Vickers Figures of Rhetoric

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?
Author(s): Brian Vickers

Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 1-44
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the
History of Rhetoric
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B R I A N VICKERS
he affinity between music and rhetoric, first proposed by

Quintdian, was the subject of many theoretical and practical works on music produced between the middle of the
sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century. Most of these
treatises, whether written in Latin or in the vernacular, were produced in Germany, and it is to German scholars in this century that
we owe the most substantial contributions to the topic,' although
'The pioneer in modern times was Arnold Schering, in "Die Lehre von den
musikalischen Figuren im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert," Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch, 21
(1908), pp. 106-114; see also his "Geschichtliches zur Ars inveniendi," Peters-Jahrbuch
(1925). Heinz Brandes, a pupil of Schering's, wrote a Berlin dissertation, Studien zur
musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1935), while a broader study was
attempted by Hans-Heinrich Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im
16.-18. Jahrhundert (Wiirzburg, 1941; repr. Hildesheim, 1969). A brief but important
article by Willibald Gurlitt, "Musik und Rhetorik. Hinweise auf ihre geschichtliche
Grundlageneinheit" appeared in Helicon 5 (1944), and is reprinted in Gurlitt's Musikgeschichte und Gegenwart, ed. H. H. Eggbrecht, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1966), 1.62-81:
cited here as "Gurlitt." See also Frederick Wessel, The Affektenlehre in the 18th Century
(Indiana U diss., 1955; University Microfilm Pub. no. 14, 674), and the articles "Affektenlehre" and "Figuren, musikalisch-rhetorisch", in Die Musik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, ed. F. Blume, (Kassel and Basel, 1955).
The International Society for The History of Rhetoric. Rhetorica, Volume 2,

Number 1 (Spring, 1984).
RHETORICA
studies have recently begun to appear in English.' One of the pioneers was Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629), who has attracted much
attention,^' although lately the emphasis has been on the Baroque
period, where discussion of the effect of rhetoric on how music
was to be composed, performed, and listened to was more sophisticated. Since rhetoric, as Omer Talon put it, having no fixed domain, could spread through all the arts,"" it is right that we are finally beginning to study its connections with music. Yet it is also
crucial to fix the discussion properly from the start, and from recent developments it seems to me timely to raise the awkward but
crucial question, how far can the terms of rhetoric be applied directly to music? HOW far can one aesthetic system, a linguistic one,
be adapted to another, non-linguistic?
I
In retrospect, it is entirely natural that the links between music
and rhetoric should have been established so thoroughly in Northern Europe in the sixteenth century. A main factor was the spread
of humanist education, with its revival of the basis of schooling,
the trivium, that union of grammar, logic, and rhetoric which was
pursued with unflagging energy by secondary schoolmasters for
some three centuries.^ Although the vernaculars made their ap'See Claude V. Palisca, "A Clarification of 'Musica Reservata' in Jean Taisnier's
'Astrologiae'," 1559, Acta Musicologica 31 (1959), pp. 133-161, cited here as "Palisca
(1)"; and "Ut Oratoria Musica: the Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism," in The
Meaning of Mannerism, ed. F. W Robinson and S. G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, New
Hampshire, 1972), pp. 37-65, cited here as "Palisca (2)"; Gregory G. Butler, "Fugue
and Rhetoric," Journal of Music Theory 21 (1977), pp. 49-109, here as "Butler (1)," and
"Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources," The Musical
Quarterly 66 (1980), pp. 53-64 (here as "Butler (2)").
'See Martin Ruhnke, Joachim Burmeister Ein Beitrag zur Musiklehre um 1600
(Kassel und Basel, 1955), and his facsimile re-edition of Burmeister's Musica poetica
(Kassel and Basel, 1955).
'"In immenso rerum omnium atque artium campo libere vagari": Institutiones oratoriae (1545), p. 8, cit. Basil Munteano, Constantes Dialectiques en Litterature et en Histoire (Paris, 1967), pp. 151-2.
*On the place of rhetoric in education during the Renaissance see W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600 (Cambridge,
1906); T. W Baldwin, Shakespere's "Small Latine and Lesse Greeke", 2 vols. (Urbana,
111., 1944); Friedrich Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen
Schulen und Universitdten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols., ed.
pearance gradually, throughout most of this time not only instruction but pupds' conversation during breaks was meant to be in
Latin. At the universities the arts course began again with the trivium, but where schools had often used summaries and digests of
rhetoric, first- and second-year university students went back to
the great originals, Aristode, Cicero, and Quintilian. Rhetoric made
its appearance in the later stages of the grammar school curriculum, and in the highest form (or "classe de rhetorique," as it was
called in France, a tide that persisted until the nineteenth century)
the pupil's literary studies were crowned by a thorough grounding
in elocutio, which meant not only style, and a mastery of aU the resources of expression, but also a commitment to language and ethics, a stress on responsible communication in the widest sense."
The rhetorical education, pioneered by such great humanists
as Erasmus, Bude, Melanchthon, Vives, and all their pupils and
disciples, trained the student in both criticism and composition.
He was taught to read analytically, to identify metaphors, sententiae, and anything from forty to two hundred rhetorical figures, in
all the literature he read, whether the poems of Ovid or Virgil, the
prose of Cicero or Seneca, or the Bible. He would mark these in the
margin of his book, and transfer some as quotations in his notebook, to be reused in his own writing. He was taught how to compose an oration, or write an essay, using the traditional processes
of creation (invention, disposition, elocution, pronunciation, memory), and to arrange the final work into one of the canonical patterns (prooemium, divisio or narratio, confirmatio, confutatio, peroratio). He was taught the three levels of style, the main literary
genres, and the styles appropriate to each genre. He learned these
and other pieces of knowledge by slow and systematic instruction,
painstaking memorization, and constant recapitulation. Whoever
had an education in Europe in this period can be counted on to be
R. Lehmann ('Leipzig, 1919); Wilfried Barner, Barock-Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zu
ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tubingen, 1970), especially pp. 241-447; D. Breuer
and G. Kopsch, "Rhetoriklehrbiicher des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine BibUographie", in H. Schanze (ed.) Rhetorik. Beitrdge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom
16. -20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1974), pp. 217-355, and other articles in that volume;
H. Lantoine, Histoire de I'enseignement secondaire en France au XVII' et au debut du
XVIW slides (Paris, 1874); Francois de Dainville, La Naissance de I'Humanisme moderne (Paris, 1940); Basil Munteano, op. cit.; Eugenio Garin, L'Educazione in Europa
(Bari, 1957), and ed. Garin, // Pensiero pedagogico del Rinascimento (Florence, 1958).
'See Brian Vickers, "Rhetorical and Anti-rhetorical tropes: on writing the history of elocutio," Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), pp. 105-132.
RHETORICA
familiar with all of the main processes of rhetoric. Those composers who had at least a grammar-school education certainly knew
their rhetoric, whether, like Thomas Campion, they had been to
Cambridge or whether, like Burmeister, they had been to the Gymnasium in Liineburg. Much more, however, remains to be discovered about musicians' education.
The stress on the importance of rhetoric in education led to, or
was accompanied by, an enormous publication boom. Quintdian's
Institutes of Oratory, first printed in 1470, had at least 18 editions by
1500, and at least 130 more by 1600.' Cyprian Soarez' De Arte Rhetorica (1568), which was for many years the standard textbook of all
Jesuit schools, had at least 134 editions, in 45 different European
cities during a period of 173 years, and a total of 207 reprints in all
forms.* J. J. Murphy's bibliography of Renaissance Rhetoric lists
3,000 titles by some 800 authors,' and is incomplete at that. The
effect of this intensive education is to be seen in all the great writers
of the period: in recent years whole books have been devoted
to rhetoric in Shakespeare, Milton, Ronsard, Racine, Pascal, and
many shorter studies have illuminated the diverse ways in which
rhetoric acted as a model, an inspiration, and a channel of expression to writers of all kinds in all genres.'"
Given this intensely word-conscious culture, it is no surprise
' O n Quintilian's influence in the Renaissance see M. Wychgram, "Quintilian
in der deutschen und franzosischen Literatur des Barock und der Aufklarung,"
Padagogisches Magazin, Heft 803 (1921), pp. 1-150; Munteano, op. cit., pp. 177-184;
Unger, pp. Uff; and E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr.
W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), passim (cf. index).
*For Soarez, see De Arte Rhetorica, translated by L. J. Flynn, S. J. (University of
Florida Ph.D., 1955; University Microfilms Order no. HUJ 100-16926), and articles
by Father Flynn in Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956), pp. 367-374, and 43 (1957),
pp. 257-265.
'J. J. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue (New York, 1981), and
my review in Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983), pp. 441-444, and 70 (1984).
'"See, e.g. Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New
York, 1947, 1966); Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968,
1979), and "Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric" in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 83-98; idem, Francis
Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968); Peter France, Racine's Rhetoric (Oxford, 1965); Alex L. Gordon, Ronsard et la Rhdorique (Geneva, 1970); D. L. Clark, John
Milton at St. Paul's School (New York, 1948); P. Topliss, The FOietoric of Pascal (Leicester,
1966). Further bibliography in Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London, 1970), and "A Bibliography of Rhetoric Studies 1970-1980," in Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), pp. 316-322.
that nrusicians and music theorists should look to this highly successful aesthetic system for guidance. Indeed, by a happy confluence of interests, Quintilian's Institutes,''' with its plea for the orator
to learn from the musician, became to the writers of this period at
once a great classic and a work of immediate contemporary significance. In Book One, chapter ten, Quintilian made a survey of other
studies necessary to complete the general education of the ideal orator, and wrote a praise of music which was to be echoed and imitated many times over. Of particular relevance to music and rhetoric are the passages recalling that grammar and music were once
united, that there were famous teachers of both (such as Sophron:
I.X.17), and that the study of music has played a major role in the
education of phdosophers, generals, and rulers, ever since "those
remote times when Chiron taught Achilles" (I.x.13, 18, 30; ed.cit..
Vol. I, pp. 167-73).
The immediate practical advantages to the orator are said to
concern the body, as in dancing and gesture (the sections on gesture and pronunciation were taken over sometimes literatim by Renaissance music theorists'^), and the voice. From music and musicians the orator must learn and master variety of voice-inflexion,
otherwise we must assume that "unlike music, oratory has no interest in the variation of arrangement and sound to suit the demands of the case" [" . non compositio et sonus in oratione quoque varie pro rerum modo adhibetur sicut in musice"]. Quintilian
then underlines the way that both music and eloquence adapt form
to content, and to expression, in a passage which was of great importance in the Renaissance:
But eloquence does vary both tone and rhythm, expressing sublime
thoughts with elevation, pleasing thoughts with sweetness, and ordinary with gentle utterance, and in every expression of its art is in sympathy with the emotions of which it is the mouth-piece. It is by the
raising, lowering or inflexion of the voice that the orator stirs the emotions of his hearers, and the measure, if 1 may repeat the term, of
voice and phrase differs according as we wish to rouse the indignation
or the pity of the judge. For, as we know, different emotions are
roused even by the various musical instruments, which are incapable
"Cited from the Loeb edition, 4 vols., tr. H. E. Butler (London, 1920).
'^Burmeister took over the sections on pronuntiatio and gestus wholesale:
Ruhnke, pp. 94-7;ibid., pp. 99f on the influence of Quintilian's concepts of moderatio
and mediocritas on seventeenth century theorists.
RHETORICA
of reproducing speech.
. [Thus,] an orator will assuredly pay special attention to his voice, and what is so specially the concern of music as this?" (I.x. 22-27; ed.cit. pp. 171-3).
Quintilian was much quoted in the Renaissance to support the

argument that music affected the passions, an idea that was diffused through many other channels. (Isidore of Sevdle, for instance, had written that musica movet affedus.") The Institutes also
helped to transmit some of those famous stories of the power of
music over human behaviour. Praising the ancient music, which
celebrated heroes and gods, Quintilian scorns its decadence in the
Roman theatre, and appeals:
Give me the knowledge of the principles of music, which have power
to excite or assuage the emotions of mankind."
He gives three exempla: Pythagoras calmed some young men about
to commit an outrage on a respectable famUy "by ordering the
piper to change her strain to a spondaic measure"; Chrysippus
knew a tune that would send children to sleep; and among the fictitious themes used for declamation exercises is one "in which it is
supposed that a piper is accused of manslaughter because he had
played a tune in the Phrygian mode as an accompaniment to a sacrifice, with the result that the person officiating went mad and flung
himself over a precipice" (I.x.32-3). Clearly the orator who has to
declaim on such a topic must know something about the modes,
which were themselves, of course, quasi-rhetorical, as tonal systems to which certain psychological or emotional responses were
associated. Well known up to Paradise Lost and beyond, the supposed connections of the Phrygian mode with enthusiasm, or the
Dorian with moderate and settled feelings, or the Mixolydian with
sad and grave ones,'^ were familiar to Renaissance music theorists.
""Namque et voce et modulatione grandia elate, iucunda dulciter, moderata

