Instrumental Music in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy: Instruments as Vehicles of Discovery

Abstract: Early seventeenth-century Italy saw the rise of the first substantial body of publications of independent, idiomatic instrumental music. Composers embraced a rhetoric of invention and virtuosic rhapsody, creating new genres, styles, and forms. Taking account of developments in the history of science and the other arts, this essay shows that the emergence of this instrumental repertoire may be understood as a manifestation of a new conception of instruments of all sorts—scientific, artistic, musical, mechanical.

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