Early seventeenth-century Italy saw a revolution in instrumental music. Large, varied, and experimental, the new instrumental repertoire was crucial for the Western tradition—but the impulses that gave rise to it have yet to be fully explored.Curious and Modern Inventions offers fresh insight into the motivating forces behind this music, tracing it to a new conception of instruments of all sorts—whether musical or scientific—as vehicles of discovery.
Rebecca Cypess shows that early modern thinkers were fascinated with instrumental technologies. The telescope, the clock, the pen, the lute—these were vital instruments for leading thinkers of the age, from Galileo Galilei to Giambattista Marino. No longer used merely to remake an object or repeat a process already known, instruments were increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry that would lead tonew knowledge. Engaging with themes from the history of science, literature, and the visual arts, this study reveals the intimate connections between instrumental music and the scientific and artisanal tools that served to mediate between individuals and the world around them.
We are by now accustomed to the notion that great instrumental music can take hold of our emotions and intellects with unique and potent immediacy. However, instrumental music’s power to transport and transform has a distinctive material and cultural history—one with deep roots, argues Rebecca Cypess, in the intellectual, artistic, and artisanal milieu of early 17th-century Italy, with its artisan-inventors, virtuoso performers, and philosopher-scientists, Galileo among them. Through a series of lively case studies, Cypess shows how the unparalleled rise of a virtuosic, experimental, and idiomatic repertory for strings and the keyboard by Frescobaldi and his fellow composer-performers was part of a unique historical moment when instrumentality and artisanship in general were radically re-envisioned as means of discovery. Here was a method of inquiry—harnessed by the musical instruments as much as by the newly-invented telescope, clock, barometer, and pen—that seemed more potent than any yet discovered to explain and to be moved by the fundamental workings of nature. No longer merely used to re-make an object, or to repeat a process already known, instruments were now increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry. This interdisciplinary study argues that the new repertory instrumental music grew out of the early modern fascination with instruments of all kinds—scientific and artisanal tools that served as mediators between individuals and the world around them.
