Andrew Hicks’ research focuses on the intellectual history of early musical thought from a cross-disciplinary perspective that embraces philosophical, cosmological, scientific and grammatical discourse in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and spans the linguistic and cultural spheres of Latin, Greek, Persian, and Arabic. His first book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2017), won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award (2018) and the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar book award (2018). He collaborated with Fr. Édouard Jeauneau on John Scottus Eriugena’s Commentary and Homily on the Gospel of John (CCCM 166, Brepols 2008), and he is currently preparing the first edition of William of Conches’ Glosulae super Priscianum (Brepols). His published essays range across the history of music theory, late ancient and medieval Pythagoreanism, the reception of Martianus Capella, textual criticism, and musical metaphors and modalities in Classical Persian literatures. He won the 2018 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin for research on his next book titled The Broken Harp: Listening Otherwise in Classical Persian Literature.
"We can hear the universe!" This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press confere... more "We can hear the universe!" This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community, but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same."
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound--and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners--has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexküll's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis, 166. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008
Les œuvres de Jean Scot Érigène, maître irlandais qui enseigna à l’École du palais de Charles le ... more Les œuvres de Jean Scot Érigène, maître irlandais qui enseigna à l’École du palais de Charles le chauve en la seconde moitié du IXe siècle, sont bien représentées dans le Corpus Christianorum, tant pour la Series graeca (7, 18, 22) que pour la Continuatio mediaeualis (31, 50, 161-165). Le volume 166 de cette dernière série est consacré à l’œuvre exégétique du maître carolingien, à savoir une homélie (Vox spiritualis) sur le Prologue de l’évangile selon saint Jean et un commentaire sur le même évangile.
Les deux œuvres sont dignes d’intérêt, non seulement pour elles-mêmes, mais aussi pour l’influence qu’elles ont exercée sur la pensée occidentale. L’influence de l’homélie est illustrée par le grand nombre de manuscrits qui nous en ont transmis le texte. La précédente édition (Sources chrétiennes 151) en dénombrait cinquante-quatre, la nouvelle édition en dénombre soixante-treize. Tout différent fut le sort du commentaire, puisqu’il ne nous a été conservé qu’en un seul manuscrit, malheureusement mutilé: Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 81. Mais ce manuscrit est précieux, puisqu’il est l’exemplaire de travail de l’auteur, annoté par lui. Il n’a pas quitté Laon depuis le IXe siècle. Ce fut sa chance, car c’est vraisemblablement à Laon qu’au XIIe siècle fut compilée la Glossa ordinaria sur l’évangile de Jean. Or, le compilateur a largement puisé dans le manuscrit 81 de Laon, assurant ainsi à d’importantes portions du commentaire de Jean Scot une large diffusion.
Les nouvelles éditions de ces deux textes représentent un progrès sur les éditions précédentes (Sources chrétiennes 151 et 180). En effet, l’éditeur a tenu compte des progrès réalisés dans le domaine des études érigéniennes depuis 1972, notamment en ce qui concerne les autographes érigéniens: The Autograph of Eriugena (CCAMA III), Brepols 1996.
The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins, and Wiebke Thormählen, 2019
The text whose editio princeps is offered here, a twelfth-century commentary on the generation of... more The text whose editio princeps is offered here, a twelfth-century commentary on the generation of the world soul (Timaeus 34b–36d) in Calcidius’ Latin translation, is undoubtedly the most famous twelfth-century commentary that has been read (in full) by next to no one. For more than a century, its fame has rested upon less than one percent of its full text, a scant seven lines (of its 704 in total) that present the comparison of a spider and its web to the soul and its body, which the commentator explicitly attributes to Heraclitus. Its author, christened “Hisdosus Scholasticus” by its first (documented) modern reader, Alfred Gercke, has been known as such to classicists since the publication of these brief seven lines as Heraclitean fragment B67a in the second edition of Hermann Diels’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker in 1906. The “Heraclitean” fragment, however, is not the only salient feature of the commentary, which provides a first-hand account of how the Timaeus was read in twelfth-century schools. Hisdosus more than once refers to what he learned a meis magistris and explicitly begins his commentary by claiming to provide his readers with an account of the Timaeus, quantum ipsius a scolasticis nostris legitur. The “Heraclitean” fragment deserves to be restored to its full original context and read once again in immediate dialogue with the many twelfth-century scholars who engaged the Timaeus and its implications for Christian theology, rather than (as classicists have been wont to do) in dialogue with Chrysippus, Strato, Aenesidemus, and Tertullian, not to mention Heraclitus, as the closest analogues for the soul/spider analogy.
