Rebecca Cypess proposes a multivalent argument about the rise of idiomatic instrumental music as a form of new knowledge capable of influencing, reflecting on and potentially shaping early modern social and scientific discovery. The author connects her readers to recent scholarship in the history of collecting, the social and emotive roles of portraiture and dance, shifting meanings (and suspicion) of curiosity, invention and instrumentality. She focuses on a small number of Italian violin and keyboard works, and the book's title is drawn from one of the substantial early instrumental collections, the Opus 8 (1626) of violinist–composer Biagio Marini, whose lengthy descriptive title terminates ‘with other curious and modern inventions’. Deconstructing Marini, Cypess takes these three historically charged words – curious, modern, invention – and situates their meanings within the early decades of the seicento, when, she maintains, idiomatic instrumental music partook in the broader empirical urge of the age to explore how various instruments could discover, resonate with and mediate social and scientific knowledge. The new idiomatic genres developed in part out of an increased professionalism that she links to an artisanal habitus or physical memory of the performer engaged in a ‘disciplining of the hand’ (virtuosity), and the historical gap between theory and practice, the ‘paradox of instrumentality’, or the ephemerality of musical sound that can be theoretically understood and deconstructed separately from the physical ability to understand the technical, material instrument.

Cypess situates her investigation within the currents of thought about music, knowledge, expression and imitation in the works of Vincenzo and Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon in particular. Part of her argument, for example, is rooted in a 1612 letter of Galileo to his friend Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli on the artistic paragone in which he opines that instrumental music possesses even greater meraviglia ‘to awaken the secret affetti of our soul’ than vocal music since it is even further from the thing being imitated (pp. 18–19). He likewise chooses painting over sculpture, but without putting painting in direct opposition to music or poetry (at least in this passage), as would have been common in the century before.

Cypess's discussion of artisanal practice (influenced by Pamela H. Smith's The Body of the Artisan (2004)) articulates the relations of the musician's body to the material nature of a musical instrument and to discovering what it was capable of describing sonically. The nuances of sonic description achievable in expert hands are at the root of further elaborations on idiomatic portraiture (aurally and visually) of emotion and personality. The idea of aural collecting by well-informed listeners, described by Andrew Dell'Antonio (Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (2011)), is another inspiration for Cypess as she links early modern ideas about emotion, civil conversation, letter writing and dance with the analysis of musical instrumentality as a scientific enterprise. Cypess reads Marini's work against the Breughel the Elder/Rubens canvas, the Allegory of Hearing (1617–1618), grounding the study of sound-making instruments within the Kunstkammer as media to ‘quantify, analyze, and recreate life’ (p. 146). Philosophies of bodily and mechanistic perception and the replication of sonic phenomena in automata, for example, were among the matters explored. The perception of time is equally examined: Frescobaldi's keyboard works embody both the precision of objective mechanized time (as in metered contrapuntal works, for example) and the freer, subjective, personal and meditative time engaged in works of more improvisatory nature like the toccata. In technical and aesthetic ways, Cypess asserts, musical works of these kinds participate in the wider societal concerns about how time is quantified and qualified.

Cypess's approach is innovative in putting ‘instrumentality’ – in the larger sense of a medium that extends the bodily senses – back into the consideration of the instrumentally expressed idiomatic musical idea. A musical instrument provides the medium to explore not only the physical possibilities in employing that instrument in a discovery of its sonic possibilities, but also the intellectual investigation of the fabric of musical language, the weaving of musical time and the mirroring of personality and emotion. The approach Cypess takes is strongly grounded in the social realm: the inventive virtuoso explores new techniques and sounds for the pleasure, erudition and experiential collection of his listeners. At the beginning of the baroque, we are still decades before the rise of the expert Cremonese violin workshop of the Amati and a century away from the masterpieces of Antonio Stradivari. What is evident from Cypess's work, however, is that the development of instrumentally idiomatic techniques would in turn help drive the technological revolution to create instruments upon which to ideally hear the works composed in dialogue with different strands of expertise.

In choosing a discrete selection of Italian musical examples, Cypess is able to present a detailed analysis of the work each piece does in terms of affective portrait or rational discovery. She is at her best in situating these discussions. The limited sample permits her to view the works in question from the multiple disciplinary angles she engages, which would be quite cumbersome in generalizing to a larger number of works or a broader geography. She is mostly successful in doing so. Cypess is perhaps less convincing when she suggests parallels with the alliance of empiricism, humanism and artisanal practice in the history writing of Vincenzo Galilei or Francis Bacon's philosophy of history, as she makes an argument for the ‘incorporation of this sense [of the ars historica] into the artisanal practices of instrumental performers’ (p. 220). It is interesting, however, to consider (as others have argued) the potential impact of the various encounters that musicians may have had with these ideas in a broader community of curiosity. She seems also to question the tapering point for the Italian Renaissance, extending it further than is usually done – to the end of the sixteenth century – perhaps to add weight to the argument that the role of instruments in general undergoes a substantive shift around this time, and in music specifically, from poetic vocally based genres to the new idiomatic instrumental genres. It is an ambitious, though not lengthy, book, well documented, with translations and original texts both provided. It leaves the overall impression of an interesting refocusing of a variety of knowledge ‘frames’ within which to consider instrumental genres, but also the desire to see some of these frames expanded to consider other works outside the selected examples and beyond the exclusive focus on Italian models.