Rhetoric

What it means

Musical rhetoric designates the conception that music is built like a speech and is meant to act like a speech. It shaped the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and took over from ancient oratory both the structure — introduction, exposition, elaboration, conclusion — and a stock of nameable figures, with which individual turns were designated and explained.

Musical use

Its foundation is the doctrine of the affections: a movement or section presents a particular affect — joy, lament, anger, calm — and is meant to evoke it in the listener. Tried and tested means stood ready for this. A descending chromatic bass line stands for lament and underlies many lamento movements; sharp dissonances, unusual leaps, repetitions, sudden rests, and the tone-painting of individual words belong to the same context. In vocal music the text is the key: it says which affect is depicted and why the music departs from the frame at a certain point.

It matters with what claim this doctrine is read today. The treatises of the time are not uniform: they name different figures, use the same names for different things, and order them differently. A closed system, such as later accounts sometimes suggest, did not exist in this form. As a pointer to how music of this period was understood and performed, the doctrine of figures nonetheless remains instructive.

Musical rhetoric took over concepts of ancient oratory to describe the structure and expression of music. Especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theorists such as Joachim Burmeister and Johann Mattheson compared composition with a speech. Figures such as anabasis, catabasis, passus duriusculus, or suspiratio stand for particular affects or textual images.

Performance practice

With vocal music, read the text before practising, and assign its affect to every section; the shaping results from this almost by itself. Keep an affect once recognized consistent over the whole section, instead of changing the attitude within a few bars. And do not additionally demonstrate striking turns — they work when their surroundings stay calm.