Milton and Music

Abstract

The young John Milton grew up in a musical household, and there is biographical evidence that his youthful passion for music only deepened over the years. My dissertation is not, however, concerned with biography. Instead, what I explore here are the ways in which thinking and writing about music stimulated Milton towards some of his most characteristically radical intellectual and aesthetic positions, and the ways in which Milton, in turn, impelled musical composers to create some of their most characteristic and challenging works. The first two chapters explore, respectively, how Milton’s poetry about music interacts with his distinctive brand of materialist philosophy; and how Milton constructs a poetic model of music that is deployed consistently throughout his poetic œuvre. The second two chapters take up an interdisciplinary mode of analysis to examine, respectively, the problem of cacophony in Handel’s Samson, an oratorio based on Milton’s Samson Agonistes; and the musical representation of fallenness in Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera of Paradise Lost.