Early Modern Tuning, Temperament, and the Natural Philosophy of Empire

Abstract This article examines early modern interactions between music-theoretical writings on tuning and consonance, natural philosophy (systematic, scientific understanding of the natural world), and the colonization of the American tropics. Part 1 argues that early modern music theorists leveraged justificatory frameworks inherited from contemporaneous natural philosophy to conceptualize utilizing tonal spaces and subduing dissonances (like keyboard temperaments’ “wolf fifths”). Early modern natural philosophy heavily emphasized ideas of “improving nature,” and maximally utilizing natural resources—key rationalities buttressing the colonial project. Part 2 examines how concepts of tuning and consonance served early modern colonizers’ descriptions of exploiting and “improving” the tropical Americas. Europeans commonly described non-Europeans’ musics in the American tropics as discordant and mistuned, supposedly demonstrating how nature and its “uncivilized” peoples needed to be maximally utilized, managed, and “improved.” But other descriptions treated Indigenous and enslaved African peoples’ musics as well tuned and consonant—metaphors for non-Europeans’ being harmoniously integrated into colonization's project of dominating earthly nature. This study addresses the natural philosophy of empire both to better articulate the political-economic dimensions surrounding music theory's adjacency to natural philosophy (and history of science) and to better situate music theory's relation to the colonial past alongside early modern epistemological trends.