EssaysontheOriginsofWesternMusic

by
David Whitwell

Essay IV: Curiosities in Music Etymology and Metaphor

In the course of our reading early literature we have found some etymological and
metaphorical references which we believe might be of interest for their help in clarifying
earlier definitions and values and for their help in understanding subsequent practice.
What follows is a sampling of those that attracted our interest.
Accent
syllable
or composite,
to one

For accent is a kind of singing; whence it is called accent from

accino, accinis [I sing, thou singest], because every
has its own proper sound either raised, lowered,
and all syllables of one word are adapted or sung
syllable on which rests the principal sound.
Opus Majus, Causes of Error, XVI, in The Opus Majus of
Roger Bacon (1220-1292), trans., Robert Burke (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1962) I, 259.

Artist

Students of Liberal Arts in the 13th century universities were

called artistae, art-ists.
Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance
Universities (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958),
48.

Bell

Bell as a metaphor for a bad teacher:

What an harsh sound does [a cracked] bell make in every
ear! The metal is good enough; it is the rift that makes it so
unpleasingly jarring.
How too like is this bell to a scandalous and ill-lived
teacher. His calling is honorable; his noise is heard far
1

enough; but the flaw, which is noted in his life, mars

doctrine, and offends those ears which else would
pleasure in his teaching. It is possible that such a one
that discordous noise, may ring in others into the
church of heaven; but there is no remedy for himself
fire....

his
take
even by
triumphant
but the

Occasional Meditations in The Works of Joseph Hall, D.D.

(1574-1656), ed., Philip Wynter (New York: AMS Press, 1969,
X, 146.

Cembalo

Notes of a cembalo as a metaphor for money:

Do you call it a favor to make twenty-five florins tinkle out
of your pocket like the notes of a cembalo?
Ariosto, Lena.

Christ the lyre player

Chromatic

See lyre.

Marchetto of Padua, early 14th century, says altered tones are

called chromatic, from chroma, or color in Greek, and
have the color of beauty, because it is on account of the
elegance and beauty of the dissonances that the whole

tone is

divided....
Marchetto of Padua, Lucidarium, Jan W. Herlinger, trans.,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), treatise 2, I, 8,
vi.

Concert

Concert as a metaphor for Gods purpose:

Lord, place me in Thy concert; give one strain
To my poor reed!
Employment in The Poems of George Herbert (15931633), ed., Ernest Rhys (London: Walter Scott, 1885),
51.

Concord
a
of

A concord is the mixture of two pitches, sounding sweetly to

our ears by its natural virtue; I think that the word, concord,
is derived metaphorically from con and cor, for just as
sweet friendship is brought about from the coming together
two hearts that are in mutual agreement....
Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, trans., Albert Seay
(American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 17.

Conductor

Fenelon uses the conductor as a metaphor for the head of

government [see Harmony as a metaphor for good government]

Cords

The strings of the instrument [in ancient times] were called

cords because they easily move the heart [corda].
Cassiodorus, letter to Boethius, 6th century AD

Correctness

Plato, Musicality is the name for correctness.

Plato, Alcibiades I, 108d.

Discord
for,

A mixture of two pitches naturally offending the ears. And it

is called discord metaphorically from dis and corde,
just as the bitterness of enmity arises from the separation of
two hearts from a mutual uniformity of sentiment.
Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, trans., Albert Seay
(American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 85.

Divine

In ancient Greece the best performers of singing or playing the

lyre were called theioi, divine.
Apostolos N. Athanassakis, The Homeric Hymns (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 474ff.

Drums

Drums, beat battle drums in time of peace as a metaphor for

an inappropriate time.
Molinas, Tamars Revenge, II, line 692.

Enchantment

Enchantment (incantatio) comes, say some, from a Chaldee

word, which the Greeks translate productive song.
Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, Universal Deluge,
in The Works of Voltaire (New York: St. Hubert Guild, 1901),
VIII, 222.

God the Musician

See Panpipes.

Good

Expressed in the ancient Egyptian language by the hieroglyphic

picture of a lute type instrument.
W. Chappell, The History of Music (London: Chappell), 2.

