Aesthetics of Music: Aesthetics of Music in the Early Renaissance

For the first time, Dr. David Whitwell presents a thorough study of the performance of music in society together with the philosophical views on art versus entertainment, the role of performance in education and character formation and how earlier philosophers viewed the interplay among Reason, Emotions, experience and the senses. The present volume studies these questions and more during the first two centuries of the Renaissance. While the Church continued to sponsor important music, the spotlight had clearly turned to the growing cultivation of the arts in the individual courts and the public at large, as is documented by a number of great writers, among them Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer. It should be no surprise that some friends of Leonardo da Vinci considered him the greatest musician known to them, a fact almost entirely forgotten today. This wide interest in the performance of music caused the music theorists to begin to abandon the old Church dogma about music being a branch of mathematics and to reconsider music as an expression of man.