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RAYMUNDUS LULLUS

A CHRONICLE OF A MUSICAL JOURNEY AROUND THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN 

Carles Magraner proposes a musical journey around the Medieval Mediterranean to the hand of one of the most important theologists and philosophers of the History: Raymundus Lullus. The musical references of his writings are brief but fundamental. In the "Revelatio Secretorum Artis" the 18th century german lullist Ivo Salzinger wrote his work "De Secreto Musicae" where, after reiterate the musical authority of Boethius and Pythagoras, deals with the division of the monochord, the musical consonances and the solmisation system of Guido d’Arezzo, and following Lullus says that music is "ars inventa ad ordinandum multas voces concordantes in uno canto". However, in the “Tree of Knowledge’’, where Lullus imagines fourteen trees of knowledge, the most important is the “humanal tree’’, in which the music takes place, and we must  “consider the voices to be high and low and medium, and long and short, thin and depth, proportional to the vocal and consonant accents, to adorn the voices and the melody of the instruments, that are pleasing to be heard by the hearts of the men’’. Other musical references in Lullus are found also in his “Doctrina Pueril’’, where he wrote: “The music is the art by which we have the straight doctrine to sing and play the instruments, raising and lowering the voices in a form to concur the different voices and sounds’’.

Image: ©Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe. Cod. St.Peter perg 92 fol.3v

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