Heyligen, however, would be horrified to hear himself described as “creative.” Personal expressiveness and intuition had no place in medieval music, which was regarded as a branch of mathematics. Like every other aspect of the universe, music was thought to possess inherent structures. Musical structures were the fixed ratios between various notes and chords. The more accurately a musician could calculate the ratios with mathematical formulations, the more likely his music was to duplicate the “aural sound of God.”
