“Quegli strumenti, che erano più atti a far proporzionata accompagnatura al balletto a cavallo”: Envisioning a cognate theory of instrumental timbre in early modern Florence1

In Chapter 10, Kelley Harness delineates a cognate theory of instrumental timbre, taking as a point of departure equestrian spectacles in seventeenth-century Florence. These outdoor events combined staged combat, dances on horseback, elaborately decorated pageant floats, machinery, and vocal and instrumental music-constitutive arts whose varied visual and sonic expressions combined to support a single, unified narrative. Harness skillfully deduces theoretical implications from a variety of data sources, including libretti, treatises, iconographic sources, documents, and organological and philological inquiry, while illustrating how musicological and historical research may-and should-keep a focus upon environmental relations.