Review: Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy, by Rebecca Cypess

Abstract

Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy , by Rebecca Cypess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xxi, 307 pp. The emergence at the end of the sixteenth century of new ways of thinking about and making music—whether or not self-consciously styled seconda pratica or stile moderno —has generated a long and distinguished historiography that focuses largely on the debate between Giovanni Maria Artusi and Claudio Monteverdi over counterpoint. The focus was then, as it is now, on vocal music, its emphasis on text-setting reflecting the humanistic bias of those late sixteenth-century writers who, following classical precedents, regarded instrumental music as mere entertainment. As a result, early modern instrumental music was not the subject of much discussion, and has remained largely secondary even in modern scholarship. The appearance of the ensemble sonata, with its close ties to developing idiomatic instrumental technique, and the increasing importance of solo repertories for lute, harpsichord, and organ have been studied as virtuosic genres whose growing aesthetic ambitions could be measured by their borrowings from the more expressive vocal genres, such as cantatas, operas, and madrigals. Part of the problem, clearly articulated by such writers as Vincenzo Galilei, was class: vocal music was composed by trained contrapuntists, real “composers,” whereas instrumental music resulted from the improvisations of practicing virtuosos, technically gifted but lacking foundational training. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to look more deeply at the connections between instrumental music and the culture that produced it, revealing the ways in which untexted music carved out …