Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy
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Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226319582 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Curious & Modern Inventions
Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy
By Rebecca Cypess
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31958-2
CHAPTER 1
The Paradox of Instrumentality
THE MATERIAL AND THE EPHEMERAL IN EARLY MODERN INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
Now, divine air! now is his soul ravished! Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?
BENEDICK, from William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, act 2, scene 3
With characteristic immodesty, Giambattista Marino predicted that his Dicerie sacre (1614) would "astonish the world" (faranno stupire il mondo). "I hope they will please," he wrote, "as much for the novelty and bizarreness of the invention (since each discourse contains only one metaphor) as for the liveliness of the style and the manner of making conceits spiritedly."
"La musica," which makes up one third of the Dicerie sacre, contains one such "novel" and "bizarre" passage, in which Marino sang the praises of the human mouth. Whereas many earlier thinkers had considered song the ideal medium of music because of its derivation from and proximity to nature, Marino reveled in the application of an aesthetic of artificiality to the human voice. He extracted the mouth from the rest of the human body and asserted that the music it produced — song — was really the product of a conglomerate of machines and tools. In the mouth, he wrote, "there are so many instruments, wrought with such care and subtlety, and conducted from such a distance, that as many parts as there are of the entire body, it seems that they were made only to serve Music." The human singer becomes an operator of an instrument, and the voice, rather than emerging from nature, is a product of the divine Artisan's skill.
After comparing the mouth to a wide array of instruments — a printing press, a key, a bell, a bridle, a rudder, a pen, a paintbrush — Marino ultimately posited it as the "model for all artificial [musical] instruments." He first likened the mouth to the pipes of Pan, claiming that "the wind-pipe is the reed which swells from the air that draws itself from the breast, and carries the breath to the throat ... The tongue ... performs the duty of the hand which, closing and opening alternatively the apertures of the pipes, varies and distinguishes the different sounds" and "delights the soul internally with the expression of concetti." Not content to stop at wind instruments, Marino then asked, "The whole mouth — what is it inside but an animated lyre, where instead of strings there are the teeth, which are held to be the modulators and moderators of the voice? ... But what is the plectrum with which the musical mind strikes the strings of this lyre, if not the tongue? Sonorous plectrum, from whose plucking ... the sweetest and most playful sound forms." Through a virtuosic display of linguistic artifice, Marino undermined the reader's understanding of the voice as a product of nature — objectifying it, disembodying it, and removing it from any familiar context. The machinery of musical instruments becomes the new constituency of the natural voice. Any sense of the ephemeral and spiritual results, paradoxically, from the overwhelming power of God the Machinist, for whom the mouth was the very prototype of all machinery.
Although it would be easy to dismiss this passage as an extreme manifestation of the so-called Mannerist movement, Marino's essay stands alongside many other pieces of evidence from this period of the fascination of early modern thinkers with instruments and the meraviglia that they could inspire. Instruments of all sorts — clocks, telescopes, prisms, barometers, the sculptor's chisel, the musician's lute — functioned as mediators between early modern individuals and their social and natural environments. Theorists recognized the physical work of artisans at their instruments as a model for the disciplining of knowledge, ascribing a new level of importance to the development of physical memory — a habitus, or "disposition of the hand" (dispositione di mano).
Early modern philosophers and inventors also began to see new possibilities in instruments themselves. These thinkers moved away from the conception of an instrument as a tool used to repeat a process or remake an object already known. Instead, they conceived of instruments — including, as I will argue throughout this book, musical instruments — as a starting point in the open-ended exploration that led to the development of new knowledge.
The formulation of this new aesthetic of instrumentality involved a paradox: despite their construction of tangible material, instruments were capable of representing the intangible and immaterial in profoundly new ways. In the realm of music, composers and theorists brought this "paradox of instrumentality" to the foreground, through words and compositions that highlight the tension between the physical instrument and the abstract sound.
Visual art brings the paradox of instrumentality into sharper focus, as art theorists linked the expression of affetti to illusions of movement and transformation. Historians have long recognized the early modern fascination with motion and the extent to which artists harnessed their knowledge of mechanics to create a sense of movement and temporality in their work. Movement and variability also lay at the heart of early modern instrumental music. Many of the new genres of the early seicento are highly changeable in their musical material and project a kaleidoscopic effect through their capricious use of diverse melodies, rhythmic ideas, metrical flexibility, and harmonic surprises. Scholars sometimes attribute this changeability to an imitation of vocal styles, in which music responded moment by moment to textual meaning. I do not wish to deny these connections to vocal music, but I would suggest that they do not tell the full story. As Marino's description of the human voice makes clear, instrumental music possessed one important feature that was lacking, or at least hidden, in vocal music: the physical instrument itself.