leniter canit, totaque arte consentit cum eorum quae dicuntur adfectibus. Atqui in
orando quoque intentio vocis, remissio, flexus pertinet ad movendos audientium
adfectus, aliaque et coUocationis et vocis (ut eodem utar verbo) modulatione concitationem iudicis, alia misericordiam petimus; cum etiam organis, quibus sermo exprimi non potest, adfici animos in diversum habitum sentiamus. . . Age, non
habebit imprimis curam vocis orator? Quid tarn musices proprium?"
'"See Brandes p. 70 and note 8.
'M.X.31; "cognitionem rationis, quae ad movendos leniendosque adfectus plurimum valet."
"See Plato, Republic. Book 3,398ff; Aristotle, Politics, Book 8, 1340 a-b; etc.
yet were not unanimously received. Joachim Burmeister, for instance, in his Musica autoschediastike (1601), having noted that Lassus
could use the Phrygian mode equally well for a church motet (Quam
benignus) as for a German secular song {Im Mayen hort man die
Hanen kreyen), echoed the traditional systematization according to
their use of semi-tones, yet concluded that the ornaments of rhetoric were far more successful in arousing the passions."'
In addition to Quintilian's exempla of the powers of music there
were the familiar stories, transmitted through such works as the
De musica (long attributed to Plutarch), or Macrobius, or Martianus
Capella, of Orpheus and Linus, of how Timotheus could arouse and
then subdue the martial spirits of Alexander, or how Terpander
quelled a rebellion.'* These had an analogous function to the myths
of famous orators who had demonstrated the power of eloquence
by some remarkable exploit, in that they were at the same time advertisements for the discipline and guarantees of success. They
were taken very seriously, too: "Montaigne's father . . . had his son
put to sleep and awakened by music," while the lutenist Francesco
di Milano "reduced a dinner-party first to melancholy, then to ecstasy, and, changing the measure, restored them."" This interest
in the psychological effects of music was typical of Renaissance humanism, as D. P. Walker has shown,^ and since rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went into the psychology of the
passions in extraordinary detail, devoting hundreds of pages to
what it called pathologia,^^ it is not surprising that music's power
"Ruhnke, 120f.
"See James Hutton, "Some English Poems in Praise of Music," English Miscellany 2 (1951), pp. 1-63; pp. 7ff. This rich study is essential reading.
"Hutton, p. 20.
"See D. P. Walker, "Musical Humanism in the sbcteenth and early seventeenth
centuries," The Music Review 2 (1941), pp. 1-13, 111-121, 220-227, 288-308; and
3 (1942), p p . 55-71; also available in German, with additional bibliographical note,
as Der musikalische Humanismus im 16. und fruhen 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel and Basel,
1949); and "The Aims of Bait's Acad^mie de poesie et de musique," Journal of Renaissance and Baroque Music 1 (1946), pp. 91-100.
^'See Joachim E>yck, Ticht-Kunst. Deutsche BarockpoetiK und rhetorische Tradition
(Bad Homburg, 1966, rev. 1969), especially pp. 81-90; Barner, op. cit.; H. E Plett,
Rhetorik der Affekte. Englische Wirkungsiisthetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance (Tubingen,
1975); Erwin Rotermund, "Der Affekt als literarischer Gegenstand; Zu Theorie und
Darstellung der Passiones im 17. Jahrhundert," in H. R. Jauss (ed.) Die nicht mehr
schonen Kiinste (Munchen, 1969), pp. 239-69, and Affekt und Artistik. Studien zur Leidenschaftsdarstellung und zum Argumentationsverfahren bei Hoffman von Hoffmanswaldau
(Munchen, 1972); B. Stolt, Wortkampf. Friihneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetoriscnen
RHETORICA
over the emotions became one of the most ubiquitous concepts in

music theory over 250 years at least. For this reason, too, in music
as in rhetoric, elocutiothe most difficult yet the most important
part, as Quintilian had saidbecame intensely studied and highly
valued. ^^
Comments on music's emotional power are rather general at
the beginning of our period. Thus the Basel humanist Minervius,
in his preface to Ludwig Senfl's Varia carmina genera (Niirnberg,
1534) praised the composer's ability to respond to different emotions in the text in terms that closely echo Quintilian's praise of the
orator's simdar power,^^ a passage also echoed by Michael Praetorius
in his Syntagma musicum (1615), who joined to it the familiar injunction from the Rhetorica ad Herennium that music, like the other arts,
is developed by the union of art, doctrine, and exercise." But later
in the seventeenth century, as rhetoric evolved a more complex
psychology of the passions, so music theorists echoed this development. In his Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650) Athanasius Kircher
gave the by now obligatory list of extraordinary emotional transformations that music could effect ("ex furiosis mansuetos, ex libidinosis castos, ex gravissimis infirmitatibus ad integram sanitatem
reductos, a Daemone denique insessos, liberatos legimus"), and
went on to divide the passions into three main groups, each with a
dozen or more subdivisions.^' Hans-Heinrich Unger, who has
given the fullest account of this topic as yet, cited two music theorists of the seventeenth century who give lists of passions that
should be directly imitated in music (Nucius, in 1613, for instance,
lists "primum verba affectuum, Laetari, Gaudere, lacrymari, timere,
ejulare, flere, lugere, trasci, ridere. Miserere"). Unger also drew attention to the work of Wolfgang Schonsleder, Architedonices musices
Praxis (Frankfurt, 1974), especially pp. 1-77; and Gerard Le Coat, The Rhetoric of the
Arts, 1550-1650 (Bern and Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 21-2 and note 66.
^QuintUian, VIII pref. 13-17; Unger, p. 5f, rightly stresses this point, which
has been overiooked by some historians of rhetoric: see Vickers, "On writing the
history of elocutio," op. cit.
"Compare the quotation from Quintilian, note 13 above, with Minervius'
praise of the composer, "quod ceu Poeta quidam egregius et verbis gestum et eorum
qui audiunt animi affectus, tonis suis inspiret, dum grandia elate, moderata leniter,
iucunda dulciter, tristia moeste, inflat ac modulatur, totaque arte cum affectibus
consentit": cit. Gurlitt, p. 76.
^'Ruhnke, p. 99; cf. Ad Herennium, I.ii.3.
^Brandes, pp. 63, 99ff.
universalis (Ingolstadt, 1631), which gives musical examples of ten

different feelings represented in music.^"^ The power of music to
represent and to move the passions in just the same way that
rhetoric does is stressed over and over again, from Leibniz in 1676
to Johann Mattheson in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Johann
Scheibe in Der Critische Musicus (1745), Johann Quantz in Versuch
einer Anweisung, die Flote traversiere zu spielen (1745), C. P. E. Bach,
Versuch Uber die wahre Art, das Klavier zu spielen (1759), a tradition
that is summed up and transposed on to a higher plane (perhaps,
in fact, too high a plane, in that more is claimed for the identity of
music and rhetoric than could ever be substantiated) in Johann
Niklaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Gottingen, 1788).^'
From the titles of these treatises alone it can be seen that the
claims for the importance of rhetoric in music were made by theorists, by historians of music, and by practitioners, composers and
instrumentalists. Some of them echo the famous injunction to the
writer by Horace, in the Ars Poetica:
Si vis me flere, dolendum est
primum ipsi tibi.^
["If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself]
Mattheson wrote in 1737:
Weil nun aber unstreitig das rechte Ziel aller Melodie nichts anders
ist, als eine solche Vergniigung des Gehors, dadurch die Affecten
rege werden; so kann mir ja keiner dieses Ziel treffen, der keine
Ûnger, pp. 37ff, citing Johann Nucius, Musicae poeticae sive de compositione cantus (Gorlitz, 1613) and pp. 104ff; the feelings represented are "die Frommigkeit, die
Freude, der Ekel, die Kampfeswut, die Geduldsamkeit, der Zorn, die Hartherzigkeit, die Furcht, die Trauer und die Barmherzigkeit". See also H. Kretzschmar, "Allgemeines und Besonderes zur Affektenlehre", Peters-Jahrbuch 15(1911), pp. 71-3, the
German historians cited in notes 1 and 21 above, and G. J. Buelow, "Music, Rhetoric,
and the Concept of the Affections: a Selective Bibliography," Notes. The Quarterly
Journal of the Music Library Association, 30 (1973), pp. 250-259.
^'On Leibniz see Gurlitt, p. 79; on Mattheson: Unger, p. 109; on Scheibe see
Brandes, p . 76 and Unger passim; on Quartz: Unger, pp. Ulf, 115f; on Bach and Forkel: Unger, passim. Unger says, without critical comment, that in the eighteenth
century discussions of the passion-arousing figures "jeder Unterschied von Musik
und Rhetorik ausgeloscht erscheint" (p. 107).
Ârs Poetica, 102 f: "If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself," tr. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Library (London, 1929), p. 459. Other classical loci
for this idea are De Oratore, II. xlv. 189 f, and Institutes, VI. ii. 26-36.
10
RHETORICA
Absicht darauf hat, selber nicht bewegt wird, ja kaum an irgend eine
Leidenschafft gedenckt.
Vîrd er aber geruhrt, und will auch
andere riihren, so muss er alle Neigungen des Hertzens, durch blosse
Klange, and deren Zusammenfassung, ohne Worten, dergestalt auszudrucken wissen, dass der Zuhorer daraus, als ob es eine wirklicher
Rede ware, den Trieb, den Sinn, die Meynung und den Nachdruck,
mit alien Ein- und Abschnitten vollig begreifen und verstehen kann.
C. P. E. Bach gave the same advice to the musician in 1759.^' But not
only performers were evaluated in rhetorical terms: composers
also. Coclicus praised Niclas Payen as one of the kings of music,
who knew how to express all the passions (omnes omnium affectus
exprimere).^ The first humanist writers on music believed that the
main agent in arousing the feelings, as in performing the duties of
prodesse and deledare, was the text, the poem or fabula that contained an image of human behaviour, often impassioned. While
leading to an excessively language-dominated conception of music," this theory did highlight the significance of the text and the
importance of adjusting the music to it, with admirable results in
the work of such composers as Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso,
and Monteverdi. Those perennial categories of ancient rhetoric, res
and verba, were revived and united with sonus, as in Sir Thomas
More's description of the Utopians' church music:
Verum una in re baud dubio longo nos intervallo praecellunt; quod
omnis eorum musica, sive quae personator organis, sive quam voce
modulantur humana, ita naturales adfectus imitatur et exprimit, ita
sonus accommodatur ad rem, seu deprecantis oratio sit seu laeta,
placabilis, turbida, lugubris, irata, ita rei sensum quendam melodiae
forma repraesentat, ut animos auditorum mirum in modum adficiat,
penetrat, incendat.'^
"Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (1737): cit. Brandes, p. 84; C. P. E.
Bach: "Indem ein Musicus nicht anders riihren kann, er sey dann selbst geruhrt; so
muss er nothwendig sich selbst in alle Affecten setzen konnen, welche er bey seinen
Zuhorern erregen will; er giebt ihnen seine Empfindungen zu verstehen und bewegt sie solchergestalt am besten zur Mit-Empfindung" (cit. Unger, p. 118).
"Coclicus: Brandes, pp. 72 f.
"See Walker, op. cit., pp. 9, 226 f, 288 if., 61 ff., and Brian Vickers: "Music and
Rhetoric in the Renaissance: the Triumph of the Word," in Vickers, In Defence of
Rhetoric, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
'^More, Utopia, ed. E. Surtz, S. J., and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London,
1965), p. 236. R. M. Adams translates: "In one respect, however, they are beyond
doubt far ahead of us, because all their music, both vocal and instrumental, renders
and expresses natural feelings, and perfectly matches the sound to the subject.
11
The three concluding verbs recall many classical texts guaranteeing

