ble to become caught up in the pleasure of the music rather than attending to the texts and "so often as it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than with the ditty, I confess myself to have grievously offended."
Liturgical music persisted, however, because Christian thinkers included it among the liberal arts. Music was related to arithmetic, geometry and astronomy by its "reliance on the concept of measurement and perception" and it was viewed as an intellectual study involving "the proportional measuring of sound according to pitch and duration." But Augustine's suspicions were shared by later centuries since the purpose of sacred music was the expression of the texts. The first duty of the monks, like all ecclesiastics, was the daily performance of the liturgy. This was "both an act of worship and an act of ritual [that] conformed to a pre-ordered pattern" in which the proper recitation of the texts--spoken, sung, or chanted-- was the primary duty. For such a significant spiritual function only an elevated form--one deriving from the powerful operation of human reason in harmony with divine will--would be sufficient. The sixth-century philosopher Boethius accordingly distinguished three types of music: universal music, or the music of the spheres (the sounds of the divinely controlled movement of the heavens); human music, in which "the incorporeal activity of the reason [is united] with the body"; and the music "residing in certain instruments [which] is produced by tension . . . by blowing . . . by water . . . or by some kind of percussion . . . by which means various sounds are produced."
Boethius' distinction between instrumental music (incapable of expressing words of worship) and vocal music relegated the former to the sphere of a physical skill, or handicraft, while the latter was produced by true musicians whose contemplation of the "science of singing" made their work an art. In Boethius' formulati...