Scholarly Confirmation Requested

Everyone knows that Gita Sarabhai gave to John Cage the definition of the purpose of music that her teacher had given her: “to quiet the mind and render it susceptible to divine influences.” And everyone knows that Cage found confirmation for this definition in the fact that his friend Lou Harrison found the same words in a 1676 publication by the lutenist Thomas Mace. But I’ve been through just about all of Mace’s Musick’s Monument, his only treatise on music and his only book published that year, and I can’t find any such words. I haven’t yet plowed through all the practical sections on playing the lute, admittedly, but Mace is so verbose, so rarely concise, that no such pointed phrase seems possible in his style. The closest I’ve found is his statement that, listening to an organ,Â

I was so transported and wrapt up into High Contemplations that there was no room left in my whole Man, viz., Body, Soul and Spirit for anything below Divine and Heavenly Raptures.Â

Also, Mace was such a minor figure, a humorless, deaf, 63-year-old singing clerk at Cambridge trying to buttress the then-moribund art of lute playing against the vicissitudes of fashion, that even could I find such a phrase I can’t imagine seeing it as much more than a piffling coincidence – it’s not like he was a major philosophical figure of Baroque music with any authority. And now I’m starting to imagine Harrison and Cage sitting in rapt discussion with Gita Sarabhai, and Lou saying casually, “Why, that’s similar to something that Thomas Mace said,” whence – fwoosh! – it flies into the Cage mythology and assumes a significance all out of proportion to the source. Am I missing something? Does anyone have a more specific citation? The literature on Mace and that on Cage and Harrison don’t seem to intersect at all, and I can’t find that anyone has ever looked into it.

And while I’m at it, happy birthday, John.

UPDATE: I found an article by Austin Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: John Cage and the Impersonal,” that traces half the phrase to one passage in Mace and the other half to another. Obviously Cage was free to accept whatever definition of music appealed to him, but it’s odd that he would have put so much stress on such a weak, tangential source. Or perhaps what’s odd is that, all his life, he collected sources (in Thoreau, Suzuki, Norman O. Brown, and on and on) for the things he wanted to say himself.