Essay of musicall ayre

Abstract

The musical essays of The Honourable Roger North have b een known since t he eighteenth century , but none has b een published in full. This edition of his Essay of Musicall Ayre is offered as the first step towards correcting the misleading view of North's importance suggested by unrepresentative selection s of his musical writings. The full text of his Essay shows him to be interested in the philosophical and scientific questions associated with music. His historical reminiscences, the parts of his musical writings best known to date, were written in the context of analyses of the effects of music which took as their points of departure the physics of sound and the psychology of perception. This exploration of the nature of musical pleasure was begun by North in his Cursory Notes of Music, his first long essay on the subject, and a work unknown until the present, when it was discovered by the present writer amongst other family papers. Having "proved his thoughts" in this essay, North then wrote the Musicall Recollections, which comprised three essays: the first was a critique of Captain Prencourt's tracts on the harpsichord; the second, a long study of physical acoustics; and the third, the Essay of Musical Ayre here presented. North subsequently rewrote the Theory of Sound as a scientific preface to a "rational grammar" of music, The Musicall Gramarian. A second version of these latter two works was written as his last work on music, to which Memoirs of Musick was appended. The Essay of Musical Ayre is North's fullest presentation of his ideas on t he nature of musical pleasure. The philosophical premises on which his a rgument is based are r ecapi t ulated in the Essay, and need t o be expanded by r eference to other writings by North . These show him to have had interest in the que sti ons of e pis temology raised by the scientific advances of his day. In fact, the Es s ay is more an application of his theory of perception to music than an occasion of musical reminiscence. Considered in the context of all of the known manuscripts of North's writings, the Essay of Musicall Ayre is seen as the application of his self-confessed primary interest, "naturall philosophy that they call physics" to his life long enthusiastic persuit of music. North's scientific interests have not been studied at all: none of his scientific writing has been published, and no serious attention has been given to his thought. The Essay of Musical Ayre can be understood only in the context of his philosophical writing. Together with a complete text of the musical essays, his works on "natural philosophy" need to be studied before North can be assessed as philosopher, virtuoso or merely "a speculative dilettante". Show more