Introduction

This volume presents the main writings on music of John Wallis (1616–1703), doctor of divinity, Savilian Professor of Geometry, and fellow of the Royal Society. Chief among these is ‘The Harmonics of the Ancients compared with Today’s’, the appendix to his 1682 edition of Ptolemy’s Harmonics; also included are three letters to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, written in 1664, and five letters published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: two in 1677 and three in 1698. These writings are concerned with several aspects of the theory of music, including the mechanical production of musical sound and the effects of music on the human person. A principal and recurring concern is the mathematical foundation of musical harmony and the relationship between ancient thinking on that subject – as represented in particular by Ptolemy (c. A.D. 90–168) – and the music of seventeenth-century England. The sources presented here enable the evolution of Wallis’s ideas on this subject to be discerned and provide evidence for the place which music held in his intellectual life. The purpose of this volume is to situate these texts within Wallis’s life and intellectual biography, and within the wider discussion of musical theory taking place in England at the time. It is not to situate Wallis himself within a wider intellectual or political milieu, nor to examine more widely the Greek musical tradition on which he at times reflected, or its reception. ¹