Stylus phantasticus -- "fantastic style" -- was first described by Athanasius Kircher in his 1650 musical encyclopedia Musurgia Universalis. Kircher defined it as a style unique to instrumental music that was "bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject; it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony." One would think such an ephemeral musical form, practiced in age when recording did not exist, would have vanished along with the fumes of Kircher's alchemical mixtures. ...
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Stylus phantasticus -- "fantastic style" -- was first described by Athanasius Kircher in his 1650 musical encyclopedia Musurgia Universalis. Kircher defined it as a style unique to instrumental music that was "bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject; it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony." One would think such an ephemeral musical form, practiced in age when recording did not exist, would have vanished along with the fumes of Kircher's alchemical mixtures. Ultimately its time did pass when it transformed, around 1700, into the form of the fantasia, but not before manifesting itself in a wide range of works running from late 16th-century works of Claudio Merulo through about 1680. On their Berlin Classics release Stylus phantasticus, Annegret Siedel and Bell'Arte Salzburg plow forward with yet more revelatory material relating to this practice within its special context, a ball set in motion on CD through the efforts of Romanesca and Siedel...
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