Saturn and Polyphony: the dark mood of music in the XVIth century

Abstract

The aim this paper is to describe the forms of expression of melancholy in the polyphony of the XVIth century. The best way to achieve this end is to draw from the ‘elementary’ conception of harmony proposed by Ficino, as a concordance of discordant (crasis) opposites that parallels the crasis of the humors in the body. In a well-known passage from De Vita III, 21, he quantified the krasis of the melancholic complexion using a dualistic model known in musical mathematics as the principle of variety and dissonance. Thanks to the same model, Renaissance theorists could attribute the protean dynamics of the black humor to musical harmony to such an extent to encourage constant and easily traceable rhetorical expressions in the musical repertoire of Renaissance and Early Baroque music.