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

Rebecca Cypess

Mar 2016 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

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.
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About the author

Rebecca Cypess is associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the author of Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.