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The Stylus Phantasticus and Free Keyboard Music of the North German Baroque.

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The Stylus Phantasticus and Free Keyboard Music of the North German Baroque. By Paul Collins. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. [xv, 229 p. ISBN 0-7546-3416-7. $89.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

As interest in the music of Dietrich Buxtehude and his north German contemporaries intensifies, one often hears the term stylus phantasticus used routinely by scholars and performers of German baroque music. Today, the term generally gives performers license to play wildly--with an unpredictable rubato and an emphasis on the musically bizarre. Treatises by Johann Mattheson certainly justify a free approach to the performance practice of specific genres and venues, such as the toccata. A resourceful reader of historical treatises, however, quickly finds a bewildering set of definitions, meanings, and associations for the stylus phantasticus. For Athanasius Kircher, for instance, the term clearly applies to a composer's imaginative approach to abstract counterpoint, such as in canons and ricercare.

Baroque theorists did not completely distinguish between the concepts of genre, venue, style, musical effect, and the musical act (composition or performance). Intriguing but vague associations of rhetoric, oratory, and the affections with the stylus fantasticus abound as well. Kircher, Mattheson, and several other baroque theorists moved fluidly between such concepts in their writings about the stylus phantasticus, making consensus on the scope and meaning of the term difficult.

Buttressed with a strong command of historical treatises and modern scholarship, Paul Collins identifies, untangles, and dissects this mishmash, author by author. Drawing upon other scholarship such as Kerala Snyder's Dietrich Buxtehude: Organist in Lubeck (New York: Schirmer Books, 1987), pp. 248-56, Collins proposes a historical evolution of the term from Kircher's ingenious counterpoint to Mattheson's expressive passages, that is, from admirable abstraction to captivating performances. Collins places Buxtehude's music somewhere between these extremes. In his analysis of late seventeenth-century music, however, Collins clearly adopts the modern usage (perhaps like Mattheson's) when evaluating the repertory in the final chapter....

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