Echoes behaving badly? Rhetorical and acoustic experimentalism in the echo fantasias of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and his contemporaries

Abstract

Abstract The 17th-century ‘echo fantasia’ for keyboard has long posed problems of classification and attribution. This article focuses on a particularly problematic example of the genre, the Echo Fantasia in d attributed to Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (d4). Once expurgated from the Sweelinck canon, d4 differs substantially from its compatriots, most notably in its erratic echo scheme in which some echoes are marked louder than their antecedents, and others take the shape of improvisatory variants. Viewing d4 from a wider perspective, this article positions the echo fantasia at the intersection of early 17th-century rhetorical and acoustic experimentalism. On the one hand, literary portrayals of the figure of Echo relied on rhetorical devices—such as anadiplosis—that also characterize d4. On the other hand, d4’s misbehaving echoes evoke the playful experimentalism of early scientists investigating echoes, including Francis Bacon, Isaac Beeckman and Marin Mersenne. Akin to a miniature musical laboratory, the echo fantasia was a genre in which the strangest echo effects could be replicated at the organ.