Harmony

longer

Harmony as a metaphor for a well-ordered life:

Music is indeed the science of proper modulation; and if we
observe the good way of life we are always associated with
this excellent science. When we sin, however, we no
have music [we are not in harmony].
Cassiodorus (480-573 AD), On Music, in An Introduction to
Divine and Human Readings, trans., Leslie Jones (New York,
Octagon Books, 1966).

Harmony

Harmony as a metaphor for speech:

For, although the distance be
Great from wise to witless words,
Still, from two far different chords
Springs the sweetest harmony.
Calderon, Belshazzars Feast, scene i.

Harmony

Harmony as a metaphor for good government:

The government of a kingdom demands a certain harmony,
like Music, and just proportions, like that of architecture. If
you will allow me, I will again make use of the comparison of these
arts, and make you conceive what ordinary understandings
those men have who govern by the detail. He who in a consort of
music sings only some certain parts, although he sings them
perfectly well, he is no more than a singer; he alone is the
master of music who governs the whole consort, and at once
regulates all the parts of it.
Francois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon (1651-1715), The
Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, Book XXII,
(London: Garland Publishing, 1979, facsimile of the 1720
edition), , II, 235.

Harmony

Harmony used as a metaphor for the sum of the features of the

face of a lady recently deceased.
The harmony of colors, features, grace,
Resulting Aires (the magicke of a face)
Of musical sweet tunes, all which combined
To this dark Vault.
Thomas Carew (1594-1639), Epitaph on the Lady S.,
in The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed., Rhodes Dunlap
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 55.

Heresy
be

A Greek word, signifying belief, or elected opinion. Is it

not greatly to the honor of human reason that men should
hated, persecuted, massacred, or burned at the stake, on
account of their chosen opinions?
Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, Universal Deluge,
in The Works of Voltaire (New York: St. Hubert Guild, 1901),
X,36.

Inspire
inspire
profaneness
a

The word inspiration when it has divine prefixed to it, bears a

particular and known signification. But otherwise, to
is no more than to Breathe into; and a man without
may truly say, that a trumpet, a fife, or a flute deliver
musical sound, by the help of Inspiration.

William Congreve (1670-1729) in The Complete Works of

William Congreve (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), III,
184.

Imagination

Information comes to the mind through the senses, through

images, from which comes the word, imagination.
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1470-1533), On the
Imagination, Harry Caplan, trans. (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1957), I, 25.

Lute

Lute as a metaphor for the healthy body:

Stalewood. Faith, like a lute that has all the strings broke;
nobody will meddle with her.
Rearage. Fie, there are doctors now in town will string her
again, and make her sound as sweet as ever she did.
Thomas Middleton (1570-1627), Michaelmas Term, I, i.

Lyre

Lyre as a metaphor for Christian harmony:

So let all nine of us, parents and affectionate children

together, live with harmonious hearts like a single lyre; let
all
of us form a lyre assembled from different strings to sing the
same song.... Christ will delightedly pluck this ten-stringed
lyre. This harp in us will resound to Christs playing
in full
harmony, once our thoughts are made perfect, if only
our
peace is at one with God to the depths of our being,
so that we
are united in body, mind, and faith. The man who by
pursuing
upright laws personifies this lyre, and orders his life
well in
all measures, must live a life which
harmonizes with the sacred
law in all things, for every string will
sound forth unbroken.
The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola (354-431 AD), trans., P. G.
Walsh (New York: Newman Press, 1975), Poem 21,326.

Melody

Melody comes from the Greek, mel [honey], reflecting the

sweetness of music.
Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD), Etymologiarum, III, xx,
trans., W. M. Linsay, quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings
in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950).

Mirror

Mirror as a metaphor for music:

When one looks into the mirror and sees a perfect likeness,
the two accord the way a note does with its rhythm.
Dante, Paradiso, XXVIII.

Music
merry-

The word for music in the Akkadian language (3,000 BC),

nigutu or ningutu, also has the connotation of joy or
making.
Henry G. Farmer, The Music of Ancient Egypt, New
Oxford History of Music (London: Oxford University
Press, 1966), I, 236.

