Figures of Rhetoric - Figures of Music

Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?

Author(s): Brian Vickers

Source: Rhetorica, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 1-44
Published by: University of California Press
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Brian Vickers
Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?
he affinity between music and rhetoric, first proposed by

Quintilian, was the subject of many theoretical and prac
tical 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 pro
duced in Germany, and it is to German scholars in this century that
we owe the most substantial contributions to the topic,1 although
lrThe 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 a a Berlin dissertation,
wrote Studien zur
Brandes, pupil of Schering's,
a broader
musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert 1935), while
(Berlin, study was
attempted by Hans-Heinrich Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im
16.-18. Jahrhundert (W?rzburg, 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 Mu
sikgeschichte 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 "Af
fektenlehre" 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).
2 RHETORICA
studies have recently begun to appear in

English.2 One of the pio
neers was Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629), who has attracted much
attention,3 although lately the emphasis has been on the Baroque
period, where discussion of the effect of rhetoric on how music
was to be and listened to was more sophis
composed, performed,
ticated. Since rhetoric, as Omer Talon put it,
having no fixed do
could spread through all the arts,4 it is
main, right that we are fi
nally beginning to study its connections with music. Yet it is also
crucial to fix the discussion from the start, and from re
properly
cent developments it seems to me to raise the awkward but
timely
crucial question, how far can the terms of rhetoric be
applied di
rectly to music? How far can one aesthetic system, a linguistic one,
be adapted to another,
non-linguistic?
In retrospect, it is entirely natural that the links between music

and rhetoric should have been established so in North
thoroughly
ern in the sixteenth A main factor was the
Europe century. 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.5 the vernaculars made their
Although ap
2
See Claude V. Palisca, "A Clarification of 'M?sica Reservata' in Jean Taisnier's
Astrologiae'," 1559, Acta Musicologica 31 (1959), pp. 133-161, cited here as "Palisca
(1)"; and "Ut Oratoria M?sica: 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 ofMusic 21 (1977), pp. 49-109, here as "Butler (1)," and
Theory
"Music and Rhetoric in Early Sources," The Musical
Seventeenth-Century English
Quarterly 66 (1980), pp. 53-64 (here as "Butler (2)").
3See Martin Ruhnke, Joachim Burmeister. Ein zur Musiklehre um 1600
Beitrag
(Kassel und Basel, 1955), and his facsimile re-edition of Burmeister's M?sica po?tica
(Kassel and Basel, 1955).
A"ln immenso rerum omnium atque artium campo libere vagari": Institutiones ora
toriae (1545), p. 8, cit. Basil Munt?ano, Constantes en Litt?rature et en His
Dialectiques
toire (Paris, 1967), pp. 151-2.
5On the place of rhetoric in education the Renaissance see W. H. Wood
during
ward, Studies in Education the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600
during (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 Universit?ten vom des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols., ed.
Ausgang
3 Figures of rhetoric/Figures of music?
pearance gradually, throughout most of this time not only instruc

tion but pupils' conversation during breaks was meant to be in
Latin. At the universities the arts course began again with the tri
vium, but where schools had often used summaries and digests of
rhetoric, first- and second-year university students went back to
the great originals, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Rhetoric made
its appearance in the later stages of the grammar school curricu
lum, and in the highest form (or "classe de rh?torique/' as itwas
called in France, a title 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 all the re
sources of expression, but also a commitment to language and eth
ics, a stress on communication in the widest sense.6
responsible
The rhetorical
education, pioneered by such great humanists
as Erasmus, Bud?, 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, senten
tiae, 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 note
book, to be reused in his own writing. He was taught how to com
pose an oration, or write an essay, using the traditional processes
of creation (invention, disposition, elocution, pronunciation, mem
ory), and to arrange the final work into one of the canonical pat
terns (prooemium, divisio or narratio, confirmatio, confutatio, pero
rado). 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 1919); Wilfried Barner, Barock-Rhetorik. zu

(3Leipzig, Untersuchungen
ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (T?bingen, 1970), especially pp. 241-447; D. Breuer
and G. Kopsch, "Rhetoriklehrb?cher des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Bibliogra
phie", in H. Schanze (ed.) Rhetorik. Beitr?ge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom

16.-20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1974), pp. 217-355, and other articles in that volume;
H. Lantoine, Histoire de secondaire en France au XVIIe et au d?but du
l'enseignement
XVIIIe si?cles (Paris, 1874); Fran?ois de Dainville, La Naissance de l'Humanisme mo
derne (Paris, 1940); Basil Munt?ano, op. cit.; Eugenio Garin, L'Educazione in Europa
(Bari, 1957), and ed. Garin, // Pensiero pedag?gico del Rinascimento (Florence, 1958).
6See Brian Vickers, "Rhetorical and Anti-rhetorical tropes: on writing the his
tory of elocutio," Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), pp. 105-132.

