Eloge: Noel Swerdlow (1941-2021)

Abstract

Noel Swerdlow's first journal article appeared in 1967, when he was twenty-six years old. In just seven pages, he presented and solved a historical mystery. Why, he asked, did a fourteenth-century music theorist derive the name of his discipline from "moys, which is water, because it was found beside the waters"? Finding the answer required him and his readers to tour a vast range of sources, in several languages. Latin writers, he discovered, preserved two ancient Greek traditions: one connected to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts, with music, and the other with water. An ancient etymology, found in Philo and Josephus, derived the name of Moses from "mou." Both identified this, correctly, as the Egyptian word for water: his name commemorated the fact that he had been saved from the river Nile. In the Carolingian period, a learned man -- probably John Scotus Eriugena, but possibly Remigius of Auxerre -- first combined these factoids to create an etymology for "music" that would remain current centuries later. As no one had any idea what evidence it rested on, it generated one fantastic explanation after another in later times.

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