ABSTRACT
The arts comprised grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. These seven arts, and their seven corresponding sciences, constituted the enkyklios pcedia or traditional system of western knowledge and education. Because of the extra-curricular status of music and mathematics in the education of amateurs and because of the conditions of craft secrecy in the education of specialists, developments in music both as a vocal and as a mathematical art must be looked for outside traditional channels of education. The traditional vehicle for preserving and transmitting information about music had been the encyclopaedia, which was formed of separate textbooks on the seven arts. The separation of the two branches of the science of music into subdivisions of natural and moral philosophy marks the beginning of the separation of art and science into ‘two cultures’. By the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, more and more writers began to speak out against the notion of music as a science.