4 RHETORICA
familiar with all of the main processes of rhetoric. Those compos

ers 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 Gym
nasium in L?neburg. Much more, however, remains to be discov
ered about musicians' education.
The stress on the importance of rhetoric in education led to, or
was accompanied by, an enormous publication boom. Quintilian's
Institutes of Oratory, first printed in 1470, had at least 18 editions by
1500, and at least 130 more by 1600.7 Cyprian Soarez' De Arte Rheto
rica (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.8 J. J. Murphy's bibliography of Renaissance Rhetoric lists
3,000 titles by some 800 authors,9 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 expres
sion to writers of all kinds in all genres.10
Given this intensely word-conscious culture, it is no surprise
7On Quintilian's influence in the Renaissance see M. Wychgram, "Quintilian

in der deutschen und franz?sischen Literatur des Barock und der Aufkl?rung,"
P?dagogisches Magazin, Heft 803 (1921), pp. 1-150; Munt?ano, op. cit., pp. 177-184;
pp. llff; and E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr.
Unger,
W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), passim (cf. index).
8For 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.
9J. 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).
10See, 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 Stud
ies, ed. K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 83-98; idem, Francis
Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968); Peter France, Racine's Rhetoric (Ox
ford, 1965); Alex L. Gordon, Ronsard et la Rh?torique (Geneva, 1970); D. L. Clark, John
Milton at St. Paul's School (New York, 1948); P. Topliss, The Rhetoric of Pascal (Leicester,
1966). Further bibliography in Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Lon
don, 1970), and "A Bibliography of Rhetoric Studies 1970-1980," in Comparative Criti
cism 3 (1981), pp. 316-322.
that musicians and music theorists should look to this highly suc
a happy conflu
cessful aesthetic system for guidance. Indeed, by
ence of interests, Quintilian's Institutes,11 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 signifi
cance. In Book One, chapter ten, Quintilian made a survey of other
studies necessary to complete the general education of the ideal or
ator, and wrote a praise of music which was to be echoed and imi
tated many times over. Of particular relevance to music and rheto
ric 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 philosophers, 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 ges
ture and pronunciation were taken over sometimes literatim by Re
naissance music theorists12), and the voice. From music and musi
cians the orator must learn and master variety of voice-inflexion,
otherwise we must assume that "unlike music, has no in
oratory
terest in the variation of arrangement and sound to suit the de
mands of the case" . . non et sonus in oratione
[". compositio quo
que 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 im
portance in the Renaissance:
But does vary both tone and sublime

eloquence rhythm, expressing
thoughts with elevation, pleasing thoughts with sweetness, and ordi
nary with utterance, in every

and of its art is in sym
gentle expression
with the emotions of which it is the It is by the
pathy mouth-piece.
or inflexion of the voice that the orator stirs the emo
raising, lowering
tions of his hearers, and the measure, if I may repeat the term, of
voice and differs as we wish to rouse the indignation
phrase according
or the of the For, as we know, different emotions are
pity judge.
roused even the various musical instruments, which are
by incapable
nCited from the Loeb edition, 4 vols., tr. H. E. Butler (London, 1920).
12Burmeister took over the sections on and gestus wholesale:
pronuntiatio
Ruhnke, pp. 94-7; ibid., pp. 99f on the influence of Quintilian's concepts of moderatio
and mediocritas on seventeenth theorists.
century
6 RHETORICA
of . . . an orator will
reproducing speech. [Thus,] assuredly pay spe
cial attention to his voice, and what is so specially the concern of mu
sic as this?13 (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 dif
fused through many other channels. (Isidore of Seville, for in
stance, had written that m?sica movet affectus.14) 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.15
He gives three exempta: Pythagoras calmed some young men about

to commit an outrage on a respectable the
family "by ordering
piper to change her strain to a spondaic measure"; Chrysippus
knew a tune that would send children to sleep; and among the fic
titious themes used for declamation exercises is one "in which it is
supposed that a piper is accused of because he had
manslaughter
a tune in the Phrygian mode as an to a sacri
played accompaniment
fice, 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 sys
tems to which certain psychological or emotional responses were
associated. Well known up to Paradise Lost and beyond, the sup
posed connections of the Phrygian mode with enthusiasm, or the
Dorian with moderate and settled feelings, or the Mixolydian with
sad and grave ones,16 were familiar to Renaissance music theorists,
13"Namque et voce et modulatione elate, iucunda dulciter, moderata

grandia
leniter canit, totaque arte consentit cum eorum quae dicuntur adfectibus. in
Atqui
orando quoque intentio vocis, remissio, flexus pertinet ad movendos audientium
adfectus, aliaque et collocationis et vocis (ut eodem utar verbo) modulatione concita
tionem iudicis, alia misericordiam cum etiam sermo ex
petimus; organis, quibus
non potest, adfici ?nimos in diversum habitum sentiamus. . . . non
primi Age,
habebit curam vocis orator? Quid tarn musices
imprimis proprium?"
14See Brandes p. 70 and note 8.
15I.x.31: "cognitionem rationis, quae ad movendos leniendosque adfectus plu
rimum valet."
16See Plato, Republic, Book 3,398ff; Aristotle, Politics, Book 8,1340 a-b; etc.
yet were not unanimously received. Joachim Burmeister, for in

