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"Bodies without soules... sweete substances without sense": Automatic Birds in the Early Modern Pleasure Garden
The decades from 1570 onward witnessed a flowering of interest in automatic theaters. Recent scholarship has attended to the roles these machines played in the scientific revolution, with particular attention to the mechanical orientation of natural philosophy. The craftsmen who created them, however, aspired primarily to inspire marvel through simulacra of nature, an impulse seen especially in their bird automata. My study works back and forth from these machines—both real and imagined—and the sounds they created to locate contacts between the music they produced and the musical ideas they inspired.... See full text
The Clockwork of Mount Parnassus: Towards a Redefinition of Time in the Early Seventeenth Century
Behind a replica of
Mount Parnassus in the gardens of Frascati, there was “a paire of organs, which
are made with such art that noe man can play and keep better tyme on a pair of
organs, than the water doth upon these.” Water organs proliferated from the
1530’s through the early seventeenth century. Highly refined from their
classical roots, they were a testing ground for newly unearthed scientific
principles as well as a visual and aural art form. Their ludic nature, however,
should not obscure the revolution that they represented. Before the
mid-sixteenth century, numerous engravings depict a leader standing in front of
his choir with his hand in various stages of marking the beat. In contrast to
this corporeal time the machines kept strict time, a feature that was highly
praised by contemporaries perhaps because it was so little in evidence in
musical practice. Although the water clock had been invented centuries
beforehand, the application of this principle to art called for a serious reexamination
of the meaning of time.... See full text
