The threefold division of music, at De institutione musica I.2, in the words that governed the subject for a thousand years: "Sunt autem tria. Et prima quidem mundana est, secunda vero humana, tertia, quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis, ut in cithara vel tibiis." Musica mundana is the proportion of the cosmos — the heavens, the elements, the seasons; musica humana the proportion joining soul to body; musica instrumentalis the only one that sounds. The ordering is not incidental. Audible music is placed last and lowest, as the least part of the subject, and the chapter immediately before it has already argued why: what is heard can deceive. Note what this costs the modern reader — for Boethius the musicus is the one who judges by reason, and the performer is not, a hierarchy that survives into the medieval distinction between musicus and cantor. The preceding page supplies the counterweight, and it is the warmest sentence in the work: music is so bound into us "ut ea ne si velimus quidem carere possimus" — we could not be rid of it even if we wished.
Boethius, De institutione arithmetica libri duo · De institutione musica libri quinque, ed. Gottfried Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867) — read from page images, with the critical apparatus separated from the text
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.INST. MUR. I, 2. 187 diam posse proferri, non est dubium quod conturbatae mentis iracundiam vel nimiam cupiditatem modestior mo- dus possit adstringere. Quid? quod, cum aliquis cantile- nam libentius auribus atque animo capit, ad illud etiam non sponte convertitur, ul motum quoque aliquem simi- 5 lem auditae cantilenae corpus effingat; et quod omnino aliquod melos auditum sibi memor animus ipse decerpat ut ex his omnibus perspicue nec dubitanter appareat, ita nobis musicam naturaliter esse coniunctam, ut ea ne si velimus quidem carere possimus. Quocirca intendenda 10 vis mentis est, ut id, quod natura est insitum, scientia quoque possit conprehensum teneri. Sicut enim in visu quoque non sufficit eruditis colores formasque conspicere, nisi etiam quae sit horum proprietas investigaverint, sic non sufficit cantilenis musicis delectari, nisi etiam quali 15 inter se coniunctae sint vocum proportione discatur. Tres esse musicas; in quo de vi musicae. II. Principio igitur de musica disserenti illud interim dicendum videtur, quot musicae genera ab eius studiosis conprehensa esse noverimus. Sunt autem tria. Et prima 2o quidem mundana est, secunda vero humana, tertia, quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis, ut in cithara vel tibiis ceterisque, quae cantilenae famulantur. Et pri- mum ea, quae est mundana, in his maxime perspicienda est, quae in ipso caelo vel compage elementorum vel tem- »5 porum varietate visuntur. Qui enim fieri potest, ut tam velox caeli machina tacito silentique cursu moveatur? Etsi . ad nostras aures sonus ille non pervenit, quod multis fieri de causis necesse est, non poterit tamen motus tam velo- cissimus ita magnorum corporum nullos omnino sonos 30
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