stance, in his M?sica 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 h?rt man die
Hanen kreyen), echoed the traditional systematization according to
their use of semi-tones, yet concluded that the ornaments of rheto
ric were far more successful in arousing the passions.17
In addition to Quintilian's exempta of the powers of music there
were the familiar stories, transmitted through such works as the
De m?sica (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
a rebellion.18 These had an analogous function to the myths
quelled
of famous orators who had demonstrated the power of eloquence
by some remarkable exploit, in that they were at the same time ad
vertisements 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 ec
stasy, and, changing the measure, restored them."19 This interest
in the psychological effects of music was typical of Renaissance hu
manism, as D. P.Walker has shown,20 and since rhetoric in the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries went into the psychology of the
passions in extraordinary detail, devoting hundreds of pages to
what it called pathologia,21 it is not surprising that music's power
17Ruhnke, 120f.
18
See James Hutton, "Some English Poems in Praise of Music/' English Miscel
lany 2 (1951), pp. 1-63; pp. 7ff. This rich study is essential reading.
19Hutton, p. 20.
20
See D. P. Walker, "Musical Humanism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries/' The Music Review 2 (1941), pp. 1-13, 111-121, 220-227, 288-308; and
3 (1942), pp. 55-71; also available in German, with additional note,
bibliographical
as Der musikalische Humanismus im 16. und fr?hen 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel and Basel,
1949); and "The Aims of Ba?f's Acad?mie de po?sie et de musique," Journal of Renais
sance and Baroque Music 1 (1946), pp. 91-100.
21
See Joachim Dyck, Ticht-Kunst. Deutsche BarockpoetiK und rhetorische Tradition
(Bad Homburg, 1966, rev. 1969), especially pp. 81-90; Barner, op. cit.; H. F. Plett,
Rhetorik der Affekte. Englische Wirkungs?sthetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance (T?bingen,
1975); Erwin Rotermund, "Der Affekt als literarischer Gegenstand: Zu Theorie und
der Passiones im 17. Jahrhundert," in H. R. Jauss (ed.) Die nicht mehr
Darstellung
sch?nen K?nste (M?nchen, 1969), pp. 239-69, and Affekt und Artistik. Studien zur Lei
denschaftsdarstellung und zum Argumentationsverfahren bei Hoffman von Hoffmanswaldau
(M?nchen, 1972); B. Stolt, Wortkampf. Fr?hneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetorischen

8 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, elocutio?the most difficult yet the most important
part, as Quintilian had said?became intensely studied and highly
valued.22
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 (N?rnberg,
1534) praised the composer's ability to respond to different emo
tions in the text in terms that closely echo Quintilian's praise of the
orator's similar power,23 a passage also echoed by Michael Praetorius
in his Syntagma musicum (1615), who joined to it the familiar injunc
tion from the Rhetorica ad Herennium that music, like the other arts,
is developed by the union of art, doctrine, and exercise.24 But later
in the seventeenth century, as rhetoric evolved a more complex
psychology of the passions, so music theorists echoed this devel
opment. In his Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650) Athanasius Kircher
gave the now obligatory list of extraordinary emotional transfor
by
mations that music could effect ("ex furiosis mansuetos, ex libidi
nosis 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.25 Hans-Heinrich Unger, who has
given the fullest account of this topic as yet, cited two music theo
rists 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, Here, lugere, irasci, ridere, Miserere"). Unger also drew at
tention to the work of Wolfgang Schonsleder, Architectonices 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.
^Quintilian, VIII pref. 13-17; Unger, p. 5f, rightly stresses this point, which
has been overlooked some historians of rhetoric: see Vickers, "On writing the
by
history of elocutio," op. cit.
23
Compare the quotation from Quintilian, note 13 above, with Minervius'
praise of the composer, "quod ceu Po?ta 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, arte cum affectibus
totaque
consentit": cit. Gurlitt, p. 76.
24Ruhnke, p. 99; cf. Ad Herennium, I.ii.3.
25Brandes, pp. 63, 99ff.
universalis (Ingolstadt, 1631), which gives musical examples of ten

different feelings represented in music.26 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 Fl?te traversi?re zu spielen (1745), C. P. E. Bach,
Versuch ?ber 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
Nikiaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (G?ttingen, 1788).27
From the titles of these treatises alone it can be seen that the
claims for the importance of rhetoric in music were made by theo
rists, 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 Po?tica:
Si vis me flere, dolendum est

primum ipsi tibi.28
["If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself']
Mattheson wrote in 1737:
Weil nun aber das rechte Ziel aller Melodie nichts anders
unstreitig
ist, als eine solche Vergn?gung des Geh?rs, dadurch die Affecten
so kann mir
rege werden; ja keiner dieses Ziel treffen, der keine
Nucius, Musicae poeticae sive de compositione can

