Music in Western Renaissance and Modern Culture

This article focuses the contribution of music to the construction of the scientific image of the world and of man in the European culture. It is divided into three main sections: the first one discusses the ancient and Renaissance concept of Harmony. Renaissance Harmony includes Number and Proportion. In the second section, whose title is Sound, the Renaissance harmonious ideal is faced and somewhat disarranged by the modern scientific paradigm. The argument of the last section, Affection, is centred on the metaphor of man as a musical instrument. In my short conclusion I shall finally discuss the birth of the Eighteenth-century aesthetic paradigm of music as an art centred on man’s pleasure, that took the place of the earlier classical and modern tradition centred on music as a science, which is the subject of my paper