The Correlation between Music and Trivium; An Epistemological Turn in Renaissance Human Thought

Music was a member of quadrivium in the Middle Ages, but the rise of humanism in the Renaissance led to a correlation between music and trivium. This transformation represents a fundamental turn in the epistemological domain of music, and reveals various dimensions of Western human thought. The present historical-analytical study seeks to answer the question of what has changed in the epistemological foundation of music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The study of the course of intellectual developments during the Middle Ages showed how the science of music lost its high position among the numerical sciences in terms of subject matter and went to the domain of scientia media. Nevertheless, Renaissance human did not tolerate this position and devoted the subject of theoretical music to the experimental science of Acoustics. Practical music and composition also was assimilated by their homogeneous companions among trivium. This approach allowed music to acquire its theoretical needs, especially in the field of composition, from the members of trivium. Thus, music lost its epistemological foundation among the immutable matters and went into the realm of the contingencies; the domain of thoughts and the territory of Renaissance human subjectivity.