26Unger, pp. 37ff, citing Johann
tus (G?rlitz, 1613) and pp. 104ff; the feelings are "die die
represented Fr?mmigkeit,
Freude, der Ekel, die Kampfeswut, die Geduldsamkeit, der Zorn, die Hartherzig
keit, die Furcht, die Trauer und die Barmherzigkeit". See also H. Kretzschmar, "All
gemeines und zur Affektenlehre",

Besonderes Peters-Jahrbuch 15(1911), pp. 71-3, the
German historians in notes 1 and 21 above, and G. J. Buelow,
cited "Music, Rhetoric,
and the Concept of the Affections: a Selective Notes. The Quarterly
Bibliography,"
Journal of theMusic Library Association, 30 (1973), pp. 250-259.
27On Leibniz see Gurlitt, p. 79; on Mattheson: Unger, p. 109; on Scheibe see
Brandes, p. 76 and Unger on Quartz: pp. lllf, 115f; on Bach and For
passim; Unger,
kel: Unger, passim. Unger says, without critical comment, that in the eighteenth
discussions of the passion-arousing "jeder Unterschied von Musik
century figures
und Rhetorik ausgel?scht erscheint" (p. 107).
28
Ars Po?tica, 102 f: "If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief your
self," 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 RHETO RICA
nicht an
Absicht darauf hat, selber bewegt wird, ja kaum irgend eine
Leidenschafft . . .Wird er aber und will auch
gedenckt. ger?hrt,
andere r?hren, so muss er alle des Hertzens, durch blosse
Neigungen
and deren ohne Worten, aus
Kl?nge, Zusammenfassung, dergestalt
zudrucken wissen, dass der Zuh?rer daraus, als ob es eine wirklicher
Rede w?re, den Trieb, den Sinn, die Meynung und den Nachdruck,
mit allen Ein- und Abschnitten und verstehen kann.
v?llig begreifen
C. P. E. Bach gave the same advice to the musician in 1759.29 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).m The first humanist writers on music believed that the
main agent in arousing the feelings, as in performing the duties of
prodesse and delectare, was the text, the poem or fabula that con
tained an
image of human behaviour, often impassioned. While
leading to an conception of mu
excessively language-dominated
sic,31 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 haud dubio nos intervallo praecellunt;

longo quod
omnis eorum m?sica, sive quae sive quam voce
personator organis,
modulantur humana, ita naturales adfectus imitatur et ita
exprimit,
sonus accommodatur ad rem, seu oratio sit seu laeta,
deprecantis
t?rbida, irata, ita rei sensum melodiae
placabilis, lugubris, quendam
forma ut ?nimos auditorum mirum in modum adficiat,
repraesentat,
p?n?tr?t, incendat.32
29Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (1737): cit. Brandes, p. 84; C. P. E.

Bach: "Indem ein Musicus nicht anders r?hren er sey dann selbst ger?hrt;
kann, so
muss er nothwendig sich selbst in alle Affecten k?nnen, setzen
welche er bey seinen
Zuh?rern erregen will; er giebt ihnen seine Empfindungen zu verstehen und be
sie am besten zur (cit. Unger, p. 118).
wegt solchergestalt Mit-Empfindung"
^Coclicus: Brandes, pp. 72 f.
31
See Walker, op. cit., pp. 9, 226 f, 288 ff., 61 ff., and Brian Vickers: "Music and
Rhetoric in the Renaissance: the Triumph of the Word," in Vickers, In Defence of
Rhetoric, from Oxford University Press.
forthcoming
32More, 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, are
they beyond
doubt far ahead of us, because all their music, both vocal and instrumental, renders
and expresses natural and perfectly matches the sound to the subject.
feelings,
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 emo
tional 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 Aristotle had singled out as one
of the excellences of metaphor that it can set something "more inti
mately before our eyes" (1405 b ll).33 The words chosen "ought to
set the scene before our eyes" (1410 b 34), and the wished-for "live
liness" will be achieved "by using the proportional type of meta
phor and by being graphic (i.e. making your hearers see things)"
(1411 b 21 ff). In literature, Aristotle writes, "by 'making them see
things' Imean using expressions that represent things as in a state
of activity." This description of the dynamic, visual quality of meta
phor recurs in many rhetoric books, whether deriving from Aris
totle 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 causa34), and Quintilian agrees that "metaphor is de
signed 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 est35). An
other influential rhetorical concept connected with visual imagery
is enargeia, or clearness (sometimes confused, fruitfully enough,
with energeia). Quintilian explains that appeal to the visual imagi
nation has strong emotional power:
There are certain which the Greeks call fyavrao-iai and
experiences
the Romans visions, absent are to our
whereby things presented imagi
nation with such extreme vividness that seem to be be
they actually
Whether the words of the hymn are cheerful, troubled, mournful, or