the affective force of rhetoric.
In such early humanist praises of the power of music the proper
"accommodation" of verba to res seems to have an enormous emotional impact attributed to it, which is sometimes described with
the help of another rhetorical category, that of vividness or visual
intensity. In Book III of his Rhetoric Aristode had singled out as one
of the excellences of metaphor that it can set something "more intimately before our eyes" (1405 b 11).^^ The words chosen "ought to
set the scene before our eyes" (1410 b 34), and the wished-for "liveliness" will be achieved "by using the proportional type of metaphor and by being graphic (i.e. making your hearers see things)"
(1411 b 21 ff). In literature, Aristotle writes, "by 'making them see
things' I mean using expressions that represent things as in a state
of activity." This description of the dynamic, visual quality of metaphor recurs in many rhetoric books, whether deriving from Aristotle or not. In the Ad Herennium we read that "metaphor is used
for the sake of creating a vivid mental picture" (Ea sumitur rei ante
oculos ponendae causa^), and Quintilian agrees that "metaphor is designed to move the feelings, give special distinction to things and
place them vividly before the eye" (translatio permovendis animis
plerumque et signandis rebus ac sub oculos subiiciendis reperta est^^). Another influential rhetorical concept connected with visual imagery
is enargeia, or clearness (sometimes confused, fruitfully enough,
with energeia). Quintilian explains that appeal to the visual imagination has strong emotional power:
There are certain experiences which the Greeks call (tâvrdcnai, and
the Romans visions, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be beWhether the words of the hymn are cheerful, supplicatory, troubled, mournful, or
angry, the music represents the meaning through the melody so admirably that it
penetrates and inspires the minds of the ardent hearers": Utopia, tr R. M. Adams
(New York, 1975), p. 87. Understandably, given the different implications they have
today, Adams has not translated literally the three concluding verbs, "adficiat, penetrat, incendat," although they do express traditional rhetorical concepts of arousing
and inflaming the feelings to virtuous action.
^^ Rhetoric, tr W. Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, XI (Oxford, 1924).
^Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV. xxxiv. 45; tr H. Caplan, Loeb Classical Library
(London, 1954), p. 343.
'5VIII. vi. 19; ed. cit.. Ill, p. 311.
"VI. II. 29; vol. II, pp. 433-5.
12
RHETORICA
fore our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions.
Those who have "this power of vivid imagination, whereby things,

words and actions are presented in the most realistic manner",
have such power over their hearers that "our emotions will be no
less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence."^^ As he says elsewhere, enargeia or "vivid illustration . . . is
something more than mere clearness, since the latter merely lets
itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice."^'
Enargeia is a general imaginative quality that the orator, or artist,
must possess. The specific verbal figures which communicated visual impressions included illustratio, evidentia, demonstratio, descriptio, ekphrasis, hypotyposis. The important point to note is that these
were usually classed among the figurae sententiae, andsince sight
was said to be the strongest of the senseswere granted the greatest emotional power. To quote one typical Renaissance rhetoric
book, in The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Henry Peacham writes that
such figures make the oration "verie sharp and vehement, by which
the sundrie affections and passions of the mind are properly and
elegantly uttered," for these figures "do attend upon affections, as
ready handmaids at commandement to expresse most aptly whatsoever the heart doth affect or suffer." ^^
Given the connotations of emotional intensity associated with
setting ideas "before the eyes," and the affective force deriving
from the proper fitting of verba to res, in the rhetoric-dominated
culture of the sixteenth century, humanists who praise composers
in these terms are paying them the highest possible compliment.
Glareanus, the Swiss humanist, praised Josquin des Prez in his
Dodekachordon (1547), by ranking him with Virgil:
No one has more effectively expressed the passions of the soul in music than this symphonist. . . . For just as Maro, with his natural facility, was accustomed to adapt his poem to his subject so as to set
weighty matters before the eyes of his readers with close-packed
''VIII. iii. 61-2; vol. Ill, pp. 245-7.

^The Garden of Eloquence, facs. ed. W G. Crane (Gainesville, Fla.; 1954), pp. 6 1 2, 120. See also Brian Vickers, "On the Practicalities of Renaissance Rhetoric," in
Vickers (ed.). Rhetoric Revalued (Binghampton, N.Y., 1982), pp. 133-141, at pp. 137-8
on the general agreement among rhetoricians of all schools as to the figurae sententiae being the best means of arousing the feelings.
13

spondees, fleeting ones with unmixed dactyls, to use words suited to
his every subject,
so our Josquin, where his matter requires it,
now advances with impetuous and precipitate notes, now . . . in
longdrawn tones,
conveying delight and pleasure.^' Rhetoric has given writers on

music a concept of expressive decorum, fitting res to verba and also
producing intense visual images. We meet the combination again
in the prefall that the Dutch humanist Samuel Quickelberg provided to an ornamented manuscript of the Penitential Psalms of
Orlando di Lasso:
He expressed [the content] so aptly with lamenting and plaintive melody, adapting where it was necessary [the music] to the subject and the
words, expressing the power of the different emotions, presenting the
subject as if acted before the eyes [rem quasi actum ante oculos ponendo],
that one cannot know whether the sweetness of the emotions more
adorns the plaintive melodies, or the plaintive melodies the sweetness
of the emotions. This kind of music they call musica reservata. '"'
Later in the century, the Italian theorist G. B. Doni argued that if
music were to be "efficace nel muovere gli affetti" then it had to use
the classical modes, for with their help composers "che praticano
in accomodare U canto alia parole" would have the power "di
commuovere gli uditori ora al pianto, ora al furore, ora ad altri af-
"Tr. O. Strunk, in Strunk (ed.) Source Readings in Music History (New York,
1950), pp. 220-1. The Latin reads "Nemo hoc Symphoneta affectus animi in cantu
efficatius expressit. . . Ut enim Maro naturae felicitate carmen rebus aequare est
solitus, quemadmodum res gravels coacervatis spondeis ante oculos ponere, velocitatem meris dactylis exprimere. . . . Ita hie noster Jodocus aliquando accelerantibus
ac praepotibus, ubi res postulat, notulis incendit, aliquando tardantibus rem phthongis intonat.
" (p. 362 of Basle, 1547 edition).
"Tr. Gustav Reese, in Reese, Music in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (London, 1954),
p. 513. Palisca (1), pp. 154 f, translates: "Lassus expresses these psalms so appropriately, in accommodating, according to necessity, the thoughts and words with lamenting and plaintive tones, in expressing the force of the individual affections, in
placing the object almost alive before the eyes." Gerald Abraham renders: "music
'conforming to the whole text and to each word, expressing every emotion and putting things before the imagination as if actually happening'": Abraham, The Concise
Oxford History of Music (London, 1979), p. 175. M. van Crevel, in Adrianus Petit
Coclico. Leben und Beziehung eines nach Deutschland emigrierten ]osquinschiilers (The
Hague, 1940), pp. 317-9, thinks that Quickelberg's source was More; perhaps, but
Glareanus was also well-known; and humanist teachings on rhetoric offered a general model.
14
RHETORICA
fetti simili."" In this sense, then, the Prologue to Monteverdi's

Orfeo (1607) is a musical rhetorician:
lo la musica son, ch'ai dolci accenti so far tranquillo ogni turbati corre,
ed or di nobil' ira ed or d'amore poss' inflamar le piCi gelate menti.
It is perfectly appropriate that Adriano Banchieri should write, a
few years later, that the modern composer should imitate the orator, and "neir esprimiere un Madrigale Moteto 6 quah sieno altre
parole, deve operare con I'armonia gl'affetti del' Oratione," in sorrow or passion, sighs or questions." The rhetorical concept of
movere could be invoked for the constituent elements of music. In
L'antica musica ridotta alia moderna prattica (Rome, 1555) Vicentino
urged the performers of his day to use freedom of rhythm by appealing to the example of the orator:
the movement of the measure should be changed to slower or faster
according to the words.
The experience of the orator teaches us to
do this, for in his oration he speaks now loudly, now softly, now
slowly, now quickly, and thus greatly moves the listeners; and this
manner of changing the measure has great effect on the soul. . "
An anonymous De musica (between 1559 and 1571) described the
advantages of chromaticism, and surprising harmonic changes:
they "do not allow the listener to become numb but excite him with
the newness of the sound to pay closer attention.""
Claude V. Palisca, whose work on music and rhetoric has extended our knowledge of the field, relates these and other innovations to the musica reservata, that still somewhat mysterious term
used for newer styles of composition in the mid-sixteenth century.
He argues, and some scholars would agree,"^ that it was an "experimental style that arose as the classical technique of certain followers of Josquin des Pres disintegrated under the pressure of text representation." Now the newer school of composers "let the poetic
" Trattato delta Musica Scenica, cit. Walker, op. cit. p. 119.
'-Banchiferi, Cartella musicale nel canto figurato (1614); cit. Unger, pp. 123 ff.
"Cit. Palisca (1), p. 143.
^Cit. ibid., p. 150.
"Unger summarizes the evidence as follows: "Gleichzeitig weisen aber alle
diese Zeugnisse darauf hin, dass jetzt in der Reservata dem Wort, der Sprache und
den Affekten der gebietende Platz in der Musik eingeraumt wird" (p. 28). Reese,
more cautious, believes that the only firm connotations, based on Quickelberg's
praise of Lassus, are "music expressive of the emotions delineated by the text"
(p. 514). Brandes attempted to distinguish musica reservata as a shift from the arousal
'^
text dictate the rules.""^ While he cogendy analysed the changes in

compositional techniques that can be associated with this concept,
I am not sure that musica reservata (or "mannerism") can be seen as
a specifically rhetorical movement. Certainly, it invoked rhetorical
ideas, but then other and very different musical traditions did the
same.*' What is undeniable is that several different influences converged to estabhsh a validation of the word overand in some
cases almost againstthe music, resulting in an undervaluing of
the specifically musical resources of music, its subordination to a
literary text. As Wdibald Gurlitt has said of this development,
man darf angesichts der einseitigen Ausrichtung des musikalischen
Ausdrucks auf literarisch-an-schauliche Vorwurfe, auf ein nicht unmittelbar Musikalisches, sondern Gegenstandliches, Programmatisches,
dem die musikalische Form als Dolmetscherin unterworfen wird, .
von einer Literarisierung und Rhetorisierung der Musik sprechen."*
The rhetoricization of music continued unabated in some circles
most of all Germanin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the time that Christoph Bernhard, the favourite pupU of
Heinrich Schiitz, came to write a treatise on his master's composition teaching, in 1650, he could describe the enormous development of the expressive resources of music in wholly rhetorical
terms:
bis dass auf unsere Zeiten die Musica so hoch kommen, dass wegen
Menge der Figuren, absonderlich aber in dem neu erfundenen und
bisher immer mehr ausgezierten Stylo Recitativo sie wohl einer Rhetorica zu vergleichen.
of feeling to the representation of feeling: "An die Stelle des alten 'Affectus movere'
tritt das 'Affectus exprimere.' Die Musik will nicht erregen sondern darstellen. Damit
ist der Kern des Reservastils beriihrt" (p. 71). But of course the passions cannot be
aroused without being first represented, and felt.
"'Pahsca (1), p. 159. His identification here, and at greater length in Palisca (2),
of musica reservata with "mannerism," seems to me extremely doubtful. Gurlitt had
used the term in 1944 to describe the age of the "stile rappresentativo" (p. 76), and it
was subsequently used by Robert. E. Wolff in 1955 (Palisca [1], p. 159 note). Yet the
term itself, from art history, is still so fluid and indeterminate that it seems of dubious value to apply it to another art. For a good recent discussion of the concept in
the visual arts (but with some very questionable applications of it to literature and
music) see John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, Middx., 1967). A wideranging and vigorous study, too complex for a brief summary, is Maria R. Maniates,
Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979).
"See, for instance, the anthology collected by Ruhnke, pp. 135-141.
"Gurlitt, pp. 76.
RHETORICA
16
Sucty years later, Johann Birnbaum, Professor of Poetics and Rhetoric at Leipzig University, praised Johann Sebastian Bach for his complete knowledge of "die Telle und Vorteile, welche die Ausarbeihing
eines musikalischen Stiicks mit der Rednerkunst gemein hat," and
Forkel called Bach "den grossten musikalischen Deklamator, den
es je gegeben hat, und den es wahrscheinlich je geben wird.""'
II
This brief survey has established some of the forms taken by
the alhance of music and rhetoric over a period of two-and-a-half
centuries. The rise of humanism, and the consolidation of rhetoric,
first propagated the theoretical association between these two sister arts. In the practice of music, both composition and performance, a further dimension strengthened the alliance, the movements in sixteenth century music away from isorhythmic medieval
polyphony, where the musical structures seem at times to exist independently of the text, to a counterpointas taught by Zarlino,
for instancemuch more responsive to the meaning of the wôrds,
and to the final triumph of comprehensibility in the more austere,
classically-inspired theories of monody; from the strict observance
of modal conventions to more flexibility in harmony, including
chromaticism; and from regular rhythms, which, once established
seldom changed, to more dynamic variations. All these changes
were made, or justified, out of a desire to increase the prominence
given to the words of the text, both for their meaning and for the
feelings, or images, that went with them. As the alliance between
rhetoric and music was taken more literally, specifically verbal compositional practices wereone is tempted to saysuperimposed
on music. "As early as 1563, in a manuscript entitled Praecepta musicae
poeticae, Gallus Dressier referred to a formal organization of music
that would adopt the divisions of an oration into exordium, medium, and finis." ^ In forming its aesthetic vocabulary, music had no
option but to borrow terminology from language, grammar, poetry, and rhetoric. Willibald Gurlitt has listed some of the terms in
music that have been derived from the language arts: they include
"Cit. Guriitt, pp. 77-8.

