Polso e musica negli scritti di teoria musicale tra la fine del Quattrocento e la metà del Seicento

Remarks about therapeutic properties of the art of sounds are not the only statements of the link between music and medicine in literary sources. Since ancient times some physicians, conceiving the health as a result of the harmonious concordance between the parts of the body, reflected on the existence of some rhythmic or harmonic ratios between the motions of pulse. The doctrines of these authors were known to the music theory of the Renaissance: Tinctoris, Gaffurio, Aaron, Zarlino and Campion exhibit knowledge of ancient and medieval speculations on the musicality of pulse. In several treatise pulse is also compared to tactus, not in order to establish a precise correspondence but to observe the conceptual affinity between the two terms; also in these cases, we can glimpse the influence of the medical theory of the past. The ideas of music theory and the discussions of physicians are intertwined in the Musurgia universalis of Athanasius Kircher, who, in the wake of some medical treatises written between the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, goes so far as to create music scores of the different types of pulse classified by the ancients. Taken together, these testimonies allow us to appreciate the permeability of music theory towards the ideas of physicians, and represent themselves a relevant chapter in the history of relationships between pulse and music.