Music

All music in ancient Egypt went under the name hy, which
meant joy or gladness.
Henry G. Farmer, The Music of Ancient Egypt, New
Oxford History of Music (London: Oxford University
Press, 1966), I, 262.

Music

John, On Music, c. 1100 AD, begins his principal discussion

of music by admitting that he does not know where the name
music actually derives from. If the reader knows, he

does

not begrudge him, for as Paul says, the Holy Ghost

apportions to individuals as he sees fit.
John, On Music, 77.

Music

Music as a metaphor for Nature:

Wouldst thou not say, Nature is out of tune,
The world is sick, and like to die in June?
Giambattista Guarini (1538-1612), The Faithful Shepherd [Il
Pastor Fido], in Five Italian Renaissance Comedies (New York:
Penguin Books, 1978), I, 286.

Music

Music as a metaphor for the heart:

No Timbrel, but heart thou playst upon,
Whose strings are stretchd unto the highest key,
The diapason love, love is the unison
In love, my life and labors waste away.
Henry Constable (1562-1613), from Diana (1594), in Richard
Sylvester, ed., The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century
Verse (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1974), 561ff.

Music

Music as a metaphor for the soul in love:

Love decks the countenance, spiriteth the eye,
And tunes the soul in sweetest harmony....
George Chapman (17th century), The Blind Beggar, scene iii.

Music

Music as a metaphor of personal feeling:

For now to sorrow must I tune my song,
And set my Harp to notes of saddest woe....
The Passion, in Frank Patterson, ed., The Works of
John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1931-1938), I, 23.

Music

Music as a metaphor for keeping emotions in balance:

Upon the whole, it may be said properly to be the same

with the affections or passions in an animal constitution as
with the strings of a musical instrument. If these,
though in
ever so just proportion one to another, are
strained beyond a
certain degree, it is more than the instrument
will bear: the lute
or lyre is abused, and its effect lost. On the
other hand, if
while some of the strings are duly
strained, others are not
wound up to their due
proportion, then is the instrument still
in disorder, and its part
ill performed. The several species of
creatures are like
different sorts of instruments; and even in
the same species
of creatures (as in the same sort of
instrument) one is
not entirely like the other, nor will the same
strings fit each.
The same degree of strength which winds up
one, and fits the
several strings to a just harmony and consort,
may in another
burst both the strings and instrument itself.
Thus men who
have the liveliest sense, and are the easiest
affected
with pain or pleasure, have need of the strongest
influence
or force of other affections, such as tenderness,
love,
sociableness, compassion, in order to preserve a right
balance within, and to maintain them in their duty, and in the
just
performance of their part, whilst others, who are of a
cooler blood, or lower key, need not the same allay or
counterpart, nor are made by Nature to feel those tender and
endearing affections in so exquisite a degree.
Anthony Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713),
Concerning Virtue or Merit in Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, II, iii.

Music

Music as a metaphor of the state of personal pleasure; three

examples from Jacobean theater:
I finde it in the musicke of my heart.
Thomas Dekker (b. 1570), The Roaring Girl, V, ii.

DAmville, upon finding some gold,

Here sounds a music whose melodious touch
Like angels voices ravishes the sense.

Cyril Tourneur (d. 1626), The Atheists Tragedy, V, i.

Let mercy touch your heart-strings gracious Lord

That it may sound like musike in the eare
Of a man desperate....
Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part II, V, ii.

Music

found in

Music as a metaphor for the pleasure in reading:

...nor the slumbers of a conscience that hath no sting to
keep it waking more delicate than the musicke which I
reading...
Thomas Dekker, Warres (1609).

Music

Music as a metaphor for happy married life:

May their whole life a sweet song prove
Set to two well composed parts,
By musickes noblest master, Love,
Played on the strings of both their hearts....
Epithalamium, in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw,
George Williams, ed. (New York: New York University Press,
1972), 489.

Music

Music as a metaphor for speech; three examples from Jacobean

theater:
Womens tongues and hearts have different tunes.
Thomas Heywood (1575-1648), The Golden Age.

On an often repeated phrase,

Sing your old song no more.
George Chapman (1559-1634), All Fools, V, ii.

On one who speaks well,

Your descants do marvelous well fit this ground.
George Chapman, Bussy DAmbois, I, ii.

