Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Onde sappiamo non esser etade,
o studio, che sia separato dal canto.
In an essay on La magia d'amore, Guido Casoni (d. 1642) demonstrated how music, along with other arts and sciences, is generated by love. On the surface, the essay strikes one as a hodgepodge of fact and fantasy in which the credibility of the data is vitiated by their often whimsical interpretation. But there is more to music than historically or logically verifiable acts or events. Casoni's musical hermeneutics reflects conceptual tendencies inherent in his own times, yet derivative from a long tradition of commentary on musical mirabilia. The present study is an attempt to contextualize these tendencies. It follows through the equation of love with music as a parable, of a plainly Neoplatonist stamp, for the relevance of music to all forms of scholarly discourse.