assions

The viola da gamba and pre-classical music

Pages from Christopher Simpson's 1667 treatise and method book, The Division Viol: What it looks like and how it is held.

Vivement from Les Goûts réunïs (1724) by François Couperin, performed by the ensemble Duo Chelyum (~443K, 54 sec).

More than you ever wanted to know about the viol from the Viola da Gamba Society of America.

Renaissance neo-Platonism

Twists of Fate: The rise and fall of neo-Platonist magic, A talk at an early music workshop, Brandeis University, 15 Jan 2000.

The Image of Melancholy and the Evolution of Baroque Idiom, an evolving research paper (original version).

Drawings by Elizabethan Hermetic Robert Fludd, who set out in the late 16th C. to know everything:

• The macrocosm, expanding outward into the divine and reflected in the microcosm, with man at its center and melancholy at its core.
• The Divine Monochord, demonstrating the perfect interrelationship of the elements, the cosmic spheres, and the musical scale.

Albrecht Dürer's 1514 etching Melencolia I (~1MB), inspired by a taxonomy of melancholy from Marsilio Ficino by way of Cornelius Agrippa.