The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 31 (2025) No. 1

Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology. By Bettina Varwig. New Material Histories of Music. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. [360 pp. ISBN 978-0226826882]

Reviewed by Jacomien Prins*

1.1 Music can make a deep impression on us. It can remind us of important moments in our lives and deeply affect our emotions. But for the early modern people at the center of Music in the Flesh, the power of music went much further. Indeed, as Bettina Varwig argues, music occupied more areas of their ensouled bodies than did language. Yet this important aspect of the early modern understanding of the link between human nature and music fell into oblivion over the centuries. In her effort to reconstruct this lost dimension of early modern European musical culture, Varwig also engages deeply in contemporary debates on the relationship between music and human beings. Her argument that music made an impression not only on the early modern mind but also on the early modern body references Richard Shusterman’s formulation of a “somaesthetics” that focuses on the mind’s embodied nature and the body’s crucial role in (musical) memory and cognition. But Varwig goes a step further. To prove her point that music is situated in the flesh, she adds: “A recent hypothesis moreover proposed ‘cellular memory’ to be responsible for the curious effect of heart transplant recipients experiencing a transfer of donor personality characteristics, although the author [Mitchell B. Liester, 2020] recommended that further research is required” (pp. 146–47). One immediately wonders what that further investigation should look like, and why this curious medical hypothesis is included in a book on early modern musical culture. In early modern Europe, it was indeed still a widespread belief that a woman imprinted her thoughts on her fetus during pregnancy, but should such ideas really be revived to understand what impression music made on early modern people, and perhaps also makes on us?

1.2 Examples such as this reveal Music in the Flesh to be an exciting journey through unexplored territory, addressing not only mainstream views in historical musicology but also fundamental methodological issues in systematic musicology. Rather than concentrating on written materials from the long seventeenth century such as musical scores, Varwig focuses on the embodied musical experiences of listeners, performers, and composers. The book’s many interesting historical testimonies to the powerful effects of music upon early modern persons give a clear picture of how music in this period was seen as a wondrous force with moving, curative, harmful, edifying, debasing, miraculous, and illuminating effects on the complex of the human body, spirit (a substance in between body and soul), and soul. The author argues, moreover, that music could induce such powerful psychosomatic effects in early modern people because they had an entirely different view of human nature than our modern view, which is still deeply influenced by Cartesian mind-body dualism. In contrast, early modern people had a more holistic view of human nature: rather than trying to break it down into individual parts, they conceptualized human nature in terms of an integrated system of body, spirit, and soul.

1.3 Combining insights from the history of ideas and “new” musicology, Varwig presents an early modern “musical physiology,” and demonstrates how such insights can impact discussions about present-day performance of early modern music repertoire. Varwig’s analyses of music examples and recorded early modern music offer her readers a model for speaking in a new language about dimensions of music that have until now remained invisible in mainstream discussions, which center mainly on written aspects of early modern music. In this sense, the book is historically illuminating. At the same time, one wonders if the historical protagonists of the story it tells would always agree with her interpretation of these little studied aspects of their reality.

1.4 Take, for example, the polymath Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), whom Varwig introduces to her readers in a slightly reductive way as a “French empiricist.” She explains that he formulated a theory about singing in which the human voice “in seeping out of a humoral, spirituous body-soul, carried that body’s attributes with it and transferred them to the surrounding porous body-souls of those listening” (p. 62). Yet, contrary to what Varwig’s interpretation of his theory might suggest here, Mersenne tried to reconceptualize special musical experiences in terms of the liberation of the soul from the sinful flesh of the body. He argued in his Harmonie universelle (1636) that “music in a certain way separates the spirit from the body and puts it in a state where it is more suited to contemplation than to action” (Varwig, p. 122).^[1] In this chapter, he presented music in its capacity to transcend the constraints of earthly incarnate life and to anticipate the delights of eternal life. His metaphysical view on music as the “language of the soul” is presented as the conclusion of a discussion of why sad music can paradoxically lead to a sense of delight. To reach that conclusion, Mersenne first criticized the view of some important Renaissance humanists, who had argued for cosmic correspondences between things that resemble each other—for example, between sad music and the human feeling of sadness.

1.5 This touches on the debate about the value of Michel Foucault’s epistemes (i.e., abstract conceptions lying at the foundations of thought that are normally taken for granted) for the analysis of early modern musical culture. As Varwig explains, “In the familiar Foucauldian narrative, it was around the beginning of the seventeenth century that the Renaissance episteme of “resemblance” was replaced by a modern episteme of “representation” (p. 31). In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson loosely applied this model to early modern music practices and theories, and argued that they can best be characterized in terms of overlapping magical and analytic epistemes.^[2] He argued that towards the end of the Renaissance “crudely empiric resemblances were not merely perceived but put to the tests of comparisons … of measurement and of order” (Tomlinson, p. 190). Mersenne’s discussion of the out-of-body experience of listening to wonderful sad music resulting in ecstasy and blissful pleasure can quite well be conceptualized in Tomlinson’s updated view of Foucault’s epistemes, but, as Varwig rightly observes, not in his terms of a dualistic subjectivity in which the soul “will not permit [the voice] to cross the Cartesian divide” (p. 32). The Cartesian divide began to emerge in Mersenne’s philosophy, as a result of which music could be presented as a means to bridge it.