supplicatory,
the music the the so that it
angry, represents meaning through melody admirably
and the minds of the ardent hearers": Utopia, tr. R. M. Adams
penetrates inspires
(New York, 1975), p. 87. Understandably, given the different implications they have
today, Adams has not translated literally the three concluding verbs, "adficiat, p?n?
tr?t, incendat," although they do express traditional rhetorical concepts of arousing
and the feelings to virtuous action.
inflaming
33
Rhetoric, tr.W. Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, ?d. W. D. Ross, XI (Ox
ford, 1924).
MRhetorica ad Herennium, IV. xxxiv. 45; tr. H. Loeb Classical Library
Caplan,
(London, 1954), p. 343.
35VIII. vi. 19; ?d. cit., Ill, p. 311.
^VI. II. 29; vol. II, pp. 433-5.
12 RHETORICA
fore our very It is the man who is really sensitive to such

eyes. impres
sions who will have the greatest over the emotions.
power
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 occur
rence."36 As he or "vivid illustration ... is
says elsewhere, enargeia
something more than mere clearness, since the latter merely lets
itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice."37
Enargeia is a general imaginative quality that the orator, or artist,
must possess. The specific verbal figures which communicated vi
sual impressions included illustratio, evidentia, demonstratio, descrip
tio, ekphrasis, hypotyposis. The important point to note is that these
were usually classed among the figurae sententiae, and?since sight
was said to be the strongest of the senses?were granted the great
est 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 what
soever the heart doth affect or suffer."38
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 the of the soul in mu
effectively expressed passions
sic than this . . . For as Maro, with his natural facil
symphonist. just
was accustomed to his poem to his so as to set
ity, adapt subject
matters before the eyes of his readers with
weighty close-packed
37VIII. iii. 61-2; vol. Ill, pp. 245-7.

38
The Garden of Eloquence, facs. ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville, Fla.;1954), pp. 61
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 rhetoricians of all schools as to the
agreement among figurae senten
tiae being the best means of arousing the feelings.
13 Figures of
rhetoric/Figures of music?
ones with unmixed to use words suited to

spondees, fleeting dactyls,
his ... so our where his matter it,
every subject, Josquin, requires
now advances with and notes, now ... in
impetuous precipitate
longdrawn tones,
conveying delight and pleasure.39 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 pro
vided to an ornamented manuscript of the Penitential Psalms of
Orlando di Lasso:
He [the content] so with and mel

expressed aptly lamenting plaintive
ody, adapting where itwas necessary [themusic] to the subject and the
words, the power of the different emotions, the
expressing presenting
as if acted before the eyes [rem quasi actam ante oculos ponendo],
subject
that one cannot know whether the sweetness of the emotions more
adorns the plaintive melodies, orthe plaintive melodies the sweetness
the emotions. This kind of music . . .40
of they call m?sica 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 il canto alia parole" would have the power "di
commuovere gli uditori ora al pianto, ora al furore, ora ad altri af
39Tr. O. Strunk, in Strunk (ed.) Source Readings inMusic History (New York,
1950), pp. 220-1. The Latin reads "Nemo hoc Symphoneta affectus animi in cantu
efficatius . . .Ut enim Maro naturae felicitate carmen rebus aequare est
expressit.
solitus, res grav?is coacervatis ante oculos poner?, veloci
quemadmodum spondeis
tatem meris ... Ita hie noster accelerantibus
dactylis exprimere. Jodocus aliquando
ac praepotibus, ubi res postulat, notulis incendit, aliquando tardantibus rem phthon
. . ."
gis intonat. (p. 362 of Basle, 1547 edition).
40Tr. 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 appropri
ately, in accommodating, according to necessity, the thoughts and words with la
menting and plaintive tones, in expressing the force of the individual affections, in
placing the object almost alive before the eyes." Gerald Abraham renders: "music
to the whole text and to each word, emotion and put
every
'conforming expressing
before the as if actually Abraham, The Concise
ting things imagination happening'":
Oxford History of Music (London, 1979), p. 175. M. van Crevel, in Adrianus Petit
Coclico. Leben und Beziehung eines nach Deutschland emigrierten Josquinsch?lers (The
1940), pp. 317-9, thinks that Quickelberg's source was More; but
Hague, perhaps,
Glareanus was also well-known; and humanist on rhetoric offered a gen
teachings
eral model.
14 RHETORICA
fetti simili."41 In this sense, then, the Prologue to Monteverdi's

Orfeo (1607) is a musical rhetorician:
lo la m?sica son, ch'ai dolci accenti so far tranquillo turbati corre,

ogni
ed or di nobil' ira ed or d'amore inflamar le pi? gela te menti.
poss'
It is perfectly appropriate that Adriano Banchieri should write, a

few years later, that the modern composer should imitate the ora
tor, and "nelT esprimiere un Madrigale Moteto ? quali sieno altre
parole, deve operare con l'armonia gl'affetti del' Oratione," in sor
row or passion, sighs or questions.42 The rhetorical concept of
mover? be invoked for the constituent
could elements of music. In
Lantica m?sica ridotta alia moderna prattica (Rome, 1555) Vicentino
urged the performers of his day to use freedom of rhythm by ap
pealing to the example of the orator:
the movement of the measure should be changed to slower or faster
to the words. . . .The of the orator teaches us to
according experience
do this, for in his oration he now now now
speaks loudly, softly,
now and thus moves the listeners; and this
slowly, quickly, greatly
manner of the measure has great effect on the soul. . . .43
changing
An anonymous De m?sica (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."44
Claude V. Palisca, whose work on music and rhetoric has ex