Music

Music as a metaphor for speech:

His mother-tongue was like the dull musick of a
monochord, which by study he turns into the harmony of
several instruments.
Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profance State [1642],
ed., Maximilian Walten (New York: AMS Press, 1966), II, 72ff.

Music

Music as a metaphor for time; two examples from Jacobean

theater: First, for time to get organized,
And tune our Instruments till the Consort come
To make up the full noise....
Francis Beaujmont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625),
The Little Thief, III.

For the wrong time to duel,

Hide em, for shame! I had thought soldiers
Had been musical, would not strike out of time,
But to the consort of drum, trumps, and fife:
Tis madmen-like to dance without music,
And most unpleasing shows to the beholders,
A Lydian verse to a Doric note.
Thomas Middleton, A Fair Quarrel, I, i.

Music

Music as a metaphor for the diplomat (here, papal):

Hes like an Instrument of sundry strings,
Not one in tune, yet any note he sings.
Thomas Dekker, A Papist in Armes (1606).

Music

Music as a metaphor for co-operation.

As strings of an Instrument, though we render several
sounds, yet let both our sounds cadence in sweet concordant
Musicke.
Thomas Dekker, The Dead Tearme (1608).

Music

Music as a metaphor for politics:

To be short, such strange mad musick doe they play upon
their Sacke-buttes...
Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of Londo (1606).

Music

Music as a metaphor for exercise:

Ringing oftentimes has made a good musick on the bells,
and puts mens bodies out of tune.
Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profance State, II, 184.

Music

Music as a metaphor for the lawyer:

He knows so much in Musique, that he affects only the
most and cunningest discords; rarely a perfect concord,
especailly sung, except in fine.
Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613), The Conceited Newes of
Sir Thomas Overbury and His Friends, ed., James Savage
(Gainesville: Scholars Facsimilies, 1968), 119.

Music House

Music House as a metaphor for a house of prostitution.

Thomas Middleton, Your Five Gallants, II, i.

Musicality

See Correctness.

Nature

Nature as a metaphor for music.

Sit down; the gentle breeze
That murmurs through the velvet leaves of these
Old vines and bowers plays a happy host
Of tunes in rhythm with this fountain, which
Is like a zither made of silver and
Of pearls, whose pebbles are the strings upon
Which chords are played on golden frets.
Calderon, The Mayor of Zalamea, II, v.

Organ

Descartes used the organ as a metaphor for demonstrating how

the body mechanism affects the perception of the emotions:

You can think of our machines heart and arteries, which

push the animal spirits into the cavities of its brain, as being
like the bellows of an organ, which push air into the windchests; and you can think of external objects, which
stimulate
certain nerves and cause spirits contained in the
cavities to
pass into some of the pores, as being like the
fingers of the
organist, which press certain keys and cause
the air to pass
from the wind-chests into certain
pipes. Now the harmony of
an organ does not depend on the
externally visible arrangement
of the pipes or on the shape of
the wind-chests or other parts.
The functions we are concerned
with here does not depend at
all on the external shape of the
visible parts which anatomists
distinguish in the substance of
the brain, or on the shape of
the brains cavities, but
solely on three factors: the spirits
which come from the
heart, the pores of the brain through
which they pass,
and the way in which the spirits are
distributed
in these pores.
Descartes, Treatise on Man,166.

Organ

Organ as a metaphor for one who stimulates others to action:

As in an Organ from one blast of wind
To many a row of Pipes the sound-board breathes.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 708.

10

Organ

The generic name of all musical instruments [vessels].

Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD), Etymologiarum, III, xxi,
trans., W. M. Linsay, quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings
in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950).

Organum

Organum is a generall name of all instrumenes of musyk.

Robert Grosseteste, De proprietatibus rerum, quoted in
Carpenter, Op. cit., 85, fn. 33.

Out of tune

Out of tune music as a metaphor for emotional unbalance:

my feeble key of untuned cares
Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, V, i, 315

Do you speak in the sick tune?

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, II, iv, 35

O what a noble mind is here overthrown!

The courtiers, soldiers, scholars eye, tongue, sword;
....
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh....
Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, i, 155ff.

