Musical Myth and Galilean Science in Giovanni Serodine’s Allegoria Della Scienza

Abstract

Myth’s stronghold on history is not easily weakened. Hans Blumenberg argues in his Arbeit am Mythos (1975) that myth has withstood scientific progress and Enlightenment rationality precisely because myth is “a ritualized body of text...[that] in its core resists modification and, in the latest stage of dealings with the myth, provokes it.”¹ Hence, myth works on itself. The reliance on myth neutralizes the absolutism of one theory over another since myth does not direct itself towards a particular goal, nor does it seek to answer a particular question, though it has been used that way through allegory. It aims for a totality by which it expresses order: “The fundamental patterns of myth are simply so sharply defined, so valid, so binding, so gripping in every sense, that they convince us again and again and still present themselves as the most useful material for any search for how matters stand, on a basic level, with human existence.”² But myth “had to be renounced” to the desire for scientific knowledge, writes Blumenberg, for “science depends on the abandonment of the claim to totality.”³

Some of the ideas in this article were first presented in my paper, “Sine musica scientia nihil est: The Lute as Instrument of Scientific Discovery,” presented at the Fifty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Oakland, California, 1990, and at a seminar given while a Fellow at the Aston Magna Academy, Rutgers, New Jersey, 1991.