The Sound of Phantasia in Motion: Musical Imagination from Aristotle to Zarlino

Abstract

Ambiguously poised between composition and improvisation, works designated as fantasia in the sixteenth century thrived on the imaginative power of virtuoso performers. Or so the term would seem to suggest: it is not immediately clear in what sense this music should be understood and singled out as the product of the imagination. Isn’t music, any kind of music, the product of the imagination? What idea of imagination was this particular kind of music meant to represent? Drawing on the Aristotelian doctrine of the internal senses, this essay explores the relationship between fantasia as a musical process and sixteenth-century notions of fantasia as a mental process. From our vantage point in history, fantasia offers a rare opportunity to observe a cultural and musical practice aimed at translating the workings of the mind into a sensible object, which the perceiving subject can then (re)experience as a representation of his own inner life, in the way he himself imagines it.