DANTE’S SWEET SYMPHONY OF PARADISE
This is the foundational volume of my four volume study of the thought of Dante Alighieri.
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DANTE’S SWEET SYMPHONY OF PARADISE
The Musical Model – The Foundations of Dante’s Rational Freedom
Metaphysics and Music – and numbers
The right order of things; Objective reality and objective morality; Transcendent Standards.
The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion; The Threefold Pattern
The Virtues of Numbers
The Pythagorean tradition: truth and beauty; The One and the Many; ratio and proportion.
Numerology: Plato; St Augustine; Boethius; Bonaventure; numerology in Dante; the innate love.
The Musical Model: the Metaphysics of Music; Music measures the relation to God; The well-tempered harmony; the musical journey.
Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Music
The Origins of Music
Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature
The Physiological and Psychological Qualities of Music.
The music of poetry: the musical origins of language and poetry; the Singing Neanderthals; the singing body; The Spirit of Song; the attunement of mind and body; The musical anthropology: music, responses, emotions; the failure to hear the music; The centrality of music to the universe.
Dante and Music
Dante’s love of music; The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy; The musical structure of the Comedy; The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy.
Dante and the Music of the Spheres
The Fathers of the Church; Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos; The Music of the Spheres and Dante’s Works.
The Ethical Definition of Music
Harmony and Political Order; Platonic Ecology; Dante’s Physics and Politics of Harmony; music and good connotation – Confucius; beautiful music and the harmonious society; attunement as harmony; deep harmony as open and participatory.
The inner music of The Comedy.
Dante’s Musical Model; The music that is beyond rational comprehension; the metaphysical attributes of music - notions of true order, relations and reality; the distinction between the natural and the human, and the artificial and the instrumental.
Inferno: The diabolic music of the Inferno; a world of disorder and disharmony, chaos and cacophony. The untuning of the sky and the disgodding of the Earth.
Purgatory – the place where poetry – and music - comes back to life; the renewal of life; Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon; Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon; In exitu Israel de Aegypto; Casella’s Song; The Siren Song; Poetry in Purgatory; Purgatory as the place of dreams; Hymns in the Valley of the Princes; Te lucis ante is sung as part of a twilight mass; Te Deum laudamus; Entrance into Purgatory proper; Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise; The Earthly Paradise; The restoration of Earth to Edenic Golden Age; The mystic procession.
Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky; The Impenetrable Song; Plato and the creation of the universe; divine emanation in Paradise; the idea of a heavenly harmony setting a template for harmony on Earth; polyphony as an allegory of harmony on Earth; Paradise as a realm beyond the normal senses; Polyphony as Political Harmony.
The Musical Cosmology
Polyphony in Paradise; Song and dance; Polyphonic performance; The special love of each in their natural movements; Creation; God the craftsman; Imagery of Water and Light. The Prime Archer.
Unity and diversity; Rational vs Libertarian Freedom.
Music as liquid light; Love permeates the multitude of spheres constituting the universe; The God of Love; the Love that brings eternal joy.
Climate accord; fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity; achieving attunement with the grammar of harmony – the ordered world
Physics, Facts, and the Greatest Love of All; Love Beyond Proof.
Outline of all four volumes, Dante Integral
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