The linguistic turn at the end of the sixteenth century transformed the mathematics of music into the rhetoric of music. Giulio del Bene, by transferring music from the quadrivium to the trivium, shifted music from the cosmos to man, giving humanity some vocal control over the magic of sound. But the redistribution was somewhat lopsided. In the attempt to re-enchant the world with the voice, instrumental music was left discarded in the quadrivium as abstract theory. The transfer severed the identity of music: vocal practice, legitimised by the rhetorical flourishes of the will, was set against the mathematics of instrumental theory, and so split the nature of music between man (humanistic values) and the cosmos (scientific facts), a conflict most acutely articulated by Rousseau and Rameau later in the eighteenth century.

Monody signalled a new ontology for modernity: to sing was to be. But the new identity, however euphonious, created a problem. The eloquence of living in the trivium could not make sense of the world; the shift was meant to validate the monodic ego, but because the trivium has no cosmology, there is no objective world for the ego to ground itself in; it can only assert its influence rhetorically, with no theory to validate its practice. Of course, there was an agenda behind the shift; the monodists wanted to activate the human will as a pragmatic and passional force to break through the constipated intellectualism of scholastic thought.