* George J. Buelow, "Rhetoric and Music," The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), XV, pp. 793-803, at p. 794.
17
"theme, motive, phrase, metrics, rhythm, period, exposition, episode, accent, articulation, figure, style, composition"; earlier periods used "clausula, color, pundum, flores, distinctio, diminutio, repetitio", and others; one could add trope, and prose.^' Since both
oratory and music are events in time, performing arts, which are
perceived by the ear, then there are certain very obvious analogies.
Both use pauses, need punctuation systems; music easily adapts a
question, for example, by setting the final note of the text a semitone higher (an effect already expressed in Gregorian chant)." A
number of sixteenth century theorists discussed the pause, which
obviously has a much greater importance in music than in oratory,
and here again we can trace an increasing use of a formal device to
underline the meaning of the text. Pauses are to be made at important points in the text, places of great dramatic significance, such as
the representation of death or eternity."
Such general analogies can be illuminating: but the more closely
the analogy is pushed the more danger of it breaking down altogether. Unger, commenting on the highly elaborate claims of Mattheson in 1739 to be able to analyze music in terms of grammar and
syntax, states that "Jede musikalische Periode erhalt erst einen
Sinn, d.h. sie wird musikalisch deutlich und verstandlich, wenn sie
gewisse Einschnitte und Ruhe-Punkte aufweist. . . ." He prints a
musical example from J. S. Bach, adding commas, a semicolon, and
a fullstop, to enforce the similarity.^ Yet there remains a big difference, for in grammar punctuation is used to mark off sense-groups
that belong together. Failure to divide according to the correct
sense results in ambiguity and confusion, as the Prologue to the
rustics' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrates. This cannot be the same in music, for the semantic level does not exist there
='Gurlitt, p. 65.
'Ûnger, p. 22, who also records that the oldest notational system for Gregorian chant, "die Neumenschrift," owes its existence to rhetorical practice, a kind of
punctuation system ("ekphonetischen Zeichen") applied to elocutio and from thence
to the rhythms of music. On the general similarities between music and oratory see
Unger, p p . 17ff and Ruhnke, pp. 133ff.
" O n the pause see Unger, pp. 30f, 70 (Beethoven noted in connection with his
"Egmont" Overture: "Der Tod konnte ausgedriickt werden durch eine Pause"), 140
and note (a very interesting analysis of Schiitz's sparing use of the pause for intense
moments in his Passions: he only uses the general pause seven times in his whole
work); and Ruhnke, pp. 135, 137, 138, 156.
''Unger, pp. 64-6.
18
RHETORICA
(a question begged by Unger with his use of the word "Sinn"), and
failure to punctuate, or phrase properly in music will spoil elegance or clarity, but cannot destroy meaning. A later theorist cited
by Unger, Forkel (1788), pushes the models drawn from grammar
and rhetoric to the point where analogy becomes identification,
both in terms of the "syntax" of music and its "meaning."'' But if
there is one thing that is sure about the application of models from
one sphere to another, it is that the comparatum and the comparans
must be different. A metaphor is a translation of something different, not of something identical.
It is surely in the nature of things that we can describe one
art in the language of another only up to a point. No doubt the
general processes of creation in rhetoricinventio, dispositio, elocutio, pronuntiatio, memoriacould be adapted to musicgiven
some ingenuitywithout causing any great distortion. Inventio
and dispositio were usually thought to be given by the text chosen
for setting, and the text further determined, through its meaning,
the mood of the music and its tempo, within such broad categories
as happy-therefore-fast, or sad-and-thus-slow. This belief that the
text provided the first two stages of composition is still found in
Athanasius Kircher in 1650, but as the treatises on musical rhetoric
in the eighteenth century followed rhetoric's natural tendency to
increasing elaboration, more complex, and sometimes bizarre hints
were given to the composer. Vogt, in his Conclave Thesauri magnae
artis musicae (Prague, 1719), suggests that he use four "Hufnagel"
(aciculas), bend them into distinct shapes, put them in a random
order, and write musical themes imitating the resulting pattern; or
throw dice; or resort to alcohol. More traditional, and responsible,
was the ad-vice of Johann David Heinichen, in Der Generalbass in der
Composition (1728), who devoted fifty pages to showing how musical invention, like rhetorical invention, could use the loci topici, the
standard doctrine of the "places" of invention, an idea developed,
typically enough, in much greater detail by Mattheson in 1739."*
As for elocutio, that was assimilated to music both in general
and particular terms. Elocutio determined the overall structure of
an oration, which was conventionally divided into between five
and eight parts. Early humanist theorists enthusiastically identi-
''Unger, pp. 57-8.

" O n Vogt, Heinichen, and Mattheson, see Unger, pp. 39-45.
19
fied the eight parts of an oration with the eight tones of the scale, a
rather unhelpful instance of fitting numerical categories together.'^
Later writers matched the linear, or sequential movement-in-time
nature of the two arts, working from the general position that
works of music, like those of language, have a beginning, a middle,
and an end. Yet when this analogy is applied in detail difficulties
arise. Dressier, in 1563, can use the terms exordium and conclusion
quite broadly, but by 1606 Joachim Burmeister is already applying
to the musical exordium the injunction from rhetoric that it should
be a captatio benevolentiae, winning the listener's attention (yes) and
sympathy (how?).'* Even more questionable, in musical terms, are
the sections usually found in the middle of an oration, confutatio
and confirmatio, by which one's opponents' arguments are refuted,
and one's own confirmed. Who are the "enemies" in a musical
composition? Mattheson, never at a loss for proofs of the identity
of music and rhetoric, defines confutatio in music as the removal of
oppositions, including false harmonies, while confirmatio involves
the repetition and variation of musical materiala notably weak
sequence." Although more elaborate attempts have been made to
link musical composition with the structure of an oration,"' I am
bound to say that I find them misguided and unconvincing. Where
music theory can draw on such general concepts as decorum, or the
three styles," it can adapt alien ideas without either distorting
them or compromising its own language.
But the major challenge to the theorists of musical rhetoric has
been, and remains, to apply the techniques of elocutio down to the
last detail, in the lore of the tropes and figures of rhetoric. The pioneer in this attempt at cross-fertilization was Joachim Burmeister
who, in a series of books published between 1599 and 1606, gave
the first extended list of specific musical-rhetorical figures, and
performed the first (and for many years the only) rhetorical analysis
5'See Ruhnke pp. 135ff for Rhau (1538), Schneegass (1591), and Dressier (1563);
also Unger, p. 31 for Dressier
^Musica poetica, ed. Ruhnke, p. 72; Butler (1) p. 56, accepts this identification,
as he does others, all too easily.
"Unger, p. 52.
'"See Butler (2), especially pp. 65-73: the increasingly assertive tone of these
pages is almost enough on its own to generate scepticism.
" O n decorum: Dressier, cit. Ruhnke, p. 137; the genera styli: Burmeister, ibid.,
106ff. But note Burmeister's strained attempt to apply the grammatical vice of solecismus to music, distinguishing no less than eleven types: ibid., lUff.
20
RHETORICA
of a whole piece of music, notably a motet by Orlandus Lassus."

Burmeister discussed some twenty-six figures; later writers in the
seventeenth, and above all eighteenth centuries, such as Kircher,
Scheible, Vogt, Mattheson, and Forkel, extended the hst greatiy,
while Unger, in 1941, can be seen as the apotheosis of this tradition,
giving tables listing up to 163 figures of rhetoric, or music, or both.''
In handbooks to rhetoric it is quite common to be confronted with
several hundred figures. Sister Miriam Joseph has demonstrated
that Shakespeare knew, and used, over two hundred rhetorical figures, and one sbcteenth century handbook claims to discuss over
five thousand ornaments of speecha staggering total, arrived at
by including linguistic, grammatical, poetic, and rhetorical units of
every kind.
To modern students, even well-informed historians of rhetoric,
the doctrine of the figures can seem incomprehensible, tedious,
distasteful." Yet the mere awareness of the enormous importance
attached to them by teachers of rhetoric, and users of rhetoric
books, for over two thousand years should be enough on its own
to make us want to understand why they were cultivated with such
dedication.
There are difficulties, however. To begin with, the figures are
sometimes described as the "colours" or "ornaments" of rhetoric,
and to modern minds that might seem as if they could be stripped
off, or dispensed with. Yet older concepts of ornatus were more
functional than ours, and the word was often used to identify the
proper language of a literary work.'' For just as literary aesthetics,
"Burmeister published Hypomnematum Musicae Poeticae . Synopsis (Rostock,

1599); Musica autoschediastike . . (Rostock, 1601), repeating and reworking much
material from his first book; Musicae practicae
(Rostock, 1601), which reprints
part four of the preceding; and Musica poetica (Rostock, 1606), which sums up all his
work. The best account of his life and work is given by Martin Ruhnke, but there are
discussions of his musical rhetoric in Brandes, Unger, Palisca (2), and Butler (1). For
his analyses of the Lassus motet see Brandes, pp. 80f; Ruhnke, pp. 162-6; and
Palisca (2), the fullest account; although I am bound to say that in places he seems to
me to overstate the congruence of the rhetorical analysis and the musical effect.
"See Table 1, pp. 64-7, and the discussion of forty-six figures in detail, pp. 6 8 90; Table 2, pp. 92-3 and the discussion pp. 94-8; and appendix 3, pp. 151-4.
"See Vickers, "On writing the history of elocutio," Comparative Criticism
3 (1981), and Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London and New York, 1970), especially Chapter 3, "The Functions of Rhetorical Figures" (pp. 83-131).
' ' O n the functional concept of ornament in the Renaissance see W. H. Wood-
21
u p to the time of the Romantics at least, conceived of the language

of literature as being above everyday speech, so the figures of
rhetoric were thought of as being deviations from normal speech
("trope" means a turning of an idea from one area of application to
another, as in the Latin name for metaphor, translatio), or intensifications of normal speech. The schemes or figures of rhetoric embraced such linguistic phenomena as distinctive word repetitions
(the same word at the beginning of succeeding clauses or sentences: anaphora; or at the end: epistrophe), or dislocations of normal
word order (hyperbaton), or the omission of expected connectives
{asyndeton). But the important point to grasp is that the figures
were not mere deviations: they had a purpose, namely to represent, or arouse strong feeling. The figures of repetition must be
chosen to stress the words important either to the writer or to the
character represented as using them: for, John Hoskins wrote in
1599, "as no man is sick in thought upon one thing but for some
vehemency or distress, so in speech there is no repetition without
importance." ** Of hyperbaton Longinus wrote in his book On the
Sublime (a work of enormous popularity in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries) that it
consists in a violent disruption of the natural order of words and
ideas, and seems to show the most unmistakable signs of violent feeling, because those who really are angry or afraid or violently irritated
or in the grip of jealousy or some other passion
come forward
with one idea and then rush off to some other, having thrown in
something quite irrational . ."
The disorder in their syntax reflects the disorder in their psyche.
Several other writers on rhetoric give such psychological definitions of the figures of rhetoric, and others add the important
corollary that the figures are merely the representation of strong
feelings as observed from life. Rhetoric, then, has codified the linguistic consequences of upset emotions.
ward, Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, 1897; 1912), p. 230,
and Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600 (Cambridge,
1906), pp. 132-4; and W. J. Ong, in E. P Corbett (ed.). Rhetorical Analyses of Literary
Works (Oxford, 1969), p. 139.
"* Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), ed. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935), p. 12.
"Longinus, On the Sublime, 22, tr A. H. Gilbert in Literary Criticism: Plato to
Dryden (Detroit, 1962), p. 174.
22
RHETORICA
Throughout the discussion of the links between rhetoric and

psychology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the ability
of this group of figures (the figures of thought), to represent, and
so arouse, the passions was reiterated with increasing conviction.
All the theorists of musical rhetoric in this period also urge composers to imitate such figures, and it is easy to see the fundamental
identity between Monteverdi's description of his stile concitato in
1638 as the use of very rapid repeated notes to convey "passion,
anger, and other violent emotions"'*' with such accounts as that
given by the anonymous, and very influential, Rhetorica ad Herennium of two related rhetorical figures, colon (a brief and incisive
clause that needs another to complete the sense) and articulus,
where the flow of discourse is broken by the force of expression (as
in his example: "You have destroyed your enemies by jealousy, injuries, influence, perfidy"). While colon "moves upon its object
more slowly and less often", articulus "strikes more quickly and
frequently":
Accordingly in the first figure it seems that the arm draws back and
the hand whirls about to bring the sword to the adversary's body,
while in the second his body is as it were pierced with quick and repeated thrusts."
Again this anonymous author writes of conduplicatio, or ploke, the
repetition of one or more words for stress or appeal:
The reiteration of the same word makes a deep impression upon the
hearer and inflicts a major wound upon the oppositionas if a weapon
should repeatedly pierce the same part of the body.
The metaphor from sword-thrusts to describe the force of a figure
recurs in Quintdian, Martianus Capella, and many Renaissance
theorists." All writers on rhetoric agree that "there is no more
effective method of exciting the emotions than an apt use of figures" (Quintilian, IX.1.21). The composer could only emulate the
orator.
"^Cit. J. Roche, The Madrigal (London, 1972), p. 144.

