Moving the Affections Through Music: Pre-Cartesian Psycho-Physiological Theories

Abstract

Beginning around the middle of the 16^th century, composers increasingly bent their creative efforts toward moving the affections. Nicola Vicentino early championed this goal. In setting secular poetry, he wrote, “the composer’s sole obligation is to animate the words and, with harmony, to represent their passions—now harsh, now sweet, now cheerful, now sad—in accordance with their subject matter.”¹ Arcadelt and Willaert already in the 1530s and 1540s demonstrated in their madrigals that this could be done. When Francesco dalla Viola, himself a composer, published as Musica nova (1559) Adrian Willaert’s collection of secular madrigals and sacred motets composed mostly in the 1540s, he praised the composer’s ability to “make the soul feel, at his bidding, every affection that he proposes to move.”²

This essay is drawn from a chapter in Claude Palisca’s book “Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Eighteenth centuries,” in publication at the Yale University Press.