The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

Curious & Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy. By Rebecca Cypess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. [xix, 307 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31944-5.]

Reviewed by Frederick Hammond*

1. Introduction

2. Curious Inventions

3. Musical Modernity

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Rebecca Cypess’s Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy is divided into six sections and a conclusion. The first chapter considers “The Paradox of Instrumentality: The Material and the Ephemeral in Early Modern Instrumental Music.” The second chapter, “Instruments of the Affetti,” examines Biagio Marini’s Affetti musicali of 1617, “the first printed volume to apply the suggestive term affetti to a volume consisting entirely of purely instrumental music.” The third chapter, “Portraiture in Motion,” describes “Instrumental Music and the Representation of the Affetti.” Marini’s Sonate of 1626 and Carlo Farina’s “Capriccio stravagante” of the following year form the subject of Chapter 4, “Curiose e moderne inventioni,” and a toccata from Girolamo Frescobaldi’s first book is paired with “Instruments of Timekeeping” in Chapter 5. Dario Castello’s two books of sonate concertate are the focus of the final chapter, “The stile moderno and the Art of History.”

1.2 In approaching Curious and Modern Inventions, it is necessary first to realize that the author’s method is not that of linear causality, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Rather, in each category she assembles a series of analogous phenomena, drawing on a wide conspectus of philosophy, scientific investigation, literature, historical context, and visual art within which to situate considerations of the instrumental music of Marini, Castello, Farina, and Frescobaldi.

2. Curious Inventions

2.1 It is difficult to do justice to the density and variety of the material deployed here. For example, in the first chapter, “The Paradox of Instrumentality,” Cypess cites the Galilei, father and son, Giambattista Marino, the Neoplatonist Giovanni Battista Della Porta, G.B. Doni, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, in order to develop the concept of instrumentality so as to embrace both scientific and musical instruments. The social context of her discussion is the change in the upper classes from personal amateur music-making to listening to the performances of highly skilled professionals as a form of “aural collecting.”^[1] Such collecting is analogous to late sixteenth-century Kunst- und Wunderkammern, assemblages of scientific and/or precious objects.

2.2 The author illustrates her “paradox of instrumentality” by analyzing a set of four sonatas placed at the end of Biagio Marini’s Sonate, symphonie, canzoni … (Venice: Magni, 1626, sometimes misdated 1629), which presents a few bibliographical problems. She reproduces in facsimile the last portion of the original index, “Per il Violino Solo,” comprising the four sonatas and three other works, but this entire section is absent from the “corrected” listing in the second volume of Claudio Sartori’s Bibliografia della musica strumentale italiana stampata in Italia fino al 1700 (1968), item 1626m.

2.3 The first sonata is marked “Semplice,” and except for some chromaticism its style justifies the subtitle. In Sonata II the performer is instructed to lower the top string of the instrument a minor third, permitting the performance of double stops in first position. Double stops occur more briefly in Sonata III, marked “variate,” which “moves and changes through time” (p. 37). Even greater variety marks Sonata IV, “to play with two strings” (“per sonar con due corde”), which “intensifies the notion of variety” in its abundance of performing indications (p. 37). The direction “affetti” in an extended passage in half notes suggests the improvisation of special effects. This cycle of four aspects of instrumentality concludes with a capriccio “to play three parts with the violin alone in the manner of a lira” (“per sonar tre parti con il violino solo a modo di lira”), in which the player is directed to push the two lower strings close to each other on the bridge in order to produce triple stops evoking the drone of the lira da braccio. The chapter concludes with “The Body of the Artisan and the Risks of Instrumentality,” illustrated by some engravings from G.B. Braccelli’s Bizzarie di varie figure (1624).

2.4 The centerpiece of Chapter 2, Marini’s Affetti musicali of 1617, consists of twenty-seven pieces of wildly varying lengths, instrumentations, and genres (balletto, synfonia, sonata, canzon, aria, brando, gagliarda, corente), all with titles derived from Venetan family names.^[2] In his dedication of the collection to two Venetian publishers, the Giunta brothers, Marini states that some of the contents were performed in their house “in the judicious Concerti of their recreations.” Cypess places such performances in the context of “civil conversation” that prompts the expression of affetti (p. 59).

2.5 Chapter 3 presents a striking analogy between Fabritio Caroso’s dance manual Nobiltà di dame (1600), Marini’s Affetti (1617), a sixteen-volume manuscript catalog of 1627 recording the picture collection of the Venetian nobleman Andrea Vendramin, and Giambattista Marino’s Galeria [sic] of verbal portraits (1619, 1625). Musical examples are taken from Salamone Rossi and Carlo Farina. In Chapter 4 the Kunst- und Wunderkammer is presented as an analog of Marini’s Sonate (1626) and Farina’s “Capriccio stravagante” (1627), a juxtaposition that meshes with the well-documented collection of Farina’s employer, Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony, in his court at Dresden. The “Capriccio stravagante” is scored for strings CATB/bc. Directions for performance are given both in Italian (“Alcuni avertimenti”) and German (“Etliche Nothwendige Erinnerungen”); an excellent table on pp. 135–38 gives both versions along with English translations. Much of this remarkable work comprises imitations of musical instruments (hurdy-gurdy, shawm, trumpets and drums, recorders, pipe and tabor, Spanish guitar, organ tremulant [compare Marini, Affetti, “La Foscarina”]). The peasant’s lyre is depicted by striking the strings col legno (nearly a half-century before Heinrich Biber’s Battaglia), the Spanish guitar by pizzicato. From the animal kingdom come hen, rooster, cat, and dog. The fowls are perfunctory, but the cat is represented more imaginatively by a dying downward glissando and sixteenths sul ponticello, the dog’s bark by repeated furious upward glissandi.

