In 1747 John Creed’s proposal for a “Machine that shall write Extempore Voluntaries” was presented to the Royal Society. A transcriptive device with rotating cylinders and steel pencils, the “fantasy machine,” as it has since come to be called, sought to inscribe and store the effusions of keyboard improvisations in real time. Musicological accounts of this machine have typically focused on its ostensible objective (almost always judged to have missed its mark) to record the fleeting improvisations of musical genius, undistorted by memory or later composerly reflection. But at the heart of Creed’s quest to delineate what he called the “minutest Particles of Sound” were rather the “intelligible Characters” that appeared via a mechanized process of inscription. This article argues that Creed’s preoccupation with character and line makes visible a version of knowing through and about music—about how sound could be conceived, captured, and communicated—that shaped perhaps the foundational concept in discourse about music for the next two hundred years: style. In the eighteenth century, style and stilus—manner and tool, expression and technology—were inextricable. The mechanical experiments of Creed and his contemporaries, the music of C. P. E. Bach, and the widely read theories of William Hogarth chart an understanding of inscriptive-semiotic matter that was premised on the intertwined workings of body and tool. This mid-eighteenth-century moment, I argue, reveals a foundational stylistic materialism in which style was not yet in the service of the biocultural taxonomies of nineteenth-century modernity, but indexed instead a more ambiguous and generative convergence of the syntactical, typographical, and corporeal—a complex nexus of tools, instruments, bodies, and techniques.
University of California Press