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

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.

Frontispiece of the Guida Armonica

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?

A page from the Guida Armonica

Four copies of the Guida Armonica