Curious and Modern Inventions

Curious and Modern Inventions Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy

by Rebecca Cypess

University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-31944-5 | Electronic: 978-0-226-31958-2
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.001.0001

AVAILABLE FROM

University of Chicago Press (cloth, ebook)
Amazon Kindle
Apple Books
Barnes & Noble Nook
Brytewave (CafeScribe-Follett Higher Ed)
DeGruyter Multi-User Ebook Program
ebrary
EBSCO eBooks (formerly NetLibrary)
Google Play
Kno
Kobo
University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO)

ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 until now, the impulses that gave rise to it had 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, artistic, 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 to new 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rebecca Cypess is assistant professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is coeditor of the two-volume collection Word, Image, and Song.

REVIEWS

“This is an excellent book. Cypess’s understanding of seventeenth-century cultural nuances is remarkable, and I very much admire how she grounds so many of her historical-cultural insights in specific musical analyses. Elegant and readable by both specialists and nonspecialists, Curious and Modern Inventions will be considered groundbreaking by enthusiasts of early modern music and of broader early modern culture alike.”

— Andrew Dell’Antonio, University of Texas at Austin

“Curious and Modern Inventions is a highly original contextual study of the repertoire of solo and ensemble music for strings that was ‘invented’ in seventeenth-century Italy. Cypess’s thorough bibliographic investigation and spirited musical analysis raise—and answer—some critical questions regarding the reception of these extraordinary works, which she convincingly relates to contemporary scientific discoveries and concerns. This book exemplifies the rich rewards of interdisciplinary thinking.”

— Ellen Rosand, Yale University

"Rebecca Cypess’s study of seventeenth-century instrumental music makes a distinctive contribution to the field by avoiding the standard historical narrative of instrumental styles derived from vocal music, instead exploring ways in which specifically instrumental idioms emerged from the cultural environment of early modern Italy."

— Renaissance Quarterly

"Rebecca Cypess proposes a multivalent argument about the rise of idiomatic instrumental music as a form of new knowledge capable of influencing, reflecting on and potentially shaping early
modern social and scientific discovery."

— British Journal of the History of Science

"This elegant book offers a model for interdisciplinary research, one that reveals the deep connections between instrumental practices associated with particular systems of knowledge in the early modern era. . . . Curious and Modern Inventions should become essential reading for anyone interested in early modern Italian science and the emergence of experimental philosophy more generally."

— Isis

“Cypess clearly spells out what she perceives as one and the same instrumental tradition between music and the sciences. . . . Compelling and valuable . . . . I strongly recommend this book to all historians of science and technology who desire to expand their outlook and investigation of early modern material culture studies.”

— Nuncius

"Starting out precisely from instrumental music’s apparent Achilles heel, its artisanal origins, Rebecca Cypess’s Curious and Modern Inventions takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through early seventeenth-century culture, musical and otherwise. This is a highly rewarding adventure: along the way, works by Biagio Marini, Carlo Farina, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and Dario Castello are repositioned as manifestations of important contemporary developments in painting, science, collectorship, and philosophy. . . . Curious and Modern Inventions will surely become standard reading for anyone interested in seventeenth-century instrumental music and the prodigiously fertile and turbulent intellectual and artistic climate in which it arose."

