The notion of "Fantastic Style," a musical term not even covered in The New Grove, is becoming quite a buzzword in connection with recorded compilations of Baroque bizarreness. In 1650, theorist Athanasius Kircher defined Stylus Phantasticus as "a most liberated form of composition, free from any constraints of text or predetermined harmony, to display genius." Other descriptions of this style vary somewhat as to the details, but with the basics remaining essentially the same, such as in the writings of Johann Mattheson ...
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The notion of "Fantastic Style," a musical term not even covered in The New Grove, is becoming quite a buzzword in connection with recorded compilations of Baroque bizarreness. In 1650, theorist Athanasius Kircher defined Stylus Phantasticus as "a most liberated form of composition, free from any constraints of text or predetermined harmony, to display genius." Other descriptions of this style vary somewhat as to the details, but with the basics remaining essentially the same, such as in the writings of Johann Mattheson and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach more than a century later. Harpsichordist Christian Brembeck has assembled a program on this theme in his Musicaphon release Der fantastische Styl that attempts to trace this style, and its distinctive approach, in seventeenth and eighteenth century German keyboard music. Previous discs devoted to Stylus Phantasticus find it largely in violin music, and that limited it to the middle of the seventeenth century, about the time when Kircher was...
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