Antique Musical Instruments and Their Players [antikvár]

Introduction Filippo Bonanni was born in Rome in 1658, became a Jesuit, and in 1698 was appointed curator of the collection of antiquities formed by the celebrated Athanasius Kircher and preserved in the Jesuit College. One of Kircher's many writings was a compendious but unreliable work on music called Musurgia Universalis (two volumes, 1650). It may have been from this work, which had a number of engravings of musical instruments, that Bonanni got the idea for his Gabinetto Armonico. This was the last of a series of illustrated publications by Bonanni which had included works on natural history, architectural history and the history of religious, military and chivalric orders and their dress. The Gabinetto Armonico, first printed in 1716 and revised and expanded in 1723, was reprinted in Paris in 1776 with a French translation alongside a reduced version of the original commentary. It has been deprecated by many historians of instruments-—somewhat unjustly, one feels, after studying it closely. Even though inexact in detail at times, it is more truly comprehensive than any book on musical instruments until the work of Curt Sachs.* Unlike earlier books on the subject it is entirely non-professional in its approach. Neither didactic, nor scientific in the seventeenth-century sense, it has a humanistic attitude and sociological awareness which anticipate some of the most progressive features of organology today. The scope of the Gabinetto Armonico reveals its author's open-mindedness in accepting material from all levels of European society and from many cultures outside it. Bonanni gives art and folk instruments of Europe, naturally with an Italian emphasis, many little-known instruments used in the Eastern Christian churches, and a remarkably * Sachs's Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente, with additions and revisions by Sachs, will be republished by Dover Publications in 1964. V