Karl Miller:

>While I do know of those earlier attempts, were they given the name of a
>Doctrine of Affections? I believe while the notion existed before, it was
>not so labeled.

You're right, it was not labeled with the word "Affektenlehre", but if we
would ask Vincenzo Galilei or Monteverdi about a "dottrina degli affetti
musicali", surely they could speak a lot of it.  The objection that I find
at the definition given by the Harvard Dictionary is that it may induce to
think that the problem of "affetti" can be reduced to the XVIII century
German theories (Mattheson et al.), which are precisely the latter (and,
in my humble opinion, the less interesting) formulations of it.

>As for believing what is written in dictionaries...in all seriousness
>I recognize not only that errors are present (in one of my seminars we
>were given several pages of the Harvard Dictionary to review, looking for
>errors).

Come on, I was joking...:-)

Pablo Massa
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