' M d H., W.xix.26; tr. H. Caplan, pp. 295f.
Âd H., IV.xxviii.xxxviii; tr. Caplan, p. 325.
"See Vickers, Classical Rhetoric, pp. 84, 99f, 107, 109, 110.
23
Ill
From this mere sketch of the complex relationships between
music and rhetoric from Lassus to Beethoven it will be clear that
music has usually been the debtor to rhetoric. Not that there is
anything dishonourable in that role, since all the arts, up to and
including the cinema, have borrowed freely. But I stress this point,
partly because some recent writers deny a debt, claiming an autonomy for the so-called "musical figures," " and partly because music
theorists, then as now, in drawing on rhetoric have also drawn on
its faults. While the ideal rhetoric book, if such a thing existed,
might be a model of economy and cogency, it must be admitted
that even the great booksQuintilian's Institutes, Cicero's De Oratorecarry a mass of detail that is not easily assimilated, and pitch
the discussion at a level far above the realities either of a classroom
situation or of the needs of a writer. As for the run of lesser writers,
the very fertUity and inventiveness of the rhetorical tradition carried its own dangers with it.
Two main weaknesses characterize the rhetoric textbook tradition: proliferation of categories, and ambiguity in definition. The
goal of the writers seems to have been to classify every distinctive
linguistic form, and to attach an appropriate name to it. This means
that extremely rare or unimportant linguistic devices have their
separate place in the system, and occupy as much space in the list
as such fundamental tropes as metaphor, simile or synecdoche, or as
such important figures as anaphora, hyperbaton, or ploke. If the student is not given some discriminating help he risks getting lost in
trivia (a trap that Unger did not altogether avoid). Further, since no
one has ever settled on a generally agreed system, and since rhetoric books continued to be created for some two thousand years,
and since every compUer wished to distinguish his own collection
from his predecessors in some way, the result is that we have a pro'^See Ruhnke, p. 150, who rejects Unger's conclusion that the musical figures
derived from the figures of rhetoric: "Dass sich analoge Namen finden liessen, beweist eine innere Verwandschaft beider Kiinste, nicht jedoch die Abhangigkeit der
einen von der anderen." Yet the relationship was always that the rhetoricians of music went to the already-existing categories of rhetoric to argue that identical, or analogous categories, could be established in music. One might wish that they had
evolved a musical rhetoric independent of language, yet one cannot deny that they
depended on rhetoric.
24
RHETORICA
liferation of names, some identical but describing different figures,

some different but describing the same thing. The users of rhetoric
books must always check the name against the example, in case
their author is being idiosyncratic: but to be able to do this needs a
good preliminary grounding in rhetoric and a reading experience
of some of the major classical treatises, the Rhetorica ad Herennium,
for instance, together with Quintilian and Longinus.
If the ancient ideal of a complete rhetoric book led to unnecessary proliferation, then the modern ideal of a comprehensive guide
to ancient rhetoric books brings simdar difficulties. The work of
Heinrich Lausberg is rigorous, and extensive, yet the lack of an English translation means that it is not often cited by English or American scholars.'' More accessible, and often quoted, is Lee Sonnino,
A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric.^" This is an attractive looking alphabetically arranged handbook, which certainly performs a
useful service. However, it is inadequately documented (quotations are from an author without book, chapter, or page reference;
or a mere reference is given as "Peacham; Puttenham"), and it fails
to help the reader on two main difficulties in traditional rhetoric.
First, the definitions of particular figures are inconsistent. The
figure congeries, for example, is defined by Quintilian as a heaping
up of different words having the same meaning; Susenbrotus says
it is a piling up of words meaning "various different things," and
Puttenham follows him; Julius Caesar Scaliger cannily avoids committing himself, saying that it is a heaping up tout court. Well, the
beginner might ask, which is it? Secondly, instead of trying to establish some norm of usage it amasses alternative names for figures
without distinguishing them. Thus the figure ploke was known in
Latin as copulatio or conduplicatio, but Miss Sonnino rightly points
out that there was another figure sometimes called ploke (alias
heratio, alias palilogia, alias duplicatio, alias diaphora) and she quotes
four rhetoricians, all of whom disagree as to its definition (Scaliger,
indeed, identifies it with antanaclasis, i.e., repeating a word while
using it in a different sense)." If the doctors disagree, what should
the students do?
"Lausberg published his Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 volumes, in 1960

(Munich: Hueber), and an abridgement of it, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, in
1963 (Munich: Hueber). It has been translated into Italian.
''London, 1968: Routledge & Kegan Paul. See my review in Critical Quarterly,
n (1970), pp. 382-3.
"See Sonnino, pp. 53f on congeries, 103 and 64 on ploke.
25
The dangers of using Sonnino's Handbook are illustrated by the

example of Gregory G. Butler. He quotes the definition given in the
De musica (after 1559) of Anonymous of Besangon of ploki or copulatio
as "a parallel repetition of similar tones in a certain way, that is,
a uniform or like comparison of parts corresponding to one another." Evidently the musical theorist has already deviated from
rhetoric, where ploke is the insistent and passionate repetition of
the same word (not "similar tones"). Butler accepts this concept of
the "reiteration of similar elements" and refers his readers to pages
103 and following in Sonnino.'' However, all the authorities cited
there refer to heratio or palilogia, which is the repetition of the same
word with a shift of stress, or change of meaning: the correct reference would be to page 64, on ploke/copulatio. In a more recent article
Butler quotes Henry Peacham's graceful suggestion of analogies
between music and rhetoric:
Yea, in my opinion no rhetoric more persuadeth or hath greater power
over the mind [than music]; nay, hath not music her figures, the same
which rhetoric? What is a revert but her antistrophe? her reports, but
sweet anaphoras? her counter-change of points, antimetaboles? her
passionate airs, but prosopopoeias? with infinite other of the same
nature.
Butler comments that "Antistrophe (hypallage) is the inversion of
word order in a sentence to produce a contrary", citing Sonnino,
pp. 164-5." However, antistrophe (or conversio) is, in fact, another
name for epistrophe, repeating the same word at the end of successive sentences (cf. Sonnino, p. 63). The hypallage that he refers to
on page 164 of Sonnino is anastrophe (or reversio), the transposition
or ridiculous inversion of words, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
where Bottom as himself claims that "The eye of man hath not
heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to
taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my
dream was," and Bottom as Pyramus announces that
"Butler (1), pp. 51-2. Buelow has described Sonnino as "an excellent aid":
op. cit. in note 26 above, p. 251. He also describes Unger's book as "outstanding":
p. 252.
^The Compleat Gentleman (1622); ed. V B. Heltzel (Ithaca, N.Y, 1962), p. 116. Cf.
Buder (1) pp. 60f and Butler (2) pp. 57f.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.215, 5.1.194: cf. Joseph, pp. 54-7, 288,
294, 295.
R H E T O R I C A
26
I see a voice. N o w will I to t h e chink
To s p y a n I can hear m y Thisby's face.
But if the modern scholar confuses the two figures, so, it seems,
did Henry Peacham before him. Nor was he alone in so doing. One
of the distinctive musical devices of Josquin des Prez, not original
to him but certainly used with full artistic awareness, is interrupting the flow of polyphony with homophonic passages in order to
stress important words in the text, such as at suscipe deprecationem
and incarnatus est in the mass. Josquin used this stylistic contrast at
these passages in all but one of his masses, and Palestrina did the
same in all of his 93 masses. Burmeister named this technique
noema, which in rhetoric is connected with indirect, allusive discourse, as is shown by its Latin name, intimatio. Burmeister evidently wanted to refer to a device that would describe the marking
off of a section of the text, but unfortunately he used an indirect
mode to name passages of direct emphasis; he also consistently
confused auxesis with climax or gradatio.^]ohar\n Nucius (1613), who
frequently used figures in an eccentric sense, or renamed them,
equated homoioteleuton, which is where succeeding clauses or sentences end with words which have identical case endings (similiter
desinens), with aposiopesis, which is the sudden breaking off of a sentence yet in such a way that the listener can complete the sense.*'
Two more dissimilar figures can hardly be imagined. But Moritz
Vogt (1719) made an equally eccentric identification of epanadiplosis,
where the same word that ends one clause or sentence begins the
next one, with epanalepsis, where the same word is placed at the
beginning and end of a clause or sentence.*'^ 1 draw attention to
these errors not in a spirit of superiority, since to err is human, but
to stress the hazards involved in using the detailed techniques of
rhetoric. Whether the error is due to the writer's lapse of concentration, or to the fault of the authority he relies on, does not matter:
""See Brandes, pp. 31-46, Unger p. 121 f.

"For Burmeister on noema see Brandes, pp. 12, 31, Unger, p. 83, (giving a
closer, but later, definition); on auxesis/climax see Brandes pp. 15, 53f; Unger, pp. 77f;
Palisca(2), pp. 50, 56.
"For Nucius' confusion see Brandes p. 16, Unger p. 79; and for his general eccentricity Ruhnke p. 141, and p. 151 on variations in terminology among the rhetoric
books.
"=For Vogt's confusion see Unger, p. 76; and ibid., p. 77 on the confusion of
noema with exclamatio.
27
what is disturbing is that such misidentifications should become,

in turn, the basis of theories about music and the identity of expressive resources between the two arts. This is to build not on
sand but on air.
Whde recording the many links between music and rhetoric in
the Renaissance and Baroque periods, we must insist on the important and currently overlooked point that it is at this final level of
identification of a hnguistic with a non-linguistic art that fundamental problems occur. Peacham cast his identification of the figures of rhetoric with figures of music in the form of a rhetorical
question. His model was Francis Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), pointing to similarities between different disciplines:
Is not the trope of music, to avoid or slide from the close or cadence,
common with the trope of rhetoric of deceiving expectation?
In both cases the brevity of the discussion, and the raising of important issues by the question form without attempting to answer
them, reminds one of another celebrated question, from Bacon's
own Essay "Of Truth": "'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and
staid not for an answer."*^ Neither Peacham nor Bacon was jesting, indeed Bacon subsequently gave a more extended list of suggested identifications", but these are questions which it is easier to
raise suggestively than to answer systematically. I propose to review
a dozen or so of the rhetorical figures claimed for music by Burmeister and others, and to investigate the degree of translatability of a
model from one art-system to another, beginning with the simple
figures of repetition. An important preliminary point, however, is
that all discussions of music and rhetoric assume that notes in music behave in the same way as do words in language. That is, since
notes can be repeated, as words can, then the effect will be similar.
Insofar as we consider the shape of the resulting figure, that may
be true; yet what of the meaning of the words? How can music be
"Bacon, Works ed. J. Spedding et al., 14 vols. (London, 1857-1874), III. 348-9;
also IV. 339, 11. 388-9.
"For Bacon's suggestions see the thorough discussion in Palisca (2), pp. 42-6.
Professor Palisca claims to find a "progression of Bacon's thought from a recognition
of the analogy between musical effects and the movements of the affections toward
the identification of musical devices with the tropes, or figures, of rhetoric" (p. 46):
that seems to me, rather, the progression made by some modern students, from
analogy to identification.
28
RHETORICA
said to match the denotational or referential level of language? I will

