Full Description
An interdisciplinary journey through history, science, and art - exploring how harmony and rhythm have shaped our understanding of the cosmos and ourselves.
What do a medieval board game, a mystic dancer, a stroke survivor, and the orbit of Jupiter have in common? All are part of the long human search for harmony and rhythm - principles that have shaped music, mathematics, architecture, medicine, theology, and cosmology across millennia.
Harmony and Rhythm of the Universe: Interdisciplinary Explorations from 1500 to the Present brings together physicists, astronomers, neuroscientists, mathematicians, musicians, historians, and theologians in a richly interdisciplinary dialogue. From Pythagoras and Plato to Kepler and Einstein, from Renaissance Spain to modern neuroscience, this volume traces how two deceptively simple concepts have proven endlessly generative - capable of connecting the movements of celestial bodies to the rhythms of the human heartbeat, and the proportions of a cathedral façade to the intervals of a musical scale.
Rather than offering a linear history, the book demonstrates that harmony and rhythm are living, contested, and evolving ideas. Past and present speak to one another here: ancient intuitions illuminate new discoveries, and contemporary science casts fresh light on centuries-old thought.
For anyone curious about the deep connections between art, science, and the human experience of the universe, this volume is an invitation to listen more carefully - to the world, and to ourselves.
Contents
Prologue
Christoph Strosetzki and María Victoria Curto Hernández
1. Unity of Macrocosm and Microcosm--Harmony of the Universe
Gudrun Wolfschmidt
2. Ancient Roots of the Quadrivium
Joscelyn Godwin
3. The Concept of Musica Mundana between ca. 1250 and 1350*
Frank Hentschel
4. Concentus of Nations: Francesco Giorgio's De harmonia mundi totius
Karsten Mackensen
5. Tuning Love: Gender and Harmony in the Early Modern Imagination
Jacomien Prins
6. Psychosomatic Means of Harmonizing with the Divine Cosmos: Music and Dance in María de Santo Domingo (c. 1486-1524)
María Victoria Curto Hernández
7. Musical and Architectural Harmony in Renaissance Spain
Amaya S. García Pérez
8. Music Between Anagogy and Neoplatonic Metaphysics: Tapia Numantino, Antonio Cabezón, and Pérez de Moya
Christoph Strosetzki
9. Gracia Baptista and Antonio de Cabezón: Relearning to Play the Harpsichord after an Ischemic Stroke
Yaho Mahúgo Carles
10. Music and Epilepsy
Yerko-Petar Ivanović-Barbeito
11. Beauty--Its Value and Its Healing Potential: Viewpoints from Antiquity, Aesthetics, and Neuroscience
Christiane Neuhaus
12. From Phoneme to Rhythm: Towards a Systematization of Metrical Scansion of Spanish Golden Age Plays
Fernando Sanz-Lázaro
13. Meter and Rhyme of Evil: The Demon's Dissonance in Lope de Vega's First Hagiographic Play (1594)
Gaston Gilabert
14. The Baile para el Mundo in the Auto El Pastor Fido by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
María Asunción Flórez Asensio
15. From Number to Language: Following some Traces of Harmony in the 18th Century
Oliver Wiener
16. The Harmonia Perfecta Maxima -The Mysterious Eternal Bond between Mathematics and Music
Karlheinz Schüffler
17. Musica Mundana, the Copernican Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, and Present-Day Cosmology
Eduardo Battaner
18. Harmonies and Symmetries: our Understanding of the Physical Universe from 1500 to Now (from Copernicus to Higgs)
Anton Andronic
19. The Harmony of the World in the 21st Century -Star Figures as Archetypes of Cosmic Order
Hartmut Warm
List of Contributors
Index
