Leseprobe_Anklaenge 2020-2021

Introduction
17
questions of cultural studies. To this end, the week-long event combined various
formats (see the program in the appendix): workshops in which students of the
mdw worked on relevant repertoire under the guidance of international lecturers,
concerts and lectures, some of which led into the workshops and some of which
were combined into short symposia with more narrowly defined topics. The present
publication contains the majority of these presentations, which have been revised by
the authors for the printed version.
The first three contributions place several developments of the period around 1600 –
solo singing with instrumental accompaniment, basso continuo, and the generally
increased appreciation of instruments and instrumental playing – in a broader
cultural and music-historical context, thus opening up new perspectives on these
closely related phenomena and the question of their ‘novelty’.
Tim Carter draws attention to a discourse on the song of birds that was quite
widespread in early seicento Italy. Relevant treatises, hitherto ignored in music
historiography, and the analysis of Monteverdi’s madrigals whose texts refer to
birds and their songs reveal an aspect that is perhaps surprising in view of the usual
picture of music history: What comes to light is an appreciation of suono in the
sense of a ‘mere’ musical phenomenon that is independent of a linguistic text and
independent of the words that are performed. This aesthetic attitude, which could
refer to virtuosic, ornament-rich solo singing, but possibly also to certain functions
of the basso continuo, suggests that the ideas about – not least the ‘new’ – music
around 1600 were by no means determined solely by the ideal of quasi-rhetorical or
expressive singing oriented towards the text.
Rebecca Cypess’ contribution deals with the changes in the ‘cultural status’ of
instrumental music-making since around 1600. In a number of fields, including the
natural sciences, the use of instruments and associated artisanal skills and knowing
became increasingly relevant to the production of knowledge during the seventeenth
century. The result is a blurring of the hitherto sharply drawn boundary between
the realm of practical-operational techné and that of the ‘purely’ theoretical episteme,
higher in the hierarchy of human knowledge. Analogously, shifts can be observed
between traditionally ‘low’ and higher forms of musical production. Thus, the
extensive and sustained establishment of composed instrumental music signifies a
turn to literacy and thus an increase in prestige and aesthetic value of artisanal and
previously unwritten practices. In basso continuo, too, such ‘improvisatory’ musicmaking,
co-determined by acting on the instrument or by ‘embodied knowledge’,
comes into play. At the same time, however, contemporaries view basso continuo in
part critically for this reason and especially because of the reduction in textuality it
entails, since it represents a departure from the tradition of theoretically demanding
contrapuntal composition, which had already been established for some time in