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A Glimpse into Seventeenth-century Musical Fantasy: An artistic Representation of Playfulness and Freedom based on the Concept of Personified Nature

Yoon-kyung Park 1

1서울대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

During the first half of the seventeenth century, there appeared the classification of various styles or genres according to functions, characteristics, and compositional strategy, which includes the fantastic style and its related genres. According to the seventeenth-century authors of musical fantasy, whether as a genre or as a concept, the term ‘fantasy’ commonly denoted freedom or deviation from contrapuntal rules. Their attempts at defining musical fantasy reveal the effect of the ideals of the seconda prattica on the instrumental idiom on the one hand, and the changing attitude towards the convention of improvisation on the other. It is noticeable that musical fantasy was discussed in the context of the increasing perception of the variety of nature and of the relationship between nature and art, or between naturalness and artificiality. Especially, the concept of Lusus(the personified nature’s playfulness) in the contemporary scientific literature illuminates this relationship. Lusus is also related to the aesthetic values pursued in the contemporary landscape architecture and the art of the garden as a space to display various styles and to experiment the balance between nature and art. This thesis considers seventeenth-century musical fantasy as artistic license, maintaining a focus on related genres, and investigates the contemporary notions of naturalness and artificiality in the intellectual and cultural context.

Citation status

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