tended our knowledge of the field, relates these and other innova
tions to the m?sica reservata, that still somewhat mysterious term
used for newer styles of composition in the mid-sixteenth century.
He and some scholars would that it was an
argues, agree,45 "experi
mental style that arose as the classical technique of certain follow
ers of Josquin des Pr?s disintegrated under the pressure of text rep
resentation." Now the newer school of composers "let the poetic
41
Trattato della M?sica Scenica, cit. Walker, op. cit. p. 119.
42Banchi?ri, Cartella musicale nel canto figurato (1614); cit. Unger, pp. 123 ff.
43Cit. Palisca (1), p. 143.
"Cit. ibid., p. 150.
45
summarizes the evidence as follows: weisen aber alle
Unger "Gleichzeitig
diese Zeugnisse darauf hin, dass jetzt in der Reserva ta dem Wort, der Sprache und
den Affekten der gebietende Platz in der Musik einger?umt wird" (p. 28). Reese,
more cautious, believes that the only firm connotations, based on Quickelberg's
of Lassus, are "music of the emotions delineated by the text"
praise expressive
514). Brandes to m?sica reservata as a shift from the arousal
(p. attempted distinguish
15 Figures of
text dictate the rules."46 While he cogently analysed the changes in

compositional techniques that can be associated with this concept,
I am not sure that m?sica reservata (or "mannerism") can be seen as
a specifically rhetorical movement. it invoked rhetorical
Certainly,
ideas, but then other and very different musical traditions did the
same.47 What is undeniable is that several different influences con
verged to establish a validation of the word over?and in some
cases almost against?the music, in an undervaluing of
resulting
the specifically musical resources of music, its subordination to a
literary text. As Wilibald Gurlitt has said of this development,
man darf der einseitigen des musikalischen

angesichts Ausrichtung
Ausdrucks auf literarisch-an-schauliche Vorw?rfe, auf ein nicht unmit
telbar Musikalisches, sondern Gegenst?ndliches, Programmatisches,
dem die musikalische Form als Dolmetscherin unterworfen wird, . . .
von einer und der Musik
Literarisierung Rhetorisierung sprechen.48
The rhetoricization of music continued unabated in some circles?

most of all German?in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu
ries. By the time that Christoph the favourite
Bernhard, pupil of
Heinrich Sch?tz, came to write a treatise on his master's compo
sition teaching, in 1650, he could describe the enormous devel
opment of the expressive resources of music in rhetorical
wholly
terms:
bis dass auf unsere Zeiten die M?sica so hoch kommen, dass wegen
der absonderlich aber in dem neu erfundenen und
Menge Figuren,
bisher immer mehr Recitativo sie wohl einer Rheto
ausgezierten Stylo
rica zu
vergleichen.
of feeling to the representation of feeling: "An die Stelle des alten Affectus mover?'
tritt das Affectus exprimerez Die Musik will nicht erregen sondern darstellen. Damit
ist der Kern des Reservastils ber?hrt" (p. 71). But of course the passions cannot be
aroused withoutbeing first represented, and felt.
46Palisca(1), p. 159. His identification here, and at greater length in Palisca (2),
of m?sica 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 used by Robert. E. Wolff in 1955 (Palisca
subsequently [1], p. 159 note). Yet the
term itself, from art history, is still so fluid and indeterminate that it seems of du
bious value to apply it to another art. For a good recent discussion of the concept in
the visual arts (but with some very questionable of it to literature and
applications
see Mannerism
music) John Shearman, (Harmondsworth, Middx., 1967). A wide
ranging and vigorous study, too complex for a brief summary, isMaria R. Maniates,
Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979).
47See, for instance, the anthology collected pp. 135-141.
by Ruhnke,
48Gurlitt, pp. 76.
16 RHETORICA
Sixty years later, Johann Birnbaum, Professor of Poetics and Rheto

ric at Leipzig University, praised Johann Sebastian Bach for his com
plete knowledge of "die Teile und Vorteile, welche die Ausarbeitung
eines musikalischen St?cks mit der Rednerkunst gemein hat/' and
Forkel called Bach "den gr?ssten musikalischen Deklamator, den
es je gegeben hat, und den es wahrscheinlich je geben wird."49
II
This brief survey has established some of the forms taken by

the alliance 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 sis
ter arts. In the practice of music, both composition and perfor
mance, a further dimension strengthened the alliance, the move
ments in sixteenth century music away from isorhythmic medieval
polyphony, where the musical structures seem at times to exist in
dependently of the text, to a counterpoint?as taught by Zarlino,
for instance?much more responsive to the meaning of the words,
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 com
positional practices were?one is tempted to say?superimposed
on music. "As early as 1563, in amanuscript entitled Praecepta musicae
Gallus Dressier referred to a formal organization of music
poeticae,
that would the divisions of an oration into exordium, me
adopt
dium, and finis." m'In forming its aesthetic vocabulary, music had no
option but to borrow terminology from language, grammar, po
etry, and rhetoric. Willibald Gurlitt has listed some of the terms in
music that have been derived from the language arts: they include
49Cit. Gurlitt, pp. 77-8.
^George J. Buelow, "Rhetoric and Music/' The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic
and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), XV, pp. 793-803, at p. 794.
"theme, motive, phrase, metrics, rhythm, period, exposition, epi