This opening chapter will lay the groundwork for an understanding of instrumentality in music in early modern Italy and the ways in which instrumental music was used as a vehicle of exploration, invention, and the formation of knowledge. At the center of this understanding lies the paradox of instrumentality. In an age of "curious and modern inventions," I will show, instrumental music assumed its place alongside other arts and sciences as a means for discovery.
Galileo, Cigoli, and the Aesthetics of Meraviglia in the Early Seventeenth Century
In his Dialogo della musica antica, e della moderna of 1581, Vincenzo Galilei lamented the state of contemporary instrumental music. A lutenist himself, whose output included compositions and instructions concerning performance and intabulation for the lute, Galilei nevertheless discerned widespread problems with instrumental composition during his lifetime. Although, in his Dialogo, he repeated the ancient notion that music played on instruments carried the potential for a positive ethical or emotional impact on listeners, he noted the problems created by the vast divide that existed during his lifetime between theorists and composers on one hand, and performers on the other. (In this instance, it should be noted, Vincenzo did not group together all practitioners and all theorists: the quadrivial concept of speculative music is shown here in a state of disrepair.)
In the first category are those
who truly know and understand excellently the stuff of theory and practice, and for this they are — by every intelligent and knowledgeable person — esteemed; but they are, through a defect of nature, so slow of wit, and deprived of invention, that the things they compose are of such little grace, that they [not only] do not delight, but generate satiety and boredom in the listener from the very first two lines. Still, they discuss these matters, and know how to demonstrate them marvelously; they may be compared to a fickle whetstone, or rock, as we might call it, that sharpens and thins some hard objects, that drills and cuts and even shaves: but with all this, they become duller all the time.
These theorist-practitioners — perhaps Galilei was thinking of composers of the instrumental canzona, rich in the counterpoint that Galilei criticized throughout his Dialogo — knew enough to follow the rules of counterpoint in composing polyphony, but their work seemed to Galilei to lack "invention" and "grace." Their musical literacy stood in contrast to their inability to move their listeners.
At the opposite end of the spectrum were the performers who captured the attention of their listeners, but who lacked a real understanding of the principles of composition. They were, for Galilei,
ambitious and seem to deserve to be numbered among [worthy musicians], simply because they have a certain fire, and disposition of the hand, so that they inspire wonder [fanno maravigliare] in most listeners; [but], when they set out to put this knowledge into writing, they become so slow to put on paper that which they have just played, that some who see and examine their [own] writings judge them to be by others than themselves; this stems from the pen not having the same facility for writing that the fingers have for playing, and the tongue for speaking.
In this view, the gap between sounded and notated music is significant. Performers' ability to maintain the interest of an audience did not prove their worthiness, since they were not able to record and transmit their music in writing. Their dispositione di mano — their virtuosity in performance — did not redeem their intellectual deficiencies. For Galilei, then, instrumental composers may have been well versed in theoretical rules of composition, but their music was dull; and instrumental performers might have entertained or astonished an audience with their technical feats, but they were incapable of writing down what they played, were such a thing even desirable.
This brief discussion — ambivalent at best — constitutes one of the few passages in the Dialogo that Vincenzo devoted to instrumental music at all. Notwithstanding his own work as a lutenist, the majority of his theoretical output was devoted to song, the medium that unites poetry and music. In his apparent preference for vocal music Vincenzo was far from alone. For many sixteenth-century theorists, vocal music reigned supreme over instrumental music because of its proximity to nature and its capacity to imitate natural speech.
The oft-repeated narrative concerning music in early seventeenth-century Italy — the generation after Vincenzo Galilei — maintains that vocal music continued its dominance: that the most important innovations in music occurred in the development of solo song and the birth of opera. In this narrative, the emergence in Italy of a significant repertoire of extended, independent, idiomatic music for a wide variety of instruments between about 1610 and 1630 — arguably the first such repertoire in the Western tradition — constituted merely an attempt on the part of instrumental composers to imitate their counterparts working with the medium of the voice.
