Joscelyn Godwin's Articles and Minor Writings
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This site contains summaries, commentaries, and links to Godwin's minor writings from 1970 to the present. For the books that he has authored, coauthored, edited, and translated, see his website:
1. “Boethius’ Three Musicians.”
Studies in Comparative Religion 4 (1970): 246-50.
My first attempt to express a “spiritual” attitude to music, written in Cleveland after a year’s immersion in the writings of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Marco Pallis, Ananada Coomaraswamy, Julius Evola, and Titus Burckhardt. Studies in Comparative Religion, a far more obscure journal than its name suggests, was produced by English disciples and admirers of Schuon, and was the sole English-language vehicle for the Traditionalists (later also called the Perennialists), This marked the beginning of my ambiguous relationship with that school. The “three musicians” are the theorist, the composer, and the performer, to which I added the listener.
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The article is also to be found on the Studies in Comparative Religion website:
For the first and last time, I signed something with my initials (J. R. J. C.) instead of my first name. The motivation was probably to create a different personality from the one responsible for my compositions and academic writings, the latter then comprising my doctoral dissertation, an introduction and notes to Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, and reviews of new music in Notes of the Music Library Association.
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2. “Spiritual Currents in Music.”
Studies in Comparative Religion 5 (1971): 110-25.
Encouraged by the acceptance of my first article, I attacked a larger canvas, revisioning music history in the light of my recent disillusion with the avant-garde, with modernism, and with the egotism of contemporary composers (including myself). Marco Pallis, an eminent contributor to the journal, reviewed this article, made some gentle suggestions, and became a lifelong correspondent and friend.
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The article is also on the Studies in Comparative Religion’s website:
The Consort 28 (1972): 70-81.
Disillusion with modernism sent me back to earlier music, with which I had been involved at Cambridge, playing with David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood’s ensembles. At this time I was collecting Renaissance instruments for Colgate University’s newly founded Collegium Musicum. Already a recorder and oboe player, I was trying to play the transverse flutes I had bought from the German instrument-maker Günther Körber. In the process I studied the instrument’s history and collected fingering charts.
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The Consort is the house organ of the Dolmetsch Foundation, heir to the family that pioneered the early music revival in England. See the website:
4. “Robert Fludd on the Lute and Pandora.”
Lute Society Journal 15 (1973): 11-19.
After discovering that Robert Fludd (1574-1637), the Hermetic philosopher and compiler of a universal encyclopedia, had written extensively on cosmic, human, and practical music, I began studying his original books in Cornell University Library’s History of Science Collection. I first approached his musical work through organology, my main musicological direction at the time, and wrote for some specialist journals in England and the USA (see nos. 5 and 6). My plan to celebrate his 400th anniversary with a conference in Oxford failed for lack of support from senior scholars.
My affection for Fludd would lead to my first book: Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds, and, 40 years later, The Greater and Lesser Worlds of Robert Fludd: Macrocosm, Microcosm and Medicine.
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The back numbers of the journal are available: see the Lute Society’s website:
5. “Robert Fludd’s Symbolic Recorder.”
American Recorder 14/1 (1973): 17.
Another instance of my efforts to make Fludd’s name and work known in the musical world, and in this case to allude to his Hermetic philosophy, for anyone receptive to such ideas. The magazine is published by the American Recorder Society:
6. “Instruments in Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi...historia.”
Galpin Society Journal 26 (1973): 2-14.
Here I treated all the instruments pictured in Fludd’s work, both real and imaginary. The Galpin Society Journal was the most distinguished journal to which I had contributed hitherto, having long been the primary venue for organological research. Cornell University Library’s History of Science Collection provided the illustrations.
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For back numbers of the journal, see the Galpin Society’s website:
http://www.galpinsociety.org/journal.htm
The articles are also accessible via JSTOR.
7. “The Survival of the Theorbo Principle.”
Journal of the Lute Society of America 6 (1973): 4-16.
A grant-funded trip to visit instrument collections in England opened my eyes to the delightful oddities outside the evolutionary mainstream, and to novel ways of classifying them. In this case, it was plucked instruments with a fretted fingerboard and additional unstopped strings. Conditions in museums made adequate photography impossible, and since I wanted the images to be uniform in size and style, I drew them myself.
The Lute Society of America’s website:
8. “Eccentric Forms of the Guitar.”
Journal of the Lute Society of America 7 (1974): 90-102.
As promised at the end of the previous article (no. 7), this continued my study of the nineteenth century’s zeal for improvement and innovation in plucked stringed instruments, and the odd and even risible results. Some specimens were found in museums, others in books, and again I made uniform drawings of them. I wrote this rather in the spirit of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not,” anticipating a later involvement with “rejected knowledge” apart from musicology.
The Lute Society of America’s website:
9. “Early Mendelssohn and Late Beethoven.”
Music and Letters 55 (1974): 272-85.
Appropriately for one on the road to promotion, I sought publication in a major musicological journal, in this case the venerable English quarterly Music and Letters. The article was partly a tribute to Philip Radcliffe, my former supervisor at Cambridge, who wrote the standard book on Mendelssohn; partly from immersion in Beethoven’s works during my solitary years in Cleveland (1969-71), during which I filled a gap in my education by listening to all the quartets and playing through all the piano sonatas, to the best of my ability. It was also by way of an apology for the disdain in which Mendelssohn was held by musical undergraduates of my anti-Romantic era.
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The journal’s website:
10. “Playing from Original Notation.”
Early Music 2 (1974): 15-19.
When “authenticity” was all the rage, few musicians were willing to go this far, and facsimiles were not easy or cheap to obtain. My challenge to them was based more on enthusiam for the project than on wide experience—not least because of others’ reluctance to sing or play from my small collection of part-books. Early Music was a bright and often chatty new journal. It amused me to show a quote from Stockhausen (a former idol) next to a Monteverdi edition by Raymond Leppard (a former teacher). Another of my teachers, Nicholas Temperley, made a complimentary reference to the article.
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The journal’s website: