PERMANENT SEMINAR IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN MUSIC
O Seminário Permanente do grupo de investigação Estudos Históricos e Culturais em Música do INET-md pretende ser um fórum onde todos os seus membros (integrados e colaboradores), bem como outros investigadores e investigadoras do meio académico, cultural e artístico, possam apresentar o seu trabalho e discutir projectos e investigações em curso.
28-05-2026 | 3 pm | NOVA FCSH, Av. de Berna, Lisbon | Tower B – Room B307 & Online
Free access, in person and online.
Meeting ID: 338 096 939 096 545
Access code: 8jg9La7H
MUSIC IN THE THEORETICAL TREATISES OF THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES: SCIENCES, ARTS, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
From «Musurgia Rhetorica» to «Arca Musarithmica»: Introduction to Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650) by Athanasius Kircher (1601/2-1680)
Fernando Miguel Jalôto (INET-md, NOVA FCSH)
The Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a famous 17th-century polymath, professor at the German College in Rome, and specialist in a wide variety of fields—”the last Renaissance man” (Schmidt) and “one of the last thinkers who could rightfully claim all knowledge as his domain” (Cutler)—published in 1650, in Rome, Musurgia Universalis, a vast manual of ancient and contemporary thought on music, its production, and its effects. In it, he explores, beyond a huge number of questions on history, theory, and notation, the relationship between the mathematical properties of music, its connection with medicine, rhetoric, and physics, such as the emission and reception of sound, acoustic phenomena, instruments, various machines, etc. As Bullow aptly summarized, it is “a compendium of musical facts and speculation that is still essential to an understanding of 17th-century music and music theory […] was drawn upon by almost every later German music theorist until well into the 18th century” or, in a simpler way, the first “musical encyclopaedia” in history. In this presentation, we will explore the more than eleven hundred pages of the two volumes of the work to, in a necessarily synthetic way, learn about some of its greatest contributions to musical knowledge in general, and above all its still very relevant role in understanding the music of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and its interpretation.
Fernando Miguel Jalôto | Holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from NOVA FCSH, with a thesis on the Neapolitan composer, poet and singer Antonio Tedeschi (1702-1770). His research interests lie in the field of the History of Portuguese Music and Culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Historical Performance Practices. He holds a Master of Music in Harpsichord from the Department of Early Music and Historical Performance Practices of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (Netherlands) and a Master of Music from the University of Aveiro, with a dissertation on Chamber Music in Portugal in the 18th century. He studied with Jacques Ogg, Gustav Leonhardt, Olivier Baumont, and Ilton Wjuniski. He plays the harpsichord, baroque organ, fortepiano, and clavichord. He is the artistic director of the Ludovice Ensemble and collaborates with various national and international groups and orchestras as a freelance musician and maestro al cembalo.
Between the Monarquia Lusitana and the historiography of the Enlightenment: historical reviews included in 18th-century music treatises and the emergence of fragments of music history
Mariana Portas de Freitas (INET-md, NOVA FCSH)
From the first half of the 18th century onwards, some Iberian treatises on music theory began to show a historiographical dimension that was not observed in similar works from previous centuries. The historical narrative and the idea of humanity’s “progress,” including the progress of the arts and music, emerged in a partial and discontinuous way. The introduction of more or less developed historical reviews reflects the gradual emergence of History as a propaedeutic science for other sciences or arts, a procedure characteristic of the Enlightenment mentality. This historiographical aspect coexisted alongside theological and cosmogonic aspects, which continued to be reproduced, recounting the remote origins of music at the dawn of time, based on the authority of the Old Testament.
Some treatises on music from the Old Regime, produced within the ecclesiastical sphere of large monasteries and cathedrals, such as Pablo Nassarre’s Escuela Musica segun la Practica Moderna (1724) or Caetano de Melo de Jesus’s Escola de Canto de Órgão (1759), continued to reproduce narratives of the biblical and timeless origins of music as part of a cosmogony or theological worldview. Alongside this, historical reviews of the formation of musical structures over time appear at the beginning of chapters or theoretical subjects, such as Guido d’Arezzo’s “invention of signs” and solmization syllables, or the evolution of the figures of the mensural system since their theorization by Jean de Murs (14th century), Johannes Tinctoris and Franchino Gaffurio (15th century). Partial historical accounts are thus introduced, preceding the emergence of general “histories of music,” already in the midst of the European Enlightenment era, such as Giovanni Battista Martini’s Storia della musica (1757-81).
If, in the general historiographical approach, the model that prevails in the analysed music treatises is that of the hagiographic narrative of the chroniclers, permeated with religious providentialism, as happens in the Monarquia Lusitana (Lusitanian Monarchy), of the monks of Alcobaça, referred to in the Escola de Canto de Órgão, from Bahia, on the other hand, the concern to insert historical accounts foreshadows a more rigorous method, not very distant from the thought of the Enlightenment. This would contribute to the formation of an eclectic vision, that is, the notion that truth is not timeless and has been constructed over time.
Mariana Portas de Freitas | Holds a Doctoral degree (PhD) in Historical Musicology from the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH), as well as a Master’s degree in the same field from the same University. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law, from the Portuguese Catholic University / Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon). Presently she is Integrated Researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology — Centre for Studies in Music and Dance (INET-md/NOVA FCSH), as well as collaborates with the Caravelas Group at the Centre for Studies in Music (CESEM/NOVA FCSH).