sode, accent, articulation, figure, style, composition"; earlier peri
ods used"clausula, color, punctum, flores, distinctio, diminutio, re
petido", and others; one could add trope, and prose.51 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 semi
tone higher (an effect already expressed in Gregorian chant).52 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 impor
tant points in the text, places of great dramatic significance, such as
the representation of death or eternity.53
Such general analogies can be illuminating: but the more closely
the analogy is pushed the more danger of it breaking down alto
on the
gether. Unger, commenting highly elaborate claims of Mat
theson in 1739 to be able to analyze music in terms of grammar and
syntax, states that "Jede musikalische Periode erh?lt erst einen
Sinn, d.h. sie wird musikalisch deutlich und verst?ndlich, wenn sie
. . ."He
gewisse Einschnitte und Ruhe-Punkte aufweist. prints a
musical example from J. S. Bach, adding commas, a semicolon, and
a to enforce the similarity.54 Yet there remains a differ
fullstop, big
ence, for in grammar punctuation is used tomark off sense-groups
that belong together. Failure to divide according to the correct
sense results in and confusion, as the to the
ambiguity Prologue
rustics' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrates. This can
not be the same inmusic, for the semantic level does not exist there
51
Gurlitt, p. 65.
52Unger, p. 22, who also records that the oldest notational system for Grego
rian chant, "die Neumenschrift," owes its existence to rhetorical a kind of
practice,
punctuation system ("ekphonetischen Zeichen") to elocutio and from thence
applied
to the rhythms of music. On the general similarities music
between and oratory see
Unger, pp. 17ff and Ruhnke, pp. 133ff.

53On the pause see
Unger, pp. 30f, 70 (Beethoven noted in connection with his
"Egmont" Overture: "Der Tod k?nnte ausgedr?ckt werden durch eine Pause"), 140
and note (a very interesting of Sch?tz's use of the pause for intense
analysis sparing
moments in his Passions: he only uses the general pause seven times in his whole
work); and Ruhnke, pp. 135,137,138,156.
54Unger, 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 ele
gance 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."55 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 differ
ent, 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 rhetoric?inventio, dispositio, elo
cutio, pronuntiatio, memoria?could be adapted to music?given
some ingenuity?without 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
elaboration, more and sometimes bizarre hints
increasing complex,
were given to the composer. Vogt, in his Conclave Thesauri magnae
artis musicae (Prague, 1719), suggests that he use four "Hufn?gel"
(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 advice of Johann David Heinichen, in Der Generalbass in der
Composition (1728), who devoted fifty pages to showing how musi
cal 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 1739.56
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
55Unger, pp. 57-8.

56On Vogt, Heinichen, and Mattheson, see Unger, pp. 39-45.
fied the eight parts of an oration with the eight tones of the scale, a
rather unhelpful instance of fitting numerical categories together.57
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
Burmeister is already applying
quite broadly, but by 1606 Joachim
to the musical exordium the injunction from rhetoric that it should
be a captatio benevolentiae, winning the listener's attention (yes) and
sympathy (how?).58 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
Mattheson, never at a loss for proofs of the identity
composition?
of music and rhetoric, defines in music as the removal of
confutatio
oppositions, including false harmonies, while confirmatio involves
the repetition and variation of musical material?a notably weak
more elaborate attempts have been made to
sequence.59 Although
link musical with the structure of an oration,60 I am
composition
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,61 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 the techniques of elocutio down to the
apply
last detail, in the lore of the tropes and figures of rhetoric. The pio
neer 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
the first (and for many years the only) rhetorical analysis
performed
57See Ruhnke pp. 135ff for Rhau (1538), Schneegass (1591), and Dressier (1563);
also Unger, p. 31 for Dressier.
58M?sica po?tica, ed. Ruhnke, p. 72; Butler (1) p. 56, accepts this identification,
as he does others, all too easily.
59Unger, p. 52.
^See Butler (2), especially pp. 65-73: the increasingly assertive tone of these
pages is almost on its own to generate scepticism.

enough
61
On decorum: Dressier, cit. Ruhnke, p. 137; the genera styli: Burmeister, ibid.,
106ff. But note Burmeister's strained attempt to apply the grammatical vice of solecis
mus to music, no less than eleven types: ibid., lllff.
distinguishing
20 RHETORICA
of a whole piece of music, notably a motet by Orlandus Lassus.62