On the surface it is difficult to find fault with this historiography. After all, vocal composers made marked innovations during this period, and there was considerably more vocal music published than instrumental music. Moreover, composers and theorists spilled great quantities of ink discussing vocal music, often justifying compositional innovations and liberties by claiming fidelity to the texts they were setting. It is no wonder that composers and theorists of instrumental music have been drowned out by this flood of words about song.
And yet, questions about this narrative arise through consideration of a document penned by Vincenzo's son, Galileo Galilei, also a gifted musician. On 26 June 1612 Galileo answered a request from a friend, the artist Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli, for his opinion on the age-old debate over the relative merits of painting and sculpture. Galileo's multifaceted response concludes with the argument that, because sculpture is three-dimensional and therefore closer to nature, it was painting that was the more praiseworthy of the two arts. Toward the end of his letter, as a final piece of evidence in support of his opinion, Galileo made reference to music, hinting at a revolutionary new theory of artistic expression:
There is an imperfection, and a thing that greatly decreases the praise due to sculpture: for the further the medium of imitation is from the things being imitated, that much more is the imitation marvelous. ... Would we not admire a musician, who, through singing, represents the feelings and passions of a lover, and moves us to have compassion for him, much more than if he were to do so through weeping? And this is because singing is a means not only different from, but contrary to the expression of sadness, and tears and plaints are very similar to it. And would we not admire [the musician] much more if he did so without voice, with the instrument alone, with musical dissonances and pathos-filled sounds, since the inanimate strings are less able to awaken the secret affetti of our soul, than the voice is in telling of them? For this reason, therefore, what marvel would there be in imitating Nature, the Sculptress, with sculpture itself, and representing a relief with the same relief? ... Thus painting is more marvelous than sculpture.
Galileo's brief description of the wonders of instrumental music projects none of the reservations expressed by his father. To be sure, music represents only an aside in this larger letter on visual art, so he doubtless said less on this subject than he might have in another context; but in presenting his analogy between painting and music, Galileo held the instrumental art as a whole above the vocal. He saw musical instruments as powerful tools to awaken and express human affetti. Precisely because of their artifice, and because of the expert handling they required, they threw human nature into relief, providing a new lens onto reality. Indeed, the analogy to a lens is not inappropriate: as Horst Bredekamp has shown, Galileo's letter to Cigoli constituted an attempt to justify a painted rendering of a natural phenomenon that Galileo had witnessed through his telescope. In 1610 Galileo had published his Sidereus nuncius, a treatise expounding upon his revolutionary telescopic observations, which included hills and craters on the surface of the moon. Galileo's assertion of this last phenomenon upended the centuries-old belief in the perfection and incorruptibility of the heavens. As Bredekamp suggests, only a two-dimensional drawing could accurately depict the light and shadow that resulted from the reflection of the sun on the surface of the three-dimensional moon. When, between 1610 and 1612, Cigoli painted his image of Mary standing on the lunar orb for the Pauline chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, he incorporated into his rendering of the lunar surface his own view of the very hills and craters that Galileo had depicted in his treatise of 1610. Galileo's skills as a draftsman and Cigoli's expert handling of his paints and brush had turned an astronomical discovery into a reality for readers and viewers on earth.
Galileo's justification of two-dimensional art as a means for the representation of three-dimensional objects found a welcome audience in Cigoli, whose manuscript treatise on perspective painting, nearly completed by 1613, echoed some of Galileo's ideas. Cigoli marveled at the capacity of painting both to render images of the world around us, and to inspire the affetti of the soul: "It is no small marvel [maraviglia] to consider that with appropriate lines and colours placed upon a flat, curved or compound surface, not only can the size, relief and colour of objects so properly and naturally be shown, as they are seen from a certain place chosen by the artist, but even their position, movement, and interval, and the affections and passions of the mind, and that all this should proceed from the correct distribution of a number of appropriate lines and colour, which we call drawing."
Cigoli's emphasis on the disparity between the "relief" of the original object — its existence in three dimensions — and the surface upon which that object is rendered resonates with Galileo's notion that "the further the medium of imitation is from the things being imitated, that much more is the imitation marvelous." The artist becomes a coordinator of techniques and media that bring the object to life for the viewer. For both Galileo and Cigoli, the medium of the imitation — the brush and pigments of the painter, the wood and gut that made up the musician's instrument — dictated the imitation's effectiveness in arousing the sense of meraviglia so essential to the early modern aesthetic experience. Consideration of the ontological gap between the medium of representation and the representation itself awakened the affetti of the beholder.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Curious & Modern Inventions by Rebecca Cypess. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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