Panpipes

Panpipes as a metaphor for Gods control:

Think of the man who rubs his lips by blowing on woven

reeds; he plays one tune from his one mouth, but there is
more
than one note, and he marshals the different sounds with
controlling skill. He governs the shrill-echoing
apertures with
his breathing and his nimble fingers, closing
and opening
them, and thus a tuneful wind with haste of
airy movement
successively passes and returns along
the hollow of the reed,
so that the wind instrument becomes
alive and issues forth a
tune unbroken. This is how God
works. He is the Musician
who controls that universal-sounding
harmony which he
exercises through all the physical
world.
The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola (354-431 AD), trans., P. G.
Walsh (New York: Newman Press, 1975), Poem 27,72.

11

Panpipes

Panpipe of seven tubes as a metaphor for the Seven Last

Words of Christ on the Cross.
Giambattista Marion (1569-1625), La Musica, the second of
his Dicerie sacre, See Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the
Seventeenth Century, trans., David Bryant (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53.

Pipe

We piped and you did not dance, a metaphor for the religious
leaders complaint that the people are not paying attention.
Matthew 11:17.

Pitch

The ancient Egyptians and Greeks had no names for individual notes,
or pitches. Only in the most recent period, Aristoxenus coined
the term tonos.

Polyphony

Weaving their voices in alternate song as a metaphor for the

moving of tree branches.
Luis de Gongora (1561-1627), First Solitude, lines 540, in
Gilbert Cunningham, The Solitudes of Gongora (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1964).

Popular Music

Some people are like a popular song, taken up only for a

time.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), The Maxims of La
Rochefoucald, trans., Louis Kronenberger (New York: Random
House, 1959), Nr. 211.

Singing

Music as a metaphor for speech:

If I sing and you dance to another tune, it will not bother
me, for my song has its own charm, even if it does not stir
feet to the dance....
Letter to the poet, Licentius, in Letters of Saint Augustine,
trans., Sister Wilfrid Parsons (New York: Fathers of the
Church, 1955), Nr. 26.

Singing

Singing as a metaphor for speech: Quevedo, in his The Dream of

Death, used the expression no one sings well on an empty stomach
to mean a person should not speak if he has only something stupid to
contribute to the conversation.
Francisco de Quevedo, Dreams and Discourses, trans., R. K.
Britton (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1989), 307.

12

Strings

Strings as a metaphor for women:

Fernando. Whoever said it would be convenient to buy
ready-made letters and trimmed beards should
have added [ready-made] tuned

instruments.
Julio. That would be impossible. The substance strings
are made of, you see, causes them to slacken with
moisture and tauten with excessive heat. In other
words, like some women, strings always need
tuning.
Fernando. Which is why they are worked on so much
to bring them up to the pitch of the tuner.
Julio. Many break.
Fernando. Look only for the genuine and discard the
false. Thats what musicians do.
Julio. Which brings up something curiously propos.
Fernando. Namely?
Julio. That as they undo the skein, they flip it with one
finger, holding the end of the string between the
teeth, and if the string casts two shadows, they
discard it as faulty and go on to the next.
The
same applies to trying out a
woman; if she
casts shadows in two
directions, change her for
another.
Lope de Vega, La Dorotea, I, iv.

Strings

marvelous
dissonance.
incredibly hard
always slipping.
tune.

A string instrument as a metaphor for a well-adjusted body.

[Plato] was right to compare the human body to a resonant,
living instrument. When it is well tuned, it makes
music; and when it is not, it is all confusion and
It is composed of many, very different strings,
to adjust to one another, and its pegs are
Some have called the tongue hardest to
Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) , A Pocket Mirror for Heroes,
trans., Christopher Maurer (New York: Currency Doubleday,
1996), 86.

Strings

Mersenne used strings, which never fail to sound when

played, as a metaphor for how man should immediately
respond to the will of God. He adds,

movements
whence one

For since there is no movement that does not lead the way
to the first Motive Power, it is reasonable that the
from which one receives so great contentment and
draws so great a harmony, lead us to that, of which
13

Providence
universe
be said in
irrational

incessantly beats the measure of the harmony of the

and governs the grand concert of everything, lest it
Eternity that the musicians were more stupid and
than the inanimate creatures....
Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Harmonie universelle (1636), V,
iii, 17 (Collary 8).

