Synopses & Reviews
At what point did machines and technology begin to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe? How was this reflected through the art and literature of the time? Was technology a sign of the fall of humanity from its original state of innocence or a sign of human progress and mastery over the natural world? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday investigates these questions and more by engaging with the poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering of the period to find the lost world of the machine in the pre-industrial culture of the European Renaissance.
The aesthetic and intellectual dimension of these machines appealed to familiar figures such as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as to a host of lesser known writers and artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This intellectual engagement with machines in the European Renaissance gave rise to new attitudes towards gender, work and labour, and even fostered the new sciences of artificial life and reason which would be pursued by figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz in the seventeenth century.
Writers, philosophers and artists had mixed and often conflicting reactions to technology, reflecting a paradoxical attitude between modern progress and traditional values. Underpinning the enthusiastic creation of a machine-driven world, then, were stories of loss and catastrophe. These contradictory attitudes are part of the legacy of the European Renaissance, just as much as the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of John Milton. And this historical legacy helps to explain many of our own attitudes towards the technology that surrounds us, sustains us, and sometimes perplexes us in the modern world.
Review
and#8220;Voskuhl tells the story of, for the most part, eighteenth-century automata: mechanical animals and human machines that once entertained the upper classes with their dizzying promise of a robotized future.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Ingenious androids, mobile machines in the form of humans, are some of the marvels of eighteenth-century engineering. They have become the focus of a remarkable range of scientific, aesthetic, and literary enthusiasm. In this perceptive and highly original study, Adelheid Voskuhl unlocks the workings and meanings of two of the most celebrated of these machines, figures of female musicians now held in museums in Paris and in Switzerland. The book describes the world of the artisans who built these devices and of the performers whose musical artfulness they mimic. This is a fine and persuasive study that enriches our understanding of the pattern of industry and fashion at a key period of the transition to modern society, and opens a fresh perspective on the decisive relations between machinery, passion, and cultural life.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;In her focused interpretive study of two famous female automata Adelheid Voskuhl captures the specificity and the tensions of Enlightenment culture. Sharply critical of standard interpretations that make these android automata harbingers of the anxieties of the machine age and industrialization, she places them squarely in the preindustrial period when a few elite workshops of master furniture builders and clockmakers still produced extraordinary show pieces for court society and equipped their mechanical musicians with the sentimental virtues of emerging bourgeois culture. Mechanical virtuosity and expressive sentimentality here play off one another to evoke challenging questions of the human-machine boundary and modern self-identity.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;A fine-grained study with a bold argument: that the history of machines and the history of emotions are deeply connected.and#160;Adelheid Voskuhl breaks apart hackneyed associations of andlsquo;man and machineandrsquo; by looking at women and machines in the context of music, artisanal industry, and Enlightenment culture. After you spend time with the piano-playing automata featured in this book, you will never see androids in the same way again.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;This deeply researched study restores Enlightenment automata to their original context of princely courts, protoindustrial craftsmanship, and bourgeois sentimentandmdash;and explains how automata later came to stand for industrial machinery, mechanical theories of organic life, and fatally accurate simulacra of human beings in the philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adelheid Voskuhlandrsquo;s panoramic study is a model of how the history of technology can illuminate cultural and intellectual history.andrdquo;
Synopsis
The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these andldquo;Enlightenment automataandrdquo; have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized.and#160;In
Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automataandmdash;both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.and#160;
Synopsis
We are by now accustomed to the notion that great instrumental music can take hold of our emotions and intellects with unique and potent immediacy. However, instrumental musicandrsquo;s power to transport and transform has a distinctive material and cultural historyandmdash;one with deep roots, argues Rebecca Cypess, in the intellectual, artistic, and artisanal milieu of early 17th-century Italy, with its artisan-inventors, virtuoso performers, and philosopher-scientists, Galileo among them. Through a series of lively case studies, Cypess shows how the unparalleled rise of a virtuosic, experimental, and idiomatic repertory for strings and the keyboard by Frescobaldi and his fellow composer-performers was part of a unique historical moment when instrumentality and artisanship in general were radically re-envisioned as means of discovery. Here was a method of inquiryandmdash;harnessed by the musical instruments as much as by the newly-invented telescope, clock, barometer, and penandmdash;that seemed more potent than any yet discovered to explain and to be moved by the fundamental workings of nature. No longer merely used to re-make an object, or to repeat a process already known, instruments were now increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry. This interdisciplinary study argues that the new repertory instrumental music grew out of the early modern fascination with instruments of all kindsandmdash;scientific and artisanal tools that served as mediators between individuals and the world around them.and#160;
Synopsis
Early seventeenth-century Italy saw a revolution in instrumental music. Large, varied, and experimental, the new instrumental repertoire was crucial for the Western traditionandmdash;but the impulses that gave rise to it have yet to be fully explored.
Curious and Modern Inventions offers fresh insight into the motivating forces behind this music, tracing it to a new conception of instruments of all sortsandmdash;whether musical or scientificandmdash;as vehicles of discovery.
Rebecca Cypess shows that early modern thinkers were fascinated with instrumental technologies. The telescope, the clock, the pen, the luteandmdash;these were vital instruments for leading thinkers of the age, from Galileo Galilei to Giambattista Marino. No longer used merely to remake an object or repeat a process already known, instruments were increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry that would lead to new knowledge. Engaging with themes from the history of science, literature, and the visual arts, this study reveals the intimate connections between instrumental music and the scientific and artisanal tools that served to mediate between individuals and the world around them.
About the Author
Rebecca Cypess is assistant professor of music at Rutgers University. She is coeditor of the two-volume collection Word, Image, and Song.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Androids, Enlightenment, and the Human-Machine Boundary
2 The Harpsichord-Playing Android; or, Clock-Making in Switzerland
3 The Dulcimer-Playing Android; or, Furniture-Making in the Rhineland
4 The Design of the Mechanics; or, Sentiments Replicated in Clockwork
5 Poetic Engagement with Piano-Playing Women Automata
6 The and#8220;Enlightenment Automatonand#8221; in the Modern Industrial Age
ConclusionBibliography
Index