Sense and Sensation

When Johann Sebastian Bach was a boy, he was caught sneaking into his older brother’s personal bookshelves.  His brother Christoph had a composition notebook full of works by great composers, but Christoph had denied Sebastian access to this book, and so it stayed shut in a locked cabinet behind grillwork doors.  Sebastian’s hands, however, were still small enough to fit through the grillwork, and since the notebook was soft-bound, Sebastian could roll it up and pull it out through the spaces in between the grillwork bars.  At night, then, when everyone was asleep, Sebastian would sneak into his brother’s shelves, remove the notebook, and, having no candles of his own, copy the book by moonlight.  It took six months of late-night sneaking to transfer all the contents, but by the end, Sebastian had carefully copied every note, learning the melodies, harmonies, and compositional forms of Pachelbel, Froberger, and more. Bach had a thirst for musical example...

Among the hidden treasures at a nearby used bookstore was a small, old copy of The Portable Medieval Reader (1975), an anthology of Medieval writing. Originally published in 1949, The Reader was already in its thirty-first printing. A re-printing of a re-printing. The compact little book was stuffed full of writings from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, and browsing through the book, I stumbled on Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth century essay “On Study and Teaching,” a collection of educational techniques and philosophy from medieval Europe. The essay is a plum reminder that poets and philosophers have been broadcasting for years (centuries!) what we now assert that “research has shown”--as if it were a revelation.  Here are just a few examples of new theories and scientific ideas that Hugh described centuries ago: Prior Knowledge The mind, cognitive scientists have been telling us, constructs new understanding by connecting it to old understandin...