In an influential 1981 article, “Interpreting an Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De institutione... more In an influential 1981 article, “Interpreting an Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De institutione musica (iii.14–16),” André Barbera drew attention to a problematic set of arithmetical proofs. At Ins.mus. 3.14ff. Boethius purports to prove that (1) the minor semitone is larger than three commas but smaller than four, (2) the major semitone is larger than four commas but smaller than five, and (3) the tone is larger than seven commas but smaller than eight. All of these conclusions are correct, but the mathematical procedure seems inherently flawed, for Boethius manipulates the numerical difference between the terms of a ratio as if it were an accurate quantification of the resultant interval. Barbera maintained that the rationale motivating the erroneous mathematics “lies at the heart of Pythagorean cosmogony.” Boethius (Barbera argued) set out to find the numerical truth underlying acoustic phenomena and “seems to have been satisfied by the apparent numerical verification of what he could hear.” The origin of this “arithmetical error” can be specified with greater precision than the vague invocation of “Pythagorean cosmogony” allows. First, I demonstrate that Boethius’s arithmetical error is not nearly as erroneous as Barbera and others would have us believe; rather, it represents an approximate method of calculation used to prove relationships otherwise incalculable. Secondly, I argue that this approximate method was not developed by Boethius but was faithfully translated from his immediate Greek source, Nicomachus of Gerasa’s (now lost) Eisagoge musike. Thirdly, I suggest that this method, or at least its basic principle, was not independently developed by Nicomachus either, for similar arithmetical methods arose within the early stages of the Greek commentary tradition on Plato’s Timaeus.
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. David Townsend and Ralph Hexter, 2012
This article addresses the ubiquitous matrix of cultural capital in the Latin Middle Ages, the li... more This article addresses the ubiquitous matrix of cultural capital in the Latin Middle Ages, the liberal arts, through the lively panoply of Martianus's disciplinae cyclicae. This is carried out in the company of the other divisions of knowledge within which the liberal arts were differently subsumed at different periods in the reception of Martianus's text: the divisions of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville. The commentary tradition on Martianus Capella's fifth-century allegorical encyclopedia of the liberal arts, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, provides an enclosed if still rugged terrain through which to map the differing conceptual frameworks within which the liberal arts gained pedagogical and philosophical traction. Martianus remained the ancient authority on the liberal arts from his “re-discovery” at the beginning of the ninth century through to the close of the twelfth. The trajectory of the De nuptiis through its medieval commentary tradition is charted. Despite the continuity ostensibly guaranteed by the nearly uninterrupted use of a single text, the interpretative mutability of the De nuptiis's elaborate allegorical frame provided a site for the continual renegotiation of the liberal arts.
"We can hear the universe!" This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press confere... more "We can hear the universe!" This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community, but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same."
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound--and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners--has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexküll's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis, 166. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008
Les œuvres de Jean Scot Érigène, maître irlandais qui enseigna à l’École du palais de Charles le ... more Les œuvres de Jean Scot Érigène, maître irlandais qui enseigna à l’École du palais de Charles le chauve en la seconde moitié du IXe siècle, sont bien représentées dans le Corpus Christianorum, tant pour la Series graeca (7, 18, 22) que pour la Continuatio mediaeualis (31, 50, 161-165). Le volume 166 de cette dernière série est consacré à l’œuvre exégétique du maître carolingien, à savoir une homélie (Vox spiritualis) sur le Prologue de l’évangile selon saint Jean et un commentaire sur le même évangile.
