I write this on the way to some workshops in London, for which I spent much of this week preparing material. This involved reading (and rereading) a lot of eighteenth-century acting manuals, during the course of which I came across the following mysterious assertion.

The voice of the Actor must alter in its intonations, according to the qualities that the words express: from this idea Music seems to have taken its birth. The number seven harmonizes in Music, and so it does in Acting.

The paragraph appears in the Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, which was published in the 1790s, and – at this point – purports to reproduce the actor’s notes for the lectures he had delivered at his ill-fated academy in the early 1750s. I have no very clear idea of what Macklin is going on about here, not least because – as a friendly musicologist has told me – 7ths do not harmonize, but instead act as a kind of bridging move in longer chord sequences.

One conclusion to take from this is that Macklin didn’t know what he was talking about either, and he is talking about harmoinzation in a not-so-strictly musicological sense. If that’s the case, then I’d suggest that he is thinking about harmony in terms of the way in which a performance (whether musical or theatrical) is held together through time, rather than ta a particular moment. Sevenths do help to hold a piece of music together because their instability helps to create transitions between more stable chords.

And hence, perhaps the utility of this passage. If Macklin is breaking from eighteenth-century musical theory, and if he’s talking about sevenths the way I think he is, then this short note can be added to the body of evidence I have on the importance of transitional phenomena to the stage of the 1700s. This is the topic of the book I submitted to CUP several months back now, and – when I make the changes to the manuscript I certainly anticipate my reviewers requesting – I’ll also think about including this. Macklin is so central to the theatre of the period that it would be a shame to leave it out.

Of course, it would be an even greater shame to add this and then discover that I am completely wrong, so I’ll try and work out other ways of discovering what this note could mean. Do write a comment if you have any ideas!