come back to this semantic problem once I have dealt with the simpler figures.
One of the commonest figures in rhetoric is anaphora, the repetition of a word at the beginning of a sequence of clauses or sentences: "The Lord is my shepherd . . . He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul . . ." (Psalm 23). In Burmeister's musical application it is "the imitation of a musical subject in only some of the
voice parts." As both Pahsca and Unger agree,*' the musical application is narrower, and has involved a change of meaning. Theoretically, the figure is possible in music; but perhaps it was not
common in the music available to Burmeister.
The obverse of anaphora is epistrophe, the same word ending a
sequence of clauses or sentences: "When I was a child, I spoke as a
child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child" (1 Cor. 13.11).
When the two are combined, as in the form a m q v c f c , a p l r d b ,
. that is known as symploke. Unger claims that for both figures
there exists a "vollige Ubereinstimmung" between music and rhetoric, but he gives no examples.*' I would imagine that for such repetitions to be felt in music they would have to occur rather close together, and might prove rather crampingthis is still to assume
that the repetition of a note has the same force as the repetition of a
whole semantic unit, which is to beg a very large question.
Word-repetition can occur within a period, of course, as when
the last word(s) of one clause become the first of the next (x . . . a,
a
. b, b . . . c). This is known in rhetoric as climax (the Greek for
ladder), or gradatio, the Latin name also pointing to its affinity with
steps or stairs: "we glory in tribulations also: Knowing that tribulation worketh patience: And patience, experience; and experience,
hope: And hope maketh not ashamed" (Rom. 5.3-5). As that example shows, the terms are commonly arranged in ascending or"Palisca (2), p. 65 n. 38; Unger, p. 68: Burmeister (1606) calls it a fugue, Thuringus (1625) limits it to the bass. Butler (1) p. 59 attempts to relate anaphora to "report"
and "fugue" in its strictest sense, but slants his case to begin with by defining the
figure in rhetoric as "the repetition of the same subject at the beginning of successive
clauses of sentences" (my italics: for 'subject' read 'word'). His argument seems to
me overambitious.
"Unger pp. 73, 77. Nucius' definition of symploke or complexio as the repetition
of the opening motif of a musical period at its ending confuses it with epanalepsis,
in fact.
29
der of importance, or magnitude. When that arrangement is made

without the terms being repeated, it is known as auxesis:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea.
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power
Shakespeare, Sonnet 65.
The rhetoricians of music in fact confused auxesis and gradatio, interchanging the names, but never dealt with the more complex
structure of gradatio.^'' Even with auxesis they seem forced to take it
in its most general terms. For Burmeister it occurs "when a harmony made up only of consonances under one and the same text
while being repeated once, twice, or three times or more, grows
and rises."** Music takes over the name, but only the idea of "increase" or "enlargement." In rhetoric pallilogia describes the repetition of a word, as distinct from a group of words, sometimes involving a change of meaning: in Burmeister's musical rhetoric it
is "a simple repetition of a series of pitches."*' This is to borrow
merely the general idea of repetition.
If we move from figures of repetition to figures of what I shall
call displacement we will see a similar process of simplification as
the rhetorical model becomes applied to music. In rhetoric hyperbaton means the dislocation of word-order, caused by violent or
disordered feelings. This effect depends on the laws of grammar
and syntax being known to and shared by the audience, for the
dislocation must be instantly recognizable. Since music has no
such strict convention, lacks indeed the concepts of logical verbal
*'Unger, p. 77, records that it was called auxesis or climax [sic!] in the seventeenth century, gradatio in the eighteenth. Perhaps the later theorists were better informed, or were using more reliable sources.
"^Translated Palisca (2), p. 50; see also Brandes, pp. 15 (who defines it as putting together two noemas, the second having an increased expressiveness created
either by a rise of pitch or an enlargement in the number of voices), 53, and Unger,
p. 78, who claims that the idea of incrementum, as with harmony growing and increasing, points to a far-reaching analogy between both arts. Clearly the phenomenon is frequent and important in music (often coupled, as Forkel recommended,
with crescendo), but the specificity of the rhetorical structure seems to have been
lost. In his analysis of Lassus' In me transierunt Palisca uses the term to refer to "the
repetition of a motive in the Bass a tone higher" (Palisca [2], p. 56), a rather drastic
reduction of the figure's range or reference,
"Palisca (2), p. 65 n. 38; also Brandes, pp. 53ff, and Unger, p. 157: the repetition
of a melodic motif at the same pitch ("Es geniigt dabei, wenn nur der Anfang jeweils
notengetreu wiederholt wird").
30
RHETORICA
sequence or standard word-order, the effect is barely possible.

Scheibe uses the name, but applies it to the transposition of a tone
or motif on to another plane.'
If hyperbaton is large-scale dislocation, hypallage is small-scale,
affecting the misplacement of two or more words within a sentence, as in the two examples from Shakespeare's Bottom quoted
above, or as in another one whensemper idemhe offers the Epilogue to the rustics' play:
Will it please you to see the Epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance
between two of our company? (5.1.359)
"Do you hear how he misplaces?," the audience might have said,
as Escalus does in Measure for Measure when Elbow, in his courtcase, confuses the accused (Pompey) with the judges:
Prove it before these varlets here, thou honourable man.
In musical rhetoric the term has lost both its humour and its specific structure. Unger concedes that it is not directly applicable to
music, since Burmeister describes it as a "Gegenfuge," or a "succession of intervals inverted." Gregory G. Butler, translating thus,
comments:
It is obvious that the analogy between hypallage as a rhetorical and as a
musical figure is not exact, for rhetorically, this figure involves lateral
or horizontal inversion of word order which if applied to music literally would involve retrogradation and not melodic inversion."
Since music has two "planes," horizontal (melodic, rhythmic) and
vertical (harmonic) it has a dimension beyond the reach of language. But Burmeister does not merely displace the figure from the
level of melody to that of harmony, he also reduces its area of application. Similarly with the figure mimesis, which in classical rhetoric
means the mimicking of someone's speech or behaviour, usually to
mock or discredit them (Ad Herennium I.x), or for banter (Quintilian
IX.ii.58). But in Burmeister, perhaps following Stomius (1536), it
merely means the imitation of a musical phrase in one of the other
voices, higher or lower, and is one of a number of rhetorical figures
that were used, loosely enough, to describe the workings of the
"'Unger, p. 80, quoting an admirable definition of the figure from Gottsched.
"'Unger, p. 79; also Brandes, p. 27; Butler (1), p. 58.
31
fugue''a musical form that is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to imitate in language.
The general conclusion so far is that the model from rhetoric
can be applied to music only partially, by an analogy or tertium comparationis that preserves just one element of the complex contained
in the rhetorical figure. In rhetoric aposiopesis describes a speaker's
breaking off a sentence out of a sudden passion, while still giving
the listener enough semantic information to be able to complete the
sense. The famous example (the subject of a painting by Rubens) is
from Book One of the Aeneid, where Neptune rebukes the winds
for raising a storm, but breaks off without saying what he wUl do
to them:
Quos egosed motos praestat componere fluctus."
Shakespeare uses aposiopesis for the dying words of Hotspur:
Hotspur.
O I could prophesy.
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No Percy, thou art dust.
And food for
[Dies]
Prince Henry. For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well great heart.
(I Hewn/Zy, 5.4.83-87)
He uses a very different form of aposidpesis for the impotent threats
of King Lear toward his evd daughters:
I will have revenges on you both
That all the world shallI will do such things
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
(2.4.279-282)
For Burmeister, though, the figure can only be used in music to

designate a general pause, and that "only after completed phrases
''See Brandes, p. 26; Unger, p. 84; Ruhnke, p. 151; Palisca (1), p. 142; Palisca (2),
p. 64; Butler (1), p. 51admitting that the use of this term in musical rhetoric is
"highly general."
"Virgil, Aeneid I, 135, tr H. R. Fairclough (Loeb Library): "Do ye now dare, O
winds, without commend of mine, to mingle earth and sky, and raise confusion
thus? Whom I
! But better is it to calm the troubled waves: hereafter with
no like penalty shall ye atone me your trespasses." Rubens' painting of this incident
is now in the Fogg Art Gallery, Harvard University.
32
RHETORICA
or a colon."'' Here the figure has lost all the specificity it enjoys in
language.
As has become clear in the course of this discussion the formation of a musical rhetoric takes the form of a theorist looking at a
rhetorical textbook" in order to find a figure in rhetoric that applied, or could be adapted to, a musical effect or structure. At times
the application is limited: thus apocope in rhetoric describes the
omission of a letter or syllable at the end of a word. To Burmeister it
could be applied to describe an incomplete fuga rea/z's," an analogy
that was true to the shape of the rhetorical figure, on the horizontal
plane. In other cases the analogy had to transpose the rhetorical figure on to a different plane. In rhetoric hyperbole means the
exceeding of the normal, or probable, or truthful, an exaggeration that is used to communicate truth through lies, as one rhetorician put it. It is a figure with a complex theory," but is based on
some kind of norm or convention of the possible or truthful, and
works neither through the shape of words, nor their repetition, but
through their meaning. Burmeister, unable to handle the semantic
level, transposed the whole figure into a rather narrow musical
context, in which it refers to the composer writing a note that is too
high for the normal range of the voice, and is therefore placed on a
line above the five lines of the stave. To match this figure Burmeister invented its complement, hypobole, when the voice descends
below the stave.'* Here Burmeister has shifted from the semantic
'^Ruhnke, p. 156: "In Burmeisters Beispielen steht die aposiopesis aber nur nach
abgeschlossenen Satzen oder nach einem Doppelpunkt." From which point, however, he reasons that the musical figure is not dependent on the rhetorical one: "Von
einer Abhangigkeit der musikalischen Figur vom rhetorischen Sinngehalt kann also
nicht gesprochen werden." But is it not rather the case that the musical concept is
dependent on the rhetorical one, yet is unable to render the detailed connotations
into its own language?
"We know that Burmeister drew his knowledge of rhetoric direct from Melanchthon's Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521), and from reworkings of Melanchthon by
Lucas Lossius: details in Ruhnke, passim.
" O n apocope see Brandes, p. 27; Unger, p. 70; Palisca (1) p. 142 (where it is defined as "partial imitation"), and Butler (1), p. 58.
"See Brian Vickers, "The Songs and Sonnets and the Rhetoric of Hyperbole," in
John Donne, Essays in Celebration, ed. A. J. Smith (London, 1972), pp. 132-174.
"See Brandes, p. 18; Unger, p. 80 (conceding that under these terms "bezeichnet Burmeister etwas rein ausserliches, namlich das Veriassen des Notensystems
nach oben oder nach unten," and describing rhetorical hyperbole as "durchaus ungeeignet" for imitation in music); and Ruhnke, p. 158.
33
or conceptual level to an auditory-visual-notational level, yet the

