"Starting out precisely from instrumental music’s apparent Achilles heel, its artisanal origins, Rebecca Cypess’s Curious and Modern Inventions takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through early seventeenth-century culture, musical and otherwise. This is a highly rewarding adventure: along the way, works by Biagio Marini, Carlo Farina, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and Dario Castello are repositioned as manifestations of important contemporary developments in painting, science, collectorship, and philosophy. . . . Curious and Modern Inventions will surely become standard reading for anyone interested in seventeenth-century instrumental music and the prodigiously fertile and turbulent intellectual and artistic climate in which it arose."