Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville, Spanish cleric; b. probably in Cartagena, c.560; d. Seville, April 4, 636. He was taken to Seville as a child, and in 599 he became archbishop there. Between 622 and 633 he compiled a treatise on the arts, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX. He expressed the conviction that music can only be preserved through memory, for musical sounds could never be notated (scribi non possunt). The text was publ. in Oxford (1911); an Eng. tr. of the pertinent parts is included in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History (N.Y., 1950).
Bibliography
K. Schmidt, Quaestiones de musicis scriptoribus romanis imprimis Cassiodoro et Isidoro (Leipzig, 1898); J. Pérez de Urbel, San Isidoro de Sevilla (Barcelona, 1945); J. Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique (Paris, 1959); J. Madoz, San Isidoro de Sevilla (Madrid, 1960).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire
