The domestic life of the Syrinx

Musicological tradition has posited a fundamental symbolic opposition between wind instruments, associated with bestial lust and deformity, and stringed instruments, connoting rational elegance and persuasive affect. The neatness of this formulation, however, dissolves when exposed to the actual representation of musical instruments in Italian visual and literary sources around 1500. The complexities are neatly exemplified in two influential publications printed either side of 1500 in Venice. In the moral explanations of the tales in the 1497 Ovidio volgare, Pan's syrinx is said to be empty of all save the wind, emblematising the insubstantial discourse of the ignorant. On the other hand, in Sannazaro's 1504 Arcadia Pan's “sampogna”—described as comprising seven pipes stopped with wax, i.e. a syrinx—symbolises the noble inheritance of the tradition of pastoral verse, passed down from Pan himself, through Theocritus and Virgil, to the poets of the Renaissance.

In fact, the syrinx played an important, if ambivalent, role in the musical rhetoric of elite identity in Italy. In the first half of the sixteenth century, it became a pervasive motif across a range of luxury household objects, including maiolica plates and jars, floor tiles, storage boxes, tabletop statuary, and perfume burners, as well as printed pictures and decorated furniture. The growing popularity of such objects, intended for display and discussion, reflected the increasing importance of collecting as a means of demonstrating status and refinement. Such objects do not invite scrutiny as sources reflecting musical expertise or sophistication; indeed, more often than not they betray fundamental misunderstandings of the musical functionality of the syrinx as an instrument. Rather, they lay claim to qualities of musical experience and its meanings, something that is of much more immediate importance than technical veracity to a majority of musical participants.