Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Editors’ Note
- Introduction
- I MYTH IN MEDIEVAL MUSIC THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY
- II ICONOLOGIES OF MUSIC AND MYTH
- III MYTHS IN RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC
- IV MYTH AND MUSICAL PRACTICE
- V NARRATIVES OF PERFORMANCE
- VI MYTH AND MUSIC AS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
- 12 ‘Fantastic Spirits’: Myth and Satire in the Ayres of Thomas Weelkes
- 13 Feeling Fallen: A Re-telling of the Biblical Myth of the Fall in a Musical Adaptation of Marvell's ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’
- VII RE-IMAGINING MYTHS AND STORIES FOR THE STAGE
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music
12 - ‘Fantastic Spirits’: Myth and Satire in the Ayres of Thomas Weelkes
from VI - MYTH AND MUSIC AS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Editors’ Note
- Introduction
- I MYTH IN MEDIEVAL MUSIC THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY
- II ICONOLOGIES OF MUSIC AND MYTH
- III MYTHS IN RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC
- IV MYTH AND MUSICAL PRACTICE
- V NARRATIVES OF PERFORMANCE
- VI MYTH AND MUSIC AS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
- 12 ‘Fantastic Spirits’: Myth and Satire in the Ayres of Thomas Weelkes
- 13 Feeling Fallen: A Re-telling of the Biblical Myth of the Fall in a Musical Adaptation of Marvell's ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’
- VII RE-IMAGINING MYTHS AND STORIES FOR THE STAGE
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music
Summary
IN 1640, the bishop and writer Edward Reynolds wrote that God gave us ‘musical, poetical, and mythological persuasions’ to arouse our imaginations, with an end to teach and moralise. He saw music, poetry and myth as means to make lofty spiritual matters tangible to mortals, as these three fictions ‘best affect the imagination’. He justified this in biblical terms, explaining:
we find some room in the Holy Scriptures for mythologies; as that of the vine, the fig-tree, and the bramble, for riddles, for parables, similitudes … whereby heavenly doctrines are shadowed forth, and do condescend unto human frailties.
He described how these arts functioned in subtle ways by ‘secretly instilling [morality] into the will, that it might at last find itself reformed, and yet [we] hardly perceive how it came to be so’. Reynolds explained that imagination worked to ‘open and unbind the thoughts’, as imagination is freer than the ‘rigor and strictness’ of reason or the ‘severity of truth’. Like many of his contemporaries, Reynolds upheld an essentially Aristotelian approach to the arts, maintaining that as long as music, poetry and myth worked to teach us virtue, these imitative, metaphoric arts were worthy pursuits. Whether a force for gaining knowledge or for deception, myth, music and poetry were thought to be the key modes for accessing and stimulating imagination, the internal sense responsible for feigning reality.
This chapter considers three case studies from Thomas Weelkes's Ayres or Fantastic Spirits (1608), in which established tropes of music, poetry and mythology are manipulated to satirical ends, as both satire and mythologies were contemporarily understood as discursive processes related to truth. Myth, for example, was a highly metaphorical form, and therefore allowed authors to use its tropes as a ‘palette’ to veil and colour a variety of themes, often topical, political, erotic or of religious and moral allegory. Eero Tarasti reports, ‘there is no doubt that the main cultural function of mythology is the establishment of precedent, the vindication of the truth of magic, of the binding forces of morality and law, and the real value of religious ritual by referring to events which have occurred in a dim past, in the Golden Age’. One might argue that mythologies and pastorals, by rooting present behaviour in an ahistorical past, urge people to question the nature of knowledge through self-examination.
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- Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture , pp. 207 - 223Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019