Strings

Strings as a metaphor for four important characteristics of a

young woman:
Tranio. Tell me but this; what dost thou think of women?
Rowland. Why, as I think of Fiddles, they delight me,
Till their strings break.
Tranio. What strings?
Rowland. Their Modesties,
Faiths, Vows, and Maidenheads, for they are like Kits
They have but four strings to em.
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Womans Prize, III, i.

Student

teachers

Ass as a metaphor for a student who listens, but does not hear:
Outstanding ability can acquire a liberal education even
under a bad and idle teacher; but if the pupil, on the other
hand, is an ass listening to the lyre, even the best of
wastes both oil and toil.
Erasmus, Adages, in The Collected Works of Erasmus
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), XXXIV, 16.

Symphonia

Isidore uses Symphonia to mean harmony in the modern sense.

Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD), Etymologiarum, III, xx,
trans., W. M. Linsay, quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings
in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950).

Symphoneta

I call a phonacus the inventor of a simple melody in some

mode, a symphoneta the one who adds the remaing voices.
Heinrich Glarean (1488-1563), letter to Johannes Aal, quoted in
Clement Miller, in The Dodecachordon: Its Origins and
Influence on Renaissance Musical Thought, in Musica
Disciplina (1961), 160.

Symphonurgic

The term used by Kircher for the rules of composing music in

the old church style [stile antico].
Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), Musurgia Universalis (Rome,
1650), Book Five.

Symphony

Symphony is the same as consonance.

14

Tinctoris, This comment is found in the Brussels manuscript of

his book, Dictionary of Musical Term.

Tone

The origin of the word tone is intonandus, to be sounded.

Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus (c. 1026-1028 AD) in Hucbald,
Guido, and John on Music, trans., Warren Babb (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978), 116.

Trumpet

A contemporary of the Second Crusade describes the trumpettypes of the Saracens as trumpae, tubae, tibiae, which is the
earliest known mention of the cognate form of the

trumpet.
Farmer, Crusading Martial Music, Music & Letters (1949),
244.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for Erasmus. Erasmus refers to himself

as being like those who sound the trumpet on the battlefield
while remaining themselves outside the fray.
Erasmus, letter to duke George of Saxony [1520], in The
Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992), VIII, 5.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for Luther. Luther, like a great

trumpet for proclaiming the gospel truth....
Erasmus, letter to duke George of Saxony [1520], in The
Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992), 42.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for Homer:

So Homer was a sounding trumpet fine
Amongst the Greeks into his learned days....
A Sonnet, in New Poems of James I, ed., Allan
Westcott (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 29.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for the poet:

Which by the trumpet of my verse I made for to resound
From pole to pole through every where of this immobile
round.
An Epithalamion, in New Poems of James I, ed.,
Allan Westcott (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 47.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for the voice.

15

A servants voice is a trumpet,

Its sound will carry far and shrill...
Moron, in Calderons The Fake Astrologer, I, lines 793ff.

Trumpet

The shrill trumpet used as a metaphor for the cry of the

beggar.
Upon the Beggar, in A Book for Boys and Girls, in The Works
of John Bunyan (1628-1688), ed., George Offor (London:
Blackie and Son, 1853), III, 758.

Trumpet

Trumpet as a metaphor for wind:

East, West, North, and South, the foure Trumpetters of the
Worlde, that never blow themselves out of breath....
Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1606),
in Grosart, The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (New
York, Russell & Russell, 1963), II, 97.

Virtuoso

Virtuoso comes from Virtu...

Franz Liszt, letter to Franz Brendel, Weimar, April 30, 1853

Voice

Marchetto of Padua, early 14th century, writes that the

etymology of the word voice [vox] comes from vows
[vota], because it expresses vows of the heart. He then
quotes Aristotle as saying, similarly of the spoken voice,
Things spoken are symbols of the

passions of the soul.

He concludes it is appropriate, therefore, that we speak of notes
of music, which derives from nota (symbol)
Marchetto of Padua, Lucidarium, Jan W. Herlinger, trans.,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), I, 10, iiiff.

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