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 list greatly,
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.63
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 fig
ures, and one sixteenth century handbook claims to discuss over
five thousand ornaments of speech?a 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.64 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.65 For just as literary aesthetics,
62 . . .
Burmeister published Hypomnematum Musicae Poeticae Synopsis (Rostock,
. . .
1599); M?sica autoschediastike (Rostock, 1601), repeating and reworking much
material from his first book; Musicae . . .
practicae (Rostock, 1601), which reprints
part four of the preceding; and M?sica po?tica (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 of the Lassus motet see Brandes, pp. 80f; Ruhnke, pp. 162-6; and
analyses
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 and the musical effect.
analysis
63See Table 1, pp. 64-7, and the discussion of forty-six figures in detail, pp. 68
90; Table 2, pp. 92-3 and the discussion pp. 94-8; and appendix 3, pp. 151-4.
64See Vickers, "On writing the history of elocutio," Comparative Criticism
3 (1981), and Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London and New York, 1970), espe
cially Chapter 3, 'The Functions of Rhetorical Figures" (pp. 83-131).
65
On the functional of ornament in the Renaissance see W. H. Wood
concept
up 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 inten
sifications of normal speech. The schemes or figures of rhetoric em
braced such linguistic phenomena as distinctive word repetitions
(the same word at the beginning of succeeding clauses or sen
tences: 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 repre
sent, or arouse strong feeling. The of repetition must be
figures
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."66 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 of violent feel

signs
are angry or afraid or
ing, because those who really violently irritated
or in the of or some other . . . come forward
grip jealousy passion
with one idea and then rush off to some other, thrown in
having
irrational . . .67
something quite
The disorder in their syntax reflects the disorder in their psyche.

Several other writers on rhetoric give such psychological defi
nitions 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 lin
guistic consequences of upset emotions.
ward, Vittorino da Peltre and other Humanist Educators 1897; 1912), p. 230,
(Cambridge,
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.
66
Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), ed. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935), p. 12.
67Longinus, 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 com
posers 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"68 with such accounts as that
given by the anonymous, and very influential, Rhetorica ad Heren
nium 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, in
juries, 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 itwere pierced with quick and re
peated thrusts.69
this anonymous author writes of conduplicatio, or plok?, the

Again
repetition of one or more words for stress or appeal:
The reiteration of the same word makes a upon the

deep impression
hearer and inflicts a
major wound upon the opposition?as if a weapon
should the same of the body.70
repeatedly pierce part
The metaphor from sword-thrusts to describe the force of a figure

recurs in Quintilian, Martianus Capella, and many Renaissance
theorists.71 All writers on rhetoric agree that "there is no more
effective method of exciting the emotions than an apt use of fig
ures" (Quintilian, IX.i.21). The composer could only emulate the
orator.
^Cit. J. Roche, The Madrigal (London, 1972), p. 144.

69Ad H., IV.xix.26; tr. H. Caplan, pp. 295f.
70
Ad H., IV.xxviii.xxxviii; tr. Caplan, p. 325.
71
See Vickers, Classical Rhetoric, pp. 84, 99f, 107, 109, 110.
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 auto
nomy for the so-called "musical figures,"72 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 books?Quintilian's Institutes, Cicero's De Ora
tore?carry 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 fertility and inventiveness of the rhetorical tradition car
ried its own dangers with it.
Two main weaknesses characterize the rhetoric textbook tradi
tion: 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 as or
tropes metaphor, simile synecdoche, or as
such important figures as anaphora, hyperbaton, or plok?. If the stu
dent 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 rheto
ric books continued to be created for some two thousand years,
and since every compiler wished to distinguish his own collection
from his predecessors in some way, the result is that we have a pro
72See Ruhnke, p. 150, who rejects Unger's conclusion that the musical figures
derived from the figures of rhetoric: "Dass sich analoge Namen finden Hessen, be
weist eine innere Verwandschaft beider K?nste, nicht jedoch die der
Abh?ngigkeit
einen von der anderen/' Yet the relationship was
always that the rhetoricians of mu
sic went to the already-existing categories of rhetoric to argue that identical, or analo
gous categories, could be established in music. One wish that had

might they
a musical
evolved rhetoric independent of language, yet one cannot deny that they
on rhetoric.
depended
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 unneces
sary proliferation, then the modern ideal of a comprehensive guide
to ancient rhetoric books brings similar difficulties. The work of
Heinrich Lausberg is rigorous, and extensive, yet the lack of an En
glish translation means that it is not often cited by English or Ameri
can scholars.73 More accessible, and often quoted, is Lee Sonnino,
A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric.74 This is an attractive look
ing alphabetically arranged handbook, which certainly performs a
useful service. However, it is inadequately documented (quota
tions 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 com
mitting himself, saying that it is a heaping up tout court. Well, the
beginner might ask, which is it? Secondly, instead of trying to es
tablish some norm of usage it amasses alternative names for figures
without distinguishing them. Thus the figure plok? was known in
Latin as copulatio or conduplicatio, but Miss Sonnino rightly points
out that there was another figure sometimes called plok? (alias
heratio, alias palilogia, alias duplicatio, alias diaphora) and she quotes
four rhetoricians, all of whom as to its definition
disagree (Scaliger,
indeed, identifies itwith antanaclasis, i.e., repeating a word while
using it in a different sense