Jonathan Goya

Music Master, Machine: Negotiating Pedagogical Authority in Francesco Geminiani’s Guida Armonica (1756)

2024–2027 · dissertation · Case Western Reserve University research

The Guida Armonica (1756) is a composing machine in book form: follow its chains of short passages and you can assemble your own music. Geminiani hoped it would bring the richness of sixteenth-century counterpoint back into eighteenth-century harmony.

The engraved frontispiece to Geminiani’s *A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick* (1749), showing the *Guida* in the foreground.The engraved frontispiece to Geminiani’s A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (1749), showing the Guida in the foreground.

I read it in light of Geminiani's precarious position as an Italian immigrant and celebrity teacher in London, and as an early version of a question we're still arguing about: when a system writes the music, who is the composer?

The first page of short musical passages from the Guida ArmonicaThe first page of the Guida Armonica

Four copies of the Guida Armonica open to their title pages. Taken at the British Library.Four copies of the Guida Armonica, taken in the British Library.