TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
9th Biennial Conference on Baroque Music
ABSTRACT
From stylus phantasticus to stylo phantastico: Tracing the
‘fantastic’ thread in musical style theory from Kircher to Grassineau
Paul Collins
This paper traces the development of the concept of a ‘fantastic’ style
in treatises and lexicographical works of the baroque period, beginning
with the encyclopedic tome Musurgia universalis (1650), by the Jesuit
polymath Athanasius Kircher, in which the style is first described. After
a brief consideration of its theoretical antecedents in writings by such
theorists as Morley, Praetorius and Mersenne, Kircher’s stylus phantasticus
and its place within the Rome-based Jesuit’s broader classification of
musical style are discussed. While equally finding expression in vocal
composition, as evidenced, for example, by one of five ‘fantastic’ examples
in the Musurgia treatise, the stylus phantasticus was understood
by Kircher and later theorists alike as being, in essence, an instrumental
style. During the eighteenth century, however, lexicographers and theorists
such as Janovka, Brossard, Mattheson, Walther and Grassineau, transformed
Kircher’s definition in varying degrees. From a concept that had found
expression principally in the keyboard fantasia and which focused on the
composer’s ingenium in matters contrapuntal, there emerged, particularly
in the writings of Mattheson, an understanding of the style in which the
performer’s improvisatory ability was especially valued. In re-inventing
Kircher’s concept, Mattheson wished the fantastischer Styl to be
a vehicle for the spontaneous musical orator, who is exhorted by the Hamburg
theorist to please, dazzle and astound his/her listeners. In this new understanding
of the fantastic style, the toccata replaced the fantasia as the genre
most representative of this, the most ‘unrestrained’ of musical styles.
Last updated on 21 March 2000 by Yo
Tomita