God's Lyre

God's Lyre is about a network of ancient ideas that connected musical expression to natural philosophy. This network included Aristotelians, Stoics, and Alexandrian monotheists, and it had a major effect on important theories of language as well. What held the various strands together was a common orientation in which musical phenomena were theorized as a consequence of nature and natural processes. In this book, Sean Alexander Gurd discusses Theophrastus, Diogenes of Babylon, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philo of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom. These authors suggest that music was the result of nature rising to a certain pitch of passionate intensity.