Les deux œuvres sont dignes d’intérêt, non seulement pour elles-mêmes, mais aussi pour l’influence qu’elles ont exercée sur la pensée occidentale. L’influence de l’homélie est illustrée par le grand nombre de manuscrits qui nous en ont transmis le texte. La précédente édition (Sources chrétiennes 151) en dénombrait cinquante-quatre, la nouvelle édition en dénombre soixante-treize. Tout différent fut le sort du commentaire, puisqu’il ne nous a été conservé qu’en un seul manuscrit, malheureusement mutilé: Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 81. Mais ce manuscrit est précieux, puisqu’il est l’exemplaire de travail de l’auteur, annoté par lui. Il n’a pas quitté Laon depuis le IXe siècle. Ce fut sa chance, car c’est vraisemblablement à Laon qu’au XIIe siècle fut compilée la Glossa ordinaria sur l’évangile de Jean. Or, le compilateur a largement puisé dans le manuscrit 81 de Laon, assurant ainsi à d’importantes portions du commentaire de Jean Scot une large diffusion.
Les nouvelles éditions de ces deux textes représentent un progrès sur les éditions précédentes (Sources chrétiennes 151 et 180). En effet, l’éditeur a tenu compte des progrès réalisés dans le domaine des études érigéniennes depuis 1972, notamment en ce qui concerne les autographes érigéniens: The Autograph of Eriugena (CCAMA III), Brepols 1996.
The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins, and Wiebke Thormählen, 2019
The text whose editio princeps is offered here, a twelfth-century commentary on the generation of... more The text whose editio princeps is offered here, a twelfth-century commentary on the generation of the world soul (Timaeus 34b–36d) in Calcidius’ Latin translation, is undoubtedly the most famous twelfth-century commentary that has been read (in full) by next to no one. For more than a century, its fame has rested upon less than one percent of its full text, a scant seven lines (of its 704 in total) that present the comparison of a spider and its web to the soul and its body, which the commentator explicitly attributes to Heraclitus. Its author, christened “Hisdosus Scholasticus” by its first (documented) modern reader, Alfred Gercke, has been known as such to classicists since the publication of these brief seven lines as Heraclitean fragment B67a in the second edition of Hermann Diels’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker in 1906. The “Heraclitean” fragment, however, is not the only salient feature of the commentary, which provides a first-hand account of how the Timaeus was read in twelfth-century schools. Hisdosus more than once refers to what he learned a meis magistris and explicitly begins his commentary by claiming to provide his readers with an account of the Timaeus, quantum ipsius a scolasticis nostris legitur. The “Heraclitean” fragment deserves to be restored to its full original context and read once again in immediate dialogue with the many twelfth-century scholars who engaged the Timaeus and its implications for Christian theology, rather than (as classicists have been wont to do) in dialogue with Chrysippus, Strato, Aenesidemus, and Tertullian, not to mention Heraclitus, as the closest analogues for the soul/spider analogy.
In an influential 1981 article, “Interpreting an Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De institutione... more In an influential 1981 article, “Interpreting an Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De institutione musica (iii.14–16),” André Barbera drew attention to a problematic set of arithmetical proofs. At Ins.mus. 3.14ff. Boethius purports to prove that (1) the minor semitone is larger than three commas but smaller than four, (2) the major semitone is larger than four commas but smaller than five, and (3) the tone is larger than seven commas but smaller than eight. All of these conclusions are correct, but the mathematical procedure seems inherently flawed, for Boethius manipulates the numerical difference between the terms of a ratio as if it were an accurate quantification of the resultant interval. Barbera maintained that the rationale motivating the erroneous mathematics “lies at the heart of Pythagorean cosmogony.” Boethius (Barbera argued) set out to find the numerical truth underlying acoustic phenomena and “seems to have been satisfied by the apparent numerical verification of what he could hear.” The origin of this “arithmetical error” can be specified with greater precision than the vague invocation of “Pythagorean cosmogony” allows. First, I demonstrate that Boethius’s arithmetical error is not nearly as erroneous as Barbera and others would have us believe; rather, it represents an approximate method of calculation used to prove relationships otherwise incalculable. Secondly, I argue that this approximate method was not developed by Boethius but was faithfully translated from his immediate Greek source, Nicomachus of Gerasa’s (now lost) Eisagoge musike. Thirdly, I suggest that this method, or at least its basic principle, was not independently developed by Nicomachus either, for similar arithmetical methods arose within the early stages of the Greek commentary tradition on Plato’s Timaeus.