analogy cannot represent the idea of going beyond normal bounds
in order to express a higher truth. There is no innate reason why
a voice should not go beyond these limits, since the range of a
singer's voice is often naturally greater than that of the stave; and
the existence of "the figure" is probably only noticeable to someone reading the music, or performing it.
All the figures based on semantic properties face similar difficulties. Some theorists recognized this early on, in that they never
attempted to apply to music tropes, which involve the transference
of sense from one area to another." One cannot represent in pure
music allegory or metaphor, nor irony in its strict sense of "meaning the opposite of what one says." Yet even the figures often
depend on semantic features. The figure of mirror-inversion, antimetabole or commutatio, which repeats two or more words in inverted order, as in "eat to live: do not live to eat," does not merely
repeat the words as meaningless counters. This is made clear by
the English Renaissance rhetorician, John Hoskins: "this is a sharp
and witty figure and shows out of the same words a pithy distinction of meaning.""" Although music abounds in mirror-figures, it
is difficult to see how they could ever have this function. Again,
metalepsis in rhetoric is a figure where a statement must be understood either from what precedes or from what follows (or "which
attributes a present effect to a remote cause"). In musical rhetoric, to accommodate this figure, once again "content" is transposed
to "form": in place of the process of suspended or inferred meaning Burmeister defines metalepsis as when some voices enter with
"Brandes, whose work is of a more limited range than either Unger or Ruhnke,
nevertheless surpasses them and, in my opinion, more recent writers on this topic,
in his awareness of the basic discriminations that need to be made between music
and rhetoric. So he writes on this point: "Wenn wir nun annehmen, dass die musikalische Figurenlehre in irgendeinem Abhangigkeitsverhaltnis zur poetischen
Figurenlehre steht, so miissten aus der Ersteren die Tropen von vornherein ausscheiden, da sie mit ihren inhaltlichen und gedanklichen Veranderungen keine Parallele in der Musik finden, well sprachlich-gedankliche und musikalische Logik
ganz verschiedene Voraussetzungen haben" (p. 25); also pp. 26f.
'"Vickers, Classical Rhetoric, p. 110. See Butler (1), p. 61, linking antimetabole,
hypallage, and antistrophe [sic! see above, note 8] and implying some connection with
musical figures.
""On metalepsis see Sonnino, p. 186, Sister Joseph, p. 158; Brandes, pp. lOf, 25f;
Unger, p. 82; Ruhnke, pp. 149f; and Butler (1), p. 58.
34
RHETORICA
the first words of a text while others begin later, with its continuation (some will begin with "De ore prudentis" and continue with the
rest of the phrase, "procedit mel"; others will enter, later, only at
those words). This refers only to the form of the text, and its disposition among the voices, not to its meaning, nor to any deductions about its meaning.
The transposition effected for metalepsis was made for other figures with an important semantic content. Congeries, for example,
which means in rhetoric the heaping up of words for purposes of
emphasis (the rhetoricians are divided as to whether the words
heaped up are of the same or of different meanings), is defined by
Burmeister as "an accumulation of perfect and imperfect consonant
intervals, the movement of which is permitted [by the rules of
counterpoint]." As Unger says, the connection between rhetoric
and music lies only in the concept of "heaping up," and is thus
rather externalor formal, as I would put it.'^ For distributio, which
in rhetoric is the technique of dividing a complex statement into its
parts, or dividing the general into special kinds, Unger claims that
Scheibe (1745) uses it exactly as in rhetoric, as applied to the fugue.'"^
But in rhetoric the division is one of ideas, or concepts, or topics of
the discussion. Music retains only the formal association, and even
here there is the major difference that the orator would have to
treat each topic one after the other, while the composer can do that
but can also sustain them simultaneously. In musical terms dubitatio can refer to a doubtful modulation, or a moment of indecision,
and most listeners could cite instances of a composer using hesitation in completing a cadence, or returning to a home key or a main
theme. But in rhetoric the figure is a combative one, from the law
courts, where, as Quintdian explains, it "may lend an impression
of truth to our statements" when we "pretend to be at a loss where
to begin or end," or express hesitation about the topic at issue.""
Music has transposed the concept into its own terms, which are
more restricted than those of rhetoric, and has inevitably substituted formal properties for semantic ones.
'"^Translated Butler (2), p. 51; see Brandes, p. 19, Unger, p. 73.

''Unger, p. 74. A later and over-expansive theorist, Forkel (1788), also relates it
to his concept of individualization in music.
'"Unger, pp. 74f; Sonnino, p. 82 = Quintilian lX.ii.l9.
35
IV
The original discussions concerning musical rhetoric were
based mostly on the work of Joachim Burmeister at the end of the
sixteenth century. Later theorists were neglected, perhaps because
Burmeister seemed to stand so near to the great innovations in music that took place between Lassus and Monteverdi. Yet in 1941 Unger's account of the tradition up to the eighteenth centuries already
showed that later theorists, although prone to excesses of ingenuity, related the figures in the two arts more coherently. Where
Burmeister had taken the figure anadiplosis, in which the word ending one clause or sentence is repeated at the beginning of the next,
and transposed it to the plane of harmony, as a kind of double imitation, in 1719 Vogt treated it, more strictly, as a melodic figure, in
which a phrase at the end of a musical period is caught up at the
start of the one following."" Where Burmeister used the figure supplementum to describe a complex harmonic sequence at the end of a
musical period, it was left to Thuringus to find the appropriate
rhetorical figure."* Where Burmeister had interpreted climax or
gradatio in rather general terms, as the repetition of a melodic motif
at various levels, Charles Butler in 1636 described it as a "stepwise
movement," Kircher in 1650 explicitly called it "gradatim ascendens," while J. G. Walter (1684-1748) defined it as "a musical figure
in which two voices proceed with each other upwards and downwards by steps in thirds per arsin et thesin," which is certainly
more faithful to the figure in rhetoric, even though musical examples might be hard to find (perhaps the soloists' theme in the
slow movement of the Brahms concerto for violin and cello?). Burmeister was a pioneer, then, and suffered the usual fate of pioneers, to be excelled by his followers.
But in other ways his work is not the best basis for the study of
music and rhetoric. For one thing his definitions are often vague,
sometimes confused, and were subject to one or more revisions in
subsequent editions of his book. Burmeister included in his list
'"^Brandes, p. 14 and note.

"*Ruhnke, pp. 126f.
""Charies Butler: Butler (2), p. 62; Kircher: Brandes, p. 53; Walther: Butler (1),
p. 92.
36
RHETORICA
of figures devices that actually belong to the tropes.'"* He originally defined five types of fugal figures, but in succeeding editions
interchanged the categories, and the divisions, and had to redefine
them."" He invented two terms to define dissonance, symblema sive
commissura, and shifted the definitions of these and other figures in
subsequent editions, which shows an unease or uncertainty with
the underlying phenomenon. Apart from those two innovations
he coined the name analepsis for a type of repetition, and gave eccentric definitions of other figures; where pleonasmus or tautology
is a vice of style in rhetoric, for Burmeister it was a virtue.'" An
idiosyncratic feature common to several of these definitions is his
transposition of a device from the horizontal to the vertical plane.
Where syncope, the omission of a letter or syllable in the middle of a
word, is used by other theorists in connection with rhythm, Burmeister applies it to dissonance."^ To Brandes it seemed odd that
Burmeister should limit his coinage analepsis to the repetition of a
harmonic figure when it would serve just as well for the repetition
of a melodic one, and it seemed inexplicable to him why Burmeister should use anadiplosis for a harmonic figure when later theorists used it for a melodic sequence."^ The similar comment by
Gregory G. Butler on Burmeister's transposition of hypallage from
the "lateral or horizontal" plane of melody to the vertical plane
of harmony has already been quoted."" It seems to me that Burmeister is not only more interested in harmony than in melody,
but that he is still thinking in terms of polyphony, and remains a
stranger to the newer development towards monody. It is perhaps
significant that his preferred composer was Lassus, who, according to a recent historian of music, belongs to an older or transitional generation: he "prefers the modal system," makes little use
of chromaticism, does not write long and beautiful melody as does
Marenzio. Lassus is skilled in counterpoint, "but for expression
he tends to rely more on harmony and is a much more 'verticalminded' composer than most of his contemporaries.""'
'"Brandes, p. 25.
""Ruhnke, p. 149.
""Ibid., pp. 152f, 154 {auxesis), 157 (anaphora), 159.
'"Unger, pp. 84, 85, 86; Ruhnke, pp. 153, 154.
"^Ruhnke, p. 154.
'"Brandes, pp. 28, 29.
"^Butler (1), p. 58.
'" The New Oxford History of Music, Vol. IV: The Age of Humanism, 1540-1630 ed.
G. Abraham (London, 1968), p. 57.
37
From this and other signs one derives the impression that Burmeister, teaching in the Gymnasium at Rostock while working on
his theoretical treatises, was rather out of touch with newer developments in both music and rhetoric. Brandes found it strange that
Burmeister should not use the figure exclamatio, so obviously applicable to music "êspecially, we might add, to the new styles of
the musica reservata and the madrigal. Twenty years later Martin
Ruhnke was surprised that, dealing with the figure hypotyposis,
which is the vivid presentation of the meaning and feeling of the
text, making the words visible, Burmeister should not have cited
the word-painting in the Italian madrigal."' If rather out of touch
with new developments in music, Burmeisterwhose main authority on rhetoric is a digest of the system of that early humanist
Melanchthonis unaware of the increasing stress in rhetoric on
the ways in which rhetorical figures should describe and arouse
strong feeUngs. The figure anadiplosis, which Burmeister used for a
harmonic effect, was only supposed to be used, Scaliger taught, in
connection with great passions."* One cannot find in Burmeister's
works anything like Athanasius Kircher's description of repetitio (or
anaphora) as a figure to express energy, and the vehement passions
of the soul: for Burmeister it is not a way of arousing the passions
but an ornament of the text."' Where parrhesia in rhetoric described
the orator's intention to speak out (libera vox), even though the
matter should be controversial, Burmeister applies it to dissonance,
but the examples he gives do not refer to especially emotional parts
of the text.
Compared to other rhetoricians of his day Burmeister seems
less interested in the language of the passions, and tends to turn
potentially affective devices into structural ones. One of the oddities of his system is his identification of the terms periodus and affectus. He defines a musical figure as being contained in the space
between two clausulae, and claims that each period or affectus represents "a distinct affection through some manner inspired by the
text." This sounds very modern, fully in accord with the musica reservata and rhetoric's emphasis on the figures of passion. Yet, as
Claude Palisca has commented,
'Brandes, p. 29.
'"Ruhnke, p. 155.
""Brandes, p. 29.
'Unger, p. 69; Ruhnke, p. 152.
"On parrhesia see Sonnino, p. 127; Unger, p. 87; Ruhnke, p. 158.
3g
RHETORICA
not every device considered by Burmeister is expressive or has an expressive purpose. Many of them are simply constructive devices, artifices that grew out of a need to knit together the voices of a composition once the cantus firmus was abandoned as the main thread eariier
in the century.
. Fuga, mimesis, anadiplosis, hypallage, and anaphora
are various ways of interrelating the parts of a polyphonic composition. Climax and auxesis are means of achieving continuity'^'
That seems to me an admirable description of the idiosyncratic way

in which Burmeister used these figures, and confirms the suggestion that in his approach to rhetoric, and his preferences in music,
he remains a somewhat old-fashioned and unrepresentative figure.
He was certainly an important pioneer, but, paradoxically perhaps,
backward rather than forward-looking. The music he chose to analyze was pre-Renaissance, pre-rhetorical in that sense. His affinities
are more with medieval rhetoric, where questions of content were
treated as questions of form, and where figures and tropes were
mere verbal devices, unconnected with the feelings and passions.
In Renaissance rhetoric form and feeling cohere again.'^
V
To the hasty reader the last few pages may have seemed like a terminological dispute between specialists, one that can be safely
passed over. Yet, in all areas of knowledge, terminology is a fundamental issue. If one mechanic understands by "clutch" what another understands by "accelerator," the result can only be confusion, and danger. In musical rhetoric no one is likely to get harmed
by mistaking one figure for another, yet the subject will certainly
become confused. And since the whole trend of modern scholarship is towards ever more detailed reconstructions of the past.
'^'Palisca (2), p. 56. Palisca goes on to argue that such devices "are artfully disguised repetitions that permit the total sound to be renewed while details are being
reused. The level of redundancy essential to musical coherence would be intolerable
in prose, even in oratory. Consequently, music is a natural sanctuary for the rhetorical figures that involve repetition." While this is partly a fair account of the different levels of "redundancy" in the two arts, it seems to me unhistorical, as an apology for Burmeister, given the theory of rhetoric and of musical rhetoric that figures
of repetition are not mere forms of sustaining a flow of sound but are intense expressive devices to be used only for the representation of strong feelings.
'^See Brian Vickers, "The Fragmentation of Rhetoric," forthcoming in work cit.
n. 31.
39
andless healthilyever larger claims for the significance of a

