untuning

We can hear Shakespeare's Ulysses in the background on untuning the string of order, and the deep metaphysical fear that sedition aroused in Hooker's day.

The Richard Hooker Lecture: Richard Hooker (c1554-1600): The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Revisited The Temple Church, London 2005

I do not know quite what is meant by untuning the sky and, if I did,

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Samuel Butler 1868

From such workmanship, every thing specially stimulant of any one part of the mind, every thing that ministers to the process of self-excitation, every thing that fosters an unhealthy consciousness by untuning the inward harmonies of our being, every thing that appeals to the springs of vanity and self-applause, or invites us to any sort of glass-gazing pleasure, -- every such thing is, by an innate law of the work, excluded.

Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. With An Historical Sketch Of The Origin And Growth Of The Drama In England Henry Norman Hudson 1850

The conclusion is likewise striking; but it includes an image so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of _musick untuning_ had found some other place:

Lives of the Poets, Volume 1 Samuel Johnson 1746

Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is "the diapason closing full in man"; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.

Luck or Cunning? Samuel Butler 1868

From such workmanship, every thing specially stimulant of any one part of the mind, every thing that ministers to the process of self-excitation, every thing that fosters an unhealthy consciousness by untuning the inward harmonies of our being, every thing that appeals to the springs of vanity and self-applause, or invites us to any sort of glass-gazing pleasure, ” every such thing is, by an innate law of the work, excluded.

Shakespeare His Life Art And Characters Hudson, H N 1872