Digitizations of Early Musical Philosophies

A Philosophical Essay of Musick Directed to a Friend
by Francis North

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Francis North, 1st Baron Guilford, (c. 1637-1685) wrote A Philosophical Essay of Musick Directed to a Friend around 1676, when he was 39. It was a work of Natural Philosophy which corresponds to the subject of Physics of our time. It is certainly not a work of Aesthetics (Philosophy of Art & Beauty) nor that of Music Theory. My inference for this categorization followed from this paragraph:

I will not go about to describe Excellent Musick, which would require a Poet as well as a Musician; I am only in the part of a Philosopher, to show what is allowable Musick, in order to make the Reasons upon which their Rules are founded understood. (p. xx, my emphasis)

Of course, there are in the texts (personal) accounts about music, which are useful as data for (historical) perspectives and conceptions of Art and Music. It’s always fun to see how many of them withstand time or survives the advent of contemporary music (be that electronic music or musique concrète).

I will mention that Henry Purcell was born circa 1659, died 1695; the previous generation of musicians: William Byrd (died 1623), John Bull (died 1628). Whether North had acquaintances with these musicians’ music, I do not know, but I take this to be his musical environment at the time.

To-do

  • Proofread (match with manuscript)
  • Split into page-by-page

Editorial Notes

The formatted (full-text and page-by-page) version on this website is derived from the Text Creation Partnership’s digitization, which is licensed under CC 0 Public Domain. I copied the TCP’s text and went through the scan of the original by the Library of Congress to format this digital text according to the original formatting. That includes: drop caps, italicization, heading formats, horizontal breaks.

The divergences are these:

  • Graphs and Tables, which I referred to Kassler (2004)’s edition. Particularly the table which follows “The divisions appear thus:” (p. xx). Additionally, all graphs have been made to be “responsive”; that is, to the best of my ability, these figures should be presentable across different viewing devices.
  • I do not comply to the ♯ glyph of the original text, which is unavailable with the font I used.
  • I keep the missing glyphs (such as in some fractions) and typos. However, one fraction that is indecipherable from the original text are adapted from Kassler’s.

Credits

  • Ingino Marini: John Fell English Font https://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/

References

  • 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: Guilford, Barons and Earls of, from Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Guilford,_Barons_and_Earls_of
  • Kassler, Jamie C. The Beginnings of the Modern Philosophy of Music in England. 2004 ISBN 0-7546-0139-0 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1004553449
  • Guilford, Francis North. A Philosophical Essay of Musick, Directed to a Friend. London: J. Martyn, 1677. Image. https://www.loc.gov/item/08019858/.
  • North, Francis. A Philosophical Essay of Musick Directed to a Friend. Text Creation Partnership. Accessed 2019. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A42318.0001.001
  • Refer to Appendix A of Kassler (2004).