ABSTRACT
Early modern thought especially associated music with the female capacities for creation and nurture for several reasons. As Musica became more feminine, considerations of her art acquired more womanly characteristics parallel to the Virtues and Vices. Music was considered parent and guardian of morality, and a teacher of godliness. The music enhances the effect of text by shifting into triple meter right after the soothing “lulla lullaby,” and slowing down to elongated note-values to induce “calm contentment.” Mother Music is a figure of passion and pathos, the body to Edward Pearce’s intellect. Where he is a real individual man, she is the imagined embodiment of the art which gave birth to his. The place in which early modern men created enduring mind-children was not without the fantasy mother who could at once nurture and arouse erotic desire like some sort of transitional object between the remembered comforts of their own childhood and the “more durable being” endowed by their masters.