critical method, the issue of terminology must be faced if we are
not to reverse the sense of progress that we proudly feel with the
incremental growth of scholarship. Knowledge certainly advances;
but it needs to be constantly criticized and inspected if misinterpretations are not to take hold.
One of the major monuments to the advance of knowledge,
and the largest encyclopedia of music ever published, is The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in twenty fat volumes,
double column. It contains an article on "Rhetoric and Music,"'^ a
welcome innovation, offering helpful scholarship but also, as far
as the figures go, some ambiguity and confusion. The author,
George J. Buelow, rightly notes that "in this basically German theory of musical figures there are . . . numerous conflicts in terminology and definition among the various writers, and there is clearly
no one systematic" doctrine (p. 794). He also notes that attempts so
far "to organize the multitude of musical figures into a few categories have not proved successful" (p. 795). Having made these sensible caveats, he then proceeds to give "the most frequently cited
musical figures in an equally arbitrary" group. Yet his grouping is
not just arbitrary, but also confused. He lists sixty-one figures, with
many musical examples, an impressive-looking detailed demonstration. However, it runs together definitions by seven or eight
theorists between 1601 and 1788, including the eccentric Nucius,
whose bizarre confusion of homoioteleuton and aposiopesis is now
enshrined in this authority for the next century. What is any one
who knows rhetoric to make of the following entry?
Complexio (Nucius) = Symploce (Kircher) = Epanalepsis (Gottsched) =
Epanadiplosis (Vogt). The repetition at the end of a melody or a whole
musical section from the beginning, (p. 795).
Here three different figures are identified with each other, and
given a musical definition vague enough to apply to two of them,
at least. What the user cannot know is whether the theorists from
Nucius (1612) to Gottsched (1754) all refer to the same musical effect, even though using totally different rhetorical figures to describe it. That is just possible, and might minimize some of the
'"Vol. XV, pp. 793-803. See also the articles "Aesthetics of music," Vol. I,
pp. 120-134; "Affections, doctrine of the," 1,135-6; "Analysis, 11, 1": I, 343-4; "Figures, doctrine of musical", VI, 545.
40
RHETORICA
conceptual confusion here. They certainly disagree about the phenomena described and codified by rhetoric. Homoioptoton, according to Kircher, is said to be the same as epistrophe to Scheibe, that
is, "the repetition of a closing section at the end of other sections."
Scheibe is roughly accurate, but Kircher not, since homoioptoton or
similiter cadens is a correspondence between clauses made by using
similar cases, not necessarily involving an identity in termination,
as Quintilian defines it (IX, iii, 78). If Kircher is obviously wrong,
why is he included?
Users of an encyclopedia or standard reference work may legitimately expect the compilers to be accurate, not vague and confused,
and such blanket interidentification of figures should have been
avoided. Yet a certain amount of vagueness is inherent in the subject
itself, as is seen, once again, with figures having a semantic component. Paronomasia in rhetoric is a play on words similar in sound
but different in meaning: for Scheibe it implies "the repetition of a
musical idea on the same notes but with new additions or alterations for emphasis" (p. 796). The semantic level has disappeared,
as it does in Kircher's definition of antitheton as a musical contrast,
expressing things "contrary and opposite," in Buelow's gloss such
things as "contrasting registers in a voice part," contrasting thematical ideas or musical textures (p. 799). One knows what Kircher
is referring to (as in the term we still use, "contrary motion"), but
this is not what antitheton means in rhetoric, with its explicit opposition of meanings. In rhetoric exclamatio is the expression of any
strong emotion, such as grief, indignation, despair, admiration,
which disturbs the flow of speech or dialogue, and is only to be
used in connection with very strong feelings. In music, according
to Walther, it is "a melodic leap up by a minor 6th," or "any leap
up or down by intervals larger than 3rds" (p. 798). Music can reproduce the general emotional effect, of course, but it cannot embrace the specific verbal structure and the whole dimension of
meaning.
A concern for the details of terminology in rhetoric and music
is fundamental to arriving at a correct estimate of the relations
between the two arts. This discussion, while establishing that point,
has also raised another and equally fundamental one, namely the
differences between two expressive systems. While the influence
of rhetoric gave composers ideas about musical form and the stages
of composition, and encouraged focus on the representation and
arousal of feeling, it did not always assist the development of specifically musical resources, and the attempt to find equivalents for
41
verbal devices was problematic. A fundamental caveat made by

Heinz Brandes in 1935 tias been practically ignored smce then,
namely that musical rhetoric, working in a different medium, had
to abandon the content of the tropes and limit itself to exploiting or
imitating their form.'^'' From the detailed comparisons I have made
it clear that the musical application of a figure is always more limited than its rhetorical function, and that it usually involves a transposition of the linguistic effect on to some other plane. I raise the
question, then, whether composers ever actually set out to imitate
specific figures or rhetoric? From the treatises it would appear as
if the theorists were attempting a descriptive analysis, after the
event, and I do not know if any composer ever took these discussions as prescriptive, instructions on how to compose. Certainly,
writers may have referred to manuals of rhetoric in their adult life,
but they had had the system of rhetorical composition drilled into
them at school and university until use of the figures became automatic. One question, then, that historians may be able to answer,
is whether we can show composers setting out to use devices codified by theorists of musical rhetoric, as we obviously can with
writers?
My feeling is that this whole enterprise was of more use to criticscondemned to having to use language to describe music
than to creators. Even the most dedicated student of rhetoric will
ultimately have to admit that in dealing with music we soon reach
the limits of rhetoric, for we reach the limits of language. By an
easy and attractive metaphor we talk about "the language of music," but if we take it literally we risk forgetting that music obeys
quite different laws to language, with its words, concepts, signs,
syntax, denotation and connotation. The reasons for this difference
were set out by Susanne Langer many years ago, in a book called
Philosophy in a New Key,^^ and bear reviving. Contrasting the visual
arts with language she writes that visual forms, such things as
lines, colours, proportions "are just as capable of articulation, i.e. of
complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort
of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that
govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are
not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively,
but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure
'^"Brandes, pp. 25-9: see the quotation in note 99 above.
'^Cambridge, Mass., 1942; quotations are from the Mentor paperback edition
(New York, 1951). All italics in the text are the author's.
42
RHETORICA
are grasped in one act of vision." Discourse unrolls in time, therefore there is a limit to "what the mind can retain from the beginning of an apperceptive act to the end of it." Further, nondiscursive
symboHsm can express "ideas that defy linguistic 'projection'", as
by "conceptualizing the flux of sensations, and giving us concrete
things in place of kaleidoscopic colours or noises," offices that "no
language-born thought can replace" (p. 86).
Although we tend to describe other arts in terms of language
this can be very deceptive. "Language is a special mode of expression, and not every sort of semantic can be brought under this
rubric; by generalizing from linguistic symbolism to symbolism as
such, we are easily led to misconceive all other types, and overlook
their most interesting features." Discourse has a number of characteristics that mark it off from both art and music.
In the first place, every language has a vocabulary and a syntax. Its ele-
ments are words with fixed meanings. Out of these one can construct,
according to the rules of the syntax, composite symbols with resultant
new meanings.
Secondly, in a language, some words are equivalent to whole combinations of other words, so that most meanings can be expressed in
several different ways. This makes it possible to define the meanings of
the ultimate single words, i.e., to construct a dictionary.
Thirdly, there may be alternative words for the same meaning,
so that even "when two people systematically use different words
for almost everything," a translation can be made from one system
to the other (p. 87). Nondiscursive symbolism, by contrast, is "composed of elements that represent various respective constituents
in the object"areas of light or shade, lines, curves"but these
elements are not units with independent meanings," they have
no significance by themselves (ibid.). Further, while verbal symbolism "has primarily a general reference," and "requires nonverbal acts, like pointing, looking, or emphatic voice-inflections to
assign specific denotations to its terms" (or, we might add, depends on a linguistically-generated convention of signs and meanings), "wordless symbolism
is nondiscursive and untranslatable," and has "no intrinsic generality. It is first and foremost a
direct presentation of an individual object. A picture has to be schematized if it is to be capable of various meanings" (pp. 88-9).
A similar gulf exists between language and music. Of all the
arts music "is preeminendy non-representational," (p. 178), pre-
43
sents "tonal structures" that can be mimetic, of course, and can

have verbal meanings attached to them, but also exists independently of mimesis and lexis. Music can express feelings, "though
even in this capacity it has its special ways of functioning, that
make it incommensurable with language" (p. 185). A musical composition makes its emotive contents not so much general and abstract as "conceivable, so that we can envisage and understand them
without verbal helps, and without the scaffolding of an occasion
wherein they figure. . . . A composer not only indicates, but arhcwlates subtle complexes of feeling that language cannot even name,
let alone set forth" (p. 189). It shares with art, and with language,
the attribute of having separable items that can be combined, and
which, like words, modify each other's characters by the combination (p. 193).
Yet it is not, logically speaking, a language, for it has no vocabulary. To
call the tones of a scale its "words," harmony its "grammar," and thematic development its "syntax," is a useless allegory, for tones lack the
very thing that distinguishes a word from a mere vocable: fixed connotations, or "dictionary meaning" (p. 194).
In language, unlike music, a statement has "a content . . , which
is uniquely determined by vocabulary and syntax. . . . Musical semantic factors, however, have never been isolated" (p. 196).
Certainly music can imitate upward, downward, or even circular motion, but such mimetic effects do not constitute a vocabulary:
if one wanted to establish that, one would need to show that the
interval of a fifth, say, had a definite semantic meaning. But
what is usually called the "grammar" of music, i.e. harmony, does not
recognize such "words" as elements at all. The analogy between music and language breaks down if we carry it beyond the mere semantic
function in general, which they are supposed to share. Logically, music has not the characteristic properties of languageseparable terms
with fixed connotations, and syntactical rules for deriving complex
connotations, without any loss to the constituent elements. Apart
from a few onomatopoetic themes
music has no literal meaning
(p. 197).
Our literal minds find it hard to grasp "that anything can be known
which cannot be named." The fallacy of expecting music to have a
language derives from our assumption "that the rubrics established by language are absolute, so that any other semantic must
make the same distinctions as discursive thought." Yet the disap-
44
RHETORICA
pointment that some theorists register really indicates "the strength

of musical expressiveness: that music articulates forms which language
cannot set forth" (p. 198). If music is symbolic, its symbolism cannot
be translated into any other medium. As Wagner said of "orchestral language," lacking conventional words, "it expresses 'just what
is unspeakable in verbal language, and what, viewed from our rationalistic (verstandesmenschlichen) standpoint, may therefore be
called simply the Unspeakable'" (p. 199). There is a rhetoric of the
unspeakable, of course, as in the figure adynaton, but it is not the
same thing as the rhetoric of music.
Like rhetoric, music can represent and arouse emotions, but
unlike rhetoric, which is a highly systematised linguistic discipline
that can combine the finite forms of rhetorical figures with an infinite combination of meaning (think of all the semantic possibilities of the figure antimetabole, of which the simplest instance is "eat
to live, do not live to eat"). A fundamental distinction must be made:
Compared with language, music has all the earmarks of a true symbolism, except one: the existence of an assigned connotation. It is a form
that is capable of connotation, and the meanings to which it is amenable are articulations of emotive, vital, sentient experiences. But its import is never fixed. In music we work essentially with free forms .
(p. 203).
In the terms of Miss Langer's discussion, music, "though clearly a
symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol. Articulation is its life, but
not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function
of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for
the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each
form is never explicitly made" (p. 204). As an "unconsummated
symbol, a significant form without conventional significance,"
music offers an "unconventionalized, unverbalized freedom of
thought" (p. 206). Rhetoric, like language, can neverand probably never wants toescape from the constraints of significance,
that interplay between the sign-system of the individual and that
of society which constitutes our shared, negotiable but stdl ultimately agreed and exchanged meanings. Our knowledge of music
is wordless, and the effect it has on us is "to make things conceivable
rather than to store up propositions. Not communication but insight is the gift of music" (p. 207).
There, perhaps, is the final difference: it may hope for insight,
but rhetoric is inalienably about communication, and can only use
words, and meanings.

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Vickers Figures of Rhetoric

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Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

Author(s): Brian Vickers

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

he affinity between music and rhetoric, first proposed by

The International Society for The History of Rhetoric. Rhetorica, Volume 2,

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

Quintilian was much quoted in the Renaissance to support the

""Namque et voce et modulatione grandia elate, iucunda dulciter, moderata

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

over the emotions became one of the most ubiquitous concepts in

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

universalis (Ingolstadt, 1631), which gives musical examples of ten

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

The three concluding verbs recall many classical texts guaranteeing

Those who have "this power of vivid imagination, whereby things,

''VIII. iii. 61-2; vol. Ill, pp. 245-7.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

conveying delight and pleasure.^' Rhetoric has given writers on

fetti simili."" In this sense, then, the Prologue to Monteverdi's

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

text dictate the rules.""^ While he cogendy analysed the changes in

"Cit. Guriitt, pp. 77-8.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

''Unger, pp. 57-8.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

of a whole piece of music, notably a motet by Orlandus Lassus."

"Burmeister published Hypomnematum Musicae Poeticae . Synopsis (Rostock,

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

u p to the time of the Romantics at least, conceived of the language

Throughout the discussion of the links between rhetoric and

"^Cit. J. Roche, The Madrigal (London, 1972), p. 144.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

liferation of names, some identical but describing different figures,

"Lausberg published his Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 volumes, in 1960

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

The dangers of using Sonnino's Handbook are illustrated by the

""See Brandes, pp. 31-46, Unger p. 121 f.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

what is disturbing is that such misidentifications should become,

said to match the denotational or referential level of language? I will

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

der of importance, or magnitude. When that arrangement is made

sequence or standard word-order, the effect is barely possible.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

For Burmeister, though, the figure can only be used in music to

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

or conceptual level to an auditory-visual-notational level, yet the

'"^Translated Butler (2), p. 51; see Brandes, p. 19, Unger, p. 73.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

'"^Brandes, p. 14 and note.

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

That seems to me an admirable description of the idiosyncratic way

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

andless healthilyever larger claims for the significance of a

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

verbal devices was problematic. A fundamental caveat made by

Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?

sents "tonal structures" that can be mimetic, of course, and can

pointment that some theorists register really indicates "the strength

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