1.6 The question “where is the music?” in Mersenne must be asked again to assess Varwig’s discussion of early modern ideas about “phonognomia” (p. 66). Phonognomia, or the view that one could determine a person’s character from their voice, goes hand in hand with the arts of physiognomy and chiromancy, in which one determines someone’s character and future from the lines on their face or on the palms of their hands. Varwig is absolutely right that Mersenne conceptualized the human voice in different terms from our modern ones (p. 64), but she misses the point of Mersenne’s discussion on the topic, when she associates him with “an ecologically grounded conception of human nature [that] challenged any firm separation between human/animal, mind/body, or body/environment” and in which “voice appeared as an outflow of what in current cognitive discourse might be termed an “embodied” and “embedded” mind (p. 66). In his Harmonie universelle (“Traitez … des chants,” p. 61, view 390) Mersenne mocked these beliefs as follows: “Subsequently, there are men who boast that they can know the temperament and the passions of people by their facial features, and by the lines in the hands, … [and] they are of the opinion that one can say the same thing about the voice … that a loud voice would testify of a person’s warm temperament, as [pseudo-]Aristotle supposes in Problems 11.3.” According to Mersenne, correspondences between a voice and a character were arbitrary; rather than someone’s character, it was the size of someone’s larynx that determined to a great extent the volume of their voice.

1.7 Another issue discussed by Varwig that doesn’t entirely do justice to Mersenne’s music theory is the story she tells about early modern conceptions of indigenous people and their voices. She argues that “the newly disciplined bodies of converted colonial subjects were subdued by the contagious power of singing no less than by the actual disease imported by the colonizers.” She adds that “unlike infectious illnesses of certain food stuffs, singing did not routinely kill off its subjects but offered an ostensibly innocuous tool of bodily-spiritual coercion” (p. 141). In his Harmonie universelle (p. 61), Mersenne pointed out that if one observes the Spanish spoken by Spanish and indigenous children in parts of America that are colonized by the Spanish, their language is not “corrupted through language mixing with the languages of the Barbarians and Savages” but sounds exactly like the Spanish spoken in Spain. He argued indeed for the universality of human nature, in which it did not matter where on earth a person was born and raised: in theory all humans are created equal, as a result of which they possess the same rational soul, emotions, linguistic and musical capacities. Even though speaking about people in the Spanish colonies as “barbarians and savages” seems to confirm Varwig’s analysis of early modern racism, Mersenne tried to correct some of the racist prejudices of his time by separating human souls from their ecologically grounded bodies.

1.8 Over the past few decades, the humanities have witnessed a “somatic turn”: a turn toward the body as a central category of analysis. As part of a reflection on the somatic turn in the study of early modern music, next to embodiment and race, Varwig offers an interesting critical discussion of gender and sexuality. By criticizing a type of feminist historical musicology in which musical scores are analyzed in terms of experiences associated with the female body, she demonstrates how the study of bodies and embodiment in early modern musical culture can also challenge existing ontologies and epistemologies belonging to the “somatic turn.” Varwig convincingly argues that the way in which Suzanne Cusick and Bonnie Gordon “brought the vocal cords and uteruses of early modern female singers into close focus” and analyzed famous songs, such as the lament from Monteverdi’s Arianna (1608), in terms of “patriarchal politics” and embodied “female desire,” is rather problematic (pp. 4–5). In addition, she argues that Susan McClary’s analysis of “a tension-release pattern” in Giulio Caccini’s Amarilli in terms of a “wordless orgasm of sorts” “seems rather vague,” even though “it aims to capture some of the potential bodily impact of that rush of air” (p. 18). She explains that even though these authors all try to focus on female bodies, their analyses of musical experience remains in fact “both score-based and grounded in the assumption of music as representation” (p. 5). In contrast, Varwig offers a valuable alternative, in which historical bodies and ideas about embodiment independent of musical scores are dealt with as an essential component of early modern musical practices.

1.9 Nowadays more than ever before, it is quite challenging to get a book deal for an academic volume that is not in line with current research trends. Authors have to research the market and refine their topics into saleable ones. The most saleable topics in historical musicology today are the ones that engage with broader shifts in the humanities. In this regard, Varwig has done an excellent job, and her brilliant book certainly deserves a place of honor in the New Material Histories of Music series of the University of Chicago Press. Not because it exemplifies the materialist turn across the humanities in which “affect has become a catalyst for refiguring human beings as bodily assemblages rather than reasoning selves,” but because it offers a critical reflection on the materialistic turn itself (p. 139). Varwig’s book shows a way forward by demonstrating that one can avoid a new book becoming narrowly reflective of modern preoccupations, which do not necessarily always do justice to a historical reality as it emerges from the sources. In the explanation of her title, for example, she reveals how she managed to circumvent the limitations of the materialist turn: the book deals indeed with “music in the flesh,” but flesh refers to “the entire human being,” that is, to spiritual matter (p. 167). In my view, she could have been even braver by speaking about human beings rather than about rather abstract “body-souls.” This would also have created more space for Mersenne’s philosophy of music, in which the modern Western belief of music as the language of the soul emerges.

1.10 In conclusion, with Music in the Flesh Varwig has made a significant contribution not only to historical musicology, but also to the historical study of the body-mind interface, in which music functions as a wonderful focal point for reflections on early modern as well as contemporary modes of being-in-the-world.