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. David Townsend and Ralph Hexter, 2012
This article addresses the ubiquitous matrix of cultural capital in the Latin Middle Ages, the li... more This article addresses the ubiquitous matrix of cultural capital in the Latin Middle Ages, the liberal arts, through the lively panoply of Martianus's disciplinae cyclicae. This is carried out in the company of the other divisions of knowledge within which the liberal arts were differently subsumed at different periods in the reception of Martianus's text: the divisions of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville. The commentary tradition on Martianus Capella's fifth-century allegorical encyclopedia of the liberal arts, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, provides an enclosed if still rugged terrain through which to map the differing conceptual frameworks within which the liberal arts gained pedagogical and philosophical traction. Martianus remained the ancient authority on the liberal arts from his “re-discovery” at the beginning of the ninth century through to the close of the twelfth. The trajectory of the De nuptiis through its medieval commentary tradition is charted. Despite the continuity ostensibly guaranteed by the nearly uninterrupted use of a single text, the interpretative mutability of the De nuptiis's elaborate allegorical frame provided a site for the continual renegotiation of the liberal arts.
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Books by Andrew J Hicks
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound--and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners--has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexküll's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
Les deux œuvres sont dignes d’intérêt, non seulement pour elles-mêmes, mais aussi pour l’influence qu’elles ont exercée sur la pensée occidentale. L’influence de l’homélie est illustrée par le grand nombre de manuscrits qui nous en ont transmis le texte. La précédente édition (Sources chrétiennes 151) en dénombrait cinquante-quatre, la nouvelle édition en dénombre soixante-treize. Tout différent fut le sort du commentaire, puisqu’il ne nous a été conservé qu’en un seul manuscrit, malheureusement mutilé: Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 81. Mais ce manuscrit est précieux, puisqu’il est l’exemplaire de travail de l’auteur, annoté par lui. Il n’a pas quitté Laon depuis le IXe siècle. Ce fut sa chance, car c’est vraisemblablement à Laon qu’au XIIe siècle fut compilée la Glossa ordinaria sur l’évangile de Jean. Or, le compilateur a largement puisé dans le manuscrit 81 de Laon, assurant ainsi à d’importantes portions du commentaire de Jean Scot une large diffusion.
Les nouvelles éditions de ces deux textes représentent un progrès sur les éditions précédentes (Sources chrétiennes 151 et 180). En effet, l’éditeur a tenu compte des progrès réalisés dans le domaine des études érigéniennes depuis 1972, notamment en ce qui concerne les autographes érigéniens: The Autograph of Eriugena (CCAMA III), Brepols 1996.
Papers by Andrew J Hicks
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound--and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners--has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexküll's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
Les deux œuvres sont dignes d’intérêt, non seulement pour elles-mêmes, mais aussi pour l’influence qu’elles ont exercée sur la pensée occidentale. L’influence de l’homélie est illustrée par le grand nombre de manuscrits qui nous en ont transmis le texte. La précédente édition (Sources chrétiennes 151) en dénombrait cinquante-quatre, la nouvelle édition en dénombre soixante-treize. Tout différent fut le sort du commentaire, puisqu’il ne nous a été conservé qu’en un seul manuscrit, malheureusement mutilé: Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 81. Mais ce manuscrit est précieux, puisqu’il est l’exemplaire de travail de l’auteur, annoté par lui. Il n’a pas quitté Laon depuis le IXe siècle. Ce fut sa chance, car c’est vraisemblablement à Laon qu’au XIIe siècle fut compilée la Glossa ordinaria sur l’évangile de Jean. Or, le compilateur a largement puisé dans le manuscrit 81 de Laon, assurant ainsi à d’importantes portions du commentaire de Jean Scot une large diffusion.
Les nouvelles éditions de ces deux textes représentent un progrès sur les éditions précédentes (Sources chrétiennes 151 et 180). En effet, l’éditeur a tenu compte des progrès réalisés dans le domaine des études érigéniennes depuis 1972, notamment en ce qui concerne les autographes érigéniens: The Autograph of Eriugena (CCAMA III), Brepols 1996.