2.6 The system of analogy seems to me to work least successfully in Chapter 5, the essay on Frescobaldi. After an introduction on vocal parallels in the toccatas, the chapter falls into three discrete sections. The first, “The Clock and the Tactus in Music,” takes off from a letter of Adriano Banchieri that describes his bad experience with a “collar clock,” a description that will strike a familiar chord with the technologically challenged of today (including the present writer). This raises a question to which I have been unable to find an answer. Presumably the public clocks to which Banchieri refers measured an abstract twelve- or twenty-four-hour day of equal hours. “Practical” time, on the other hand, divided not the time of a complete revolution of the earth but rather the actual hours of daylight into equal segments, of daily-varying length, with sunset marked by the Ave Maria. How were these two systems coordinated, especially in terms of personal time-keeping mechanisms like the collar clock? Banchieri’s letter serves as a springboard for a discussion of musical tactus and clock time.

2.7 The next section of the chapter centers around an analysis of Frescobaldi’s Toccata settima from his first book of 1615–1616—my own dunghill, as it were. Here there are a few inaccuracies to correct. The author refers to “evidence that the [specifically harpsichord] toccatas were used in church” (p. 160) and misleadingly parallels them with the Fiori musicali, an explicitly liturgical organ collection (p. 185). (I have suggested in par. 11.99 of my Frescobaldi website, https://girolamofrescobaldi.com, that Toccata undecima would be appropriate for the claviorgano.) In her discussion of m. 27 of Toccata settima, the author describes the sixteenth notes in the right hand against even eighths in the left as having a sense of urgency and forward motion. Frescobaldi’s own instructions suggest almost the opposite: such passages are to be performed “not too rapidly,” with the sixteenths dotted on the second of each pair. Cypess confuses passi doppî—sixteenths in both hands, also to be performed “adagio”—with a trill notated as measured against a passaggio. Frescobaldi directs that the trill be “not divided note for note” and the passaggio performed “less rapidly and expressively.” (Neither situation occurs in Toccata settima: for passi doppî see e.g. Toccata prima, mm. 39–40; for a trillo against a passaggio see Toccata terza, m. 25.)

2.8 The third section of the chapter, again largely independent of its companions, is a discussion of the relation of clock time to meditative time in the context of prayer, with particular reference to St. Augustine, Ignatius Loyola, and Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino. It also offers some unusual sidelights on Frescobaldi’s patron/nemesis Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.

3. Musical Modernity

3.1 The final chapter opens with a résumé of the five previous sections, all concerned in some way with the concept of invenzioni. Here the author turns to examine the designation moderno as “a musical manifestation of the ars historica with Dario Castello’s two volumes of Sonate concertate in stil moderno [1, lost, 1621; both 1629] as a point of departure” (p. 187).

3.2 Cypess clears the ground by observing that Castello’s sonatas display many elements considered modern: trio sonata texture, harmonic and contrapuntal freedom, idiomatic and virtuosic writing, contrasting sections with improvisational gestures. But these are superimposed on the skeleton of the late sixteenth-century polyphonic canzona, whether designated “canzona” or “sonata.” This template parallels the emerging view of history which sets human ingenuity (the counterpart of the artisanal habitus) to work on “the raw materials of nature” (p. 221), a view exemplified in the work of Francis Bacon, which was circulating in Italy. (On p. 202 ex. 6.20 is given as beginning on m. 27; on p. 214 it actually begins on m. 52.)

3.3 The discussion of the Monteverdi brothers’ role in the formulation of “modern” style in the concluding section of Chapter 6, “Revisiting the seconda prattica,” raises a question of interpretation. For their contemporaries Carlo Gesualdo, “the prince of musicians of our age,” was a more central figure than Monteverdi. (Although Monteverdi is the only composer André Maugars mentions by name in his Response of 1639, there is some doubt as to whether he actually even knew Monteverdi’s music.) Through the work of Schrade, Stravinsky, Lowinsky, and subsequent -inskys, we have been conditioned to believe just the opposite: Monteverdi as the high road, Gesualdo as a thorny side path. Cypess basically accepts this hierarchy, merely modifying the traditional preeminence of vocal over instrumental music rather than challenging Monteverdi’s presumed centrality.

3.4 If readers occasionally sometimes feel the lack of a causal connection in the deployment of materials, they cannot but admire the encyclopedic knowledge of so many aspects of seventeenth-century intellectual culture and its role in illuminating some wonderful music in this handsomely produced book.