— Journal of the American Musicological Society

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Editorial Principles

Introduction - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0001
[instrumental music, instruments, instrumentality, Stile moderno, artisanship, vocal music, early modern Italy, Baroque]
A need exists for a thorough reassessment of the revolutionary instrumental repertoire of early 17^th-century Italy. Rather than considering instrumental music on its own or in relation only to vocal music, this chapter argues for engagement with recent work on artisanship and technology in the history of science, literature, and visual art. (pages 1 - 12)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 1. The Paradox of Instrumentality: The Material and the Ephemeral in Early Modern Instrumental Music - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0002
[instruments, instrumentality, instrumental music, Stile moderno, Giambattista Marino, Galileo Galilei, artisan, artisanship, artifice, habitus]
Earlier understandings of instrumental music as an imitation of vocal music were complicated in the seventeenth century by a new aesthetic, which embraced artifice as much as the “natural.” Seicento theorists such as Giambattista Marino and Galileo Galilei inverted the hierarchy of vocal and instrumental music, arguing that instrumental music was more effective at arousing the affetti (emotions) of the listener. The stile moderno instrumental music of early seventeenth-century Italy explored an essential opposition between the material nature of instruments and the ephemerality of the emotions that they sought to represent and elicit. It was in consideration of this paradox that artists and artisans could arouse the sense of wonder so essential to the early modern aesthetic experience. (pages 13 - 50)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 2. Instruments of the Affetti: Biagio Marini’s Affetti musicali (1617) - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0003
[Biagio Marini, Affetti musicali, Affetti, Venice, instrumental music, Stefano Guazzo, civil conversation, conversazione, Angelo Grillo, letters]
Biagio Marini’s Affetti musicali was one of the earliest and most important collections of instrumental music in the stile moderno. Marini’s preface offers evidence of the first social usage of this music—in gatherings of progressive listeners and patrons in Venice. Exploration of the modes of civility and discourse that dominated such gatherings sheds light on the music. The theory of “conversazione” (conversation) set forth in the work of Stefano Guazzo provides a model for understanding Marini’s musical affetti, and collections of letters by the poet and abbot Angelo Grillo shows how such affetti were thought to be preserved through publication. These literary models shed light on their musical counterpart in Marini’s work: by offering a series of test-pieces in the new instrumental style, Marini stimulated “conversazione” about his musical experiments; this social discourse helped to give the music its affective power. (pages 51 - 78)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 3. Portraiture in Motion: Instrumental Music and the Representation of the Affetti - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0004
[portraiture, dance, sonata, Fabritio Caroso, Giambattista Marino, Isabella Andreini, La galeria, Stile moderno, Affetti]
Theorists connected musical works with visual portraits, which preserved the memory of the subject for posterity. I argue for a new understanding of instrumental works with character-trait titles (e.g. “The Gracious One”) with portraits in other media, including Giambattista Marino’s poetic collection La galeria (“The [portrait] gallery”). Some pieces with character-trait titles are dance works, which may interpreted alongside the multi-media portraiture advocated by Fabritio Caroso’s dance manual Nobiltà di dame (1600). Other works with such titles are sonatas, which use the quickly changing idiom of the stile moderno to portray the affetti in a complex manner. Instruments of music functioned as instruments of portraiture, expressing the affetti of the subject as clearly as the painter’s brush. (pages 79 - 116)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 4. “Curiose e moderne inventioni”: Biagio Marini’s Sonate (1626) and Carlo Farina’s “Capriccio stravagante” (1627) as Collections of Curiosities - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0005
[curiosities, collecting, Kunstkammer, Biagio Marini, Carlo Farina, violin, virtuosity, representation, nature, artifice]
In their most bizarre compositions Biagio Marini and Carlo Farina employed the violin in new, virtuosic ways to imitate the sounds of other instruments and of animals. These pieces activate a display of musical curiosities akin, I suggest, to the curiosities of art and nature that resided in early modern Kunstkammern—proto-museums in which the collector sought to categorize and analyze artifacts from their social and natural worlds. Using evidence from those collections, I interpret these humorous musical works as part of a broader attempt to probe the boundary between nature and artifice. Indeed, the composers’ own words, found in titles, rubrics, prefaces, and appendices, suggest that these sonic animations constitute attempts to capture and recreate all of the sounds of life. (pages 117 - 158)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 5. Instruments of Timekeeping: The Case of Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite . . . libro primo - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0006
[Girolamo Frescobaldi, Toccata, Tactus, meter, clock, Galileo Galilei, Augustine, Roberto Bellarmino, meditation, prayer]
Certain genres of instrumental music in early modern Italy broke free of the regular pulse—the tactus—that had governed music of previous eras. Among these was the toccata, a genre for lute and keyboard that attempted to capture some of the freedom of improvisation. Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite…libro primo (1615) famously included a preface explaining some of the performance practices of these works. While Frescobaldi suggests an analogy with the freely metered performance of vocal music of the same period, this chapter argues that the style of his toccatas also had its roots in the subjective experience of time rooted in counter-Reformation theology, itself based on the meditative approaches to time described in the works of Augustine. The experience of time in public affairs contrasts with this private, subjective experience. In works like Frescobaldi’s toccatas, the musical instrument acts as a horological instrument—a tool to aid in the marking and experience of time. (pages 159 - 186)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Chapter 6. The stile moderno and the Art of History: Artisanship and Historical Consciousness in the Works of Dario Castello - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0007
[Dario Castello, sonata, Canzona, Ars historica, art of history, artisan, Seconda prattica, Stile moderno]
Early modern composers distinguished themselves from their predecessors by referring to their work as “modern”; these assertions of modernity reflect a growing historical consciousness—a desire to distinguish the present moment from the past. The clearest manifestation of such historical sense outside of music was in the ars historica of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Music, too, had its ars historica—the work of theorists and composers who sought to separate themselves from earlier traditions. Monteverdi’s seconda prattica (“second practice”) represents one example, but another lies in the purely instrumental works by Dario Castello, which he called Sonate concertate in stil moderno (Concerted sonatas in the modern style). Castello’s sonatas use the older genre of the canzona as a template, but depart from that genre in their application of distinctly modern techniques. These techniques are governed above all by the habitus of the performer, and Castello’s sonatas thus bring the performer’s physical, bodily sense to bear on the articulation of the modern style. These sonatas thus constitute an artisanal contribution to the ars historica. (pages 187 - 224)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Conclusion - Rebecca Cypess
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226319582.003.0008
[instrumental music, instruments, instrumentality, Stile moderno, Early modern Italy, Baroque]
This volume has presented a new way of understanding instrumental music in early modern Italy as a product of “instrumentality.” Such understandings open the way for further interpretations situated within a broad, inter-disciplinary perspective. (pages 225 - 228)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Notes

Musical Works Cited

Bibliography

Index