Morris, Mitchell B. (Advisor)
Patrick David-Jung Bonczyk (Author)
The tenuous boundaries that separate humans, animals, and machines fascinate and sometimes unsettle us. In eighteenth-century France, conceptions of what differentiates humans from animals and machines became a sustained topic of interest in spaces that were public and private, recreational and intellectual. This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century harpsichords were porous sites where performers, composers, artisans, academics, and pedagogues negotiated the limits of these fragile boundaries. French harpsichords are at the center of my dissertation because they embodied an experimental collision of animal parts and other biomatter, complex machinery, and visual and musical performance. Taken together, I consider the ways that instruments had social import apart from sound production alone, expanding the definition of “instrument” beyond traditional organological studies of style in craftsmanship and musical aesthetics. I use an “entangled organology” that traces economic, technological, scientific, and environmental convergences to reveal the thick networks through which harpsichords traveled and the behavioral codes and motivations that instrument makers, performers, listeners, composers, and philosophers embedded into them. I follow the 1687 French embassy to Siam to show how harpsichords were crucial in intercultural, diplomatic exchanges as gifts, bribes, or as sources of teachable knowledge. I examine Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1738 flute-playing android to show how musical instruments mobilized debates in human anatomy and the mechanical arts. I then focus on bird and monkey genre paintings (singerie) on harpsichords’ surfaces to show how harpsichords evoked the contested human-animal divide. Next, I use Jean-Philippe Rameau’s harpsichord manual of 1724 and songbird pièce to narrate musical confrontations with nature between player and machine. Finally, I bring together early modern brain and nerve theories and an analysis of a pair of keyboard rondeaux by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer to demonstrate how harpsichord music embraced neurocultural findings on the exceptionalism of human cognition over animals and machines. Drawing from historically informed performance practices, the history of the book, the history of science and technology, art history, and material culture, “Wond’rous Machines” questions implicit assumptions about music, music making, and the fixity of musical instruments to argue that there are kinds of musical engagements, or musicking, that conventional organologies cannot explain.
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Book
Rath, Richard Cullen;
(2003)
How early America sounded
(/isis/citation/CBB001181335/)
Article
Martensen, Karin;
(2018)
Mensch und Maschine in den Laboratorien Thomas Alva Edisons. Ein Beitrag zur Technikhistorie aus musikwissenschaftlicher Sicht. (Man and machine in the laboratories of Thomas Alva Edison. A contribution to the history of technology from a musicological point of view.)
(/isis/citation/CBB084582039/)
Article
Hui, A. E.;
(2011)
Instruments of Music, Instruments of Science: Hermann von Helmholtz's Musical Practices, His Classicism, and His Beethoven Sonata
(/isis/citation/CBB001033821/)
Book
Fairman, Elisabeth R.;
Art, Yale Center for British;
(2014)
Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists' Books and the Natural World
(/isis/citation/CBB001500458/)
Article
Simon, Julia;
(2012)
Diverting Water in Rousseau: Technology, the Sublime, and the Quotidian
(/isis/citation/CBB001201885/)
Article
Pannese, Alessia;
(2012)
A Gray Matter of Taste: Sound Perception, Music Cognition, and Baumgarten's Aesthetics
(/isis/citation/CBB001211285/)
Chapter
Connor, Steven;
(2011)
Air-Looms and Influencing Machines
(/isis/citation/CBB001201377/)
Book
Quenet, Grégory;
(2005)
Les tremblements de terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: La naissance d'un risque
(/isis/citation/CBB000953113/)
Chapter
Cowan, Brian;
(2013)
English Coffeehouses and French Salons: Rethinking Habermas, Gender and Sociability in Early Modern French and British Historiography
(/isis/citation/CBB001201708/)
Article
Damme, Stéphane Van;
(2005)
Culture rhétorique et culture scientifique: Crise ou mutation de la poétique des savoirs dans la Compagnie de Jésus en France, 1630-1730?
(/isis/citation/CBB000670326/)
Book
Caradonna, Jeremy L.;
(2012)
The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 1670--1794
(/isis/citation/CBB001201218/)
Article
Quellier, Florent;
(2012)
L'aprés Jean-Louis Flandrin, une décennie d'histoire de l'alimentation en France (XVe-XIXe siécles)
(/isis/citation/CBB001320878/)
Article
Gouk, Penelope;
Sykes, Ingrid;
(2011)
Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(/isis/citation/CBB001230384/)
Chapter
Otto, Peter;
(2011)
Inside the Imagination-Machines of Gothic Fiction: Estrangement, Transport, Affect
(/isis/citation/CBB001201376/)
Book
Erlmann, Veit;
(2010)
Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
(/isis/citation/CBB001031303/)
Thesis
Zhuqing Hu;
(2019)
From Ut Re Mi to Fourteen-Tone Temperament: The Global Acoustemologies of an Early Modern Chinese Tuning Reform
(/isis/citation/CBB144734757/)
Article
Martina Heßler;
(2020)
Überflüssigwerden, reparieren und ermächtigen: Facetten eines anthropozentrischen Diskurses um die technische Ersetzung der Menschen (Making superfluous, repairing and empowering: Facets of an Anthropocentric Discourse around the Technical Replacement of Humans)
(/isis/citation/CBB528355587/)
Article
Cheung, Tobias;
(2010)
Transitions and Borders between Animals, Humans and Machines 1600--1800: Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB000932598/)
Chapter
Allen, Aaron S.;
(2012)
“Fatto di Fiemme”: Stradivari's Violins and the Musical Trees of the Paneveggi
(/isis/citation/CBB001421371/)
Chapter
Flora Willson;
(2017)
Hearing Things: Musical Objects at the 1851 Great Exhibition
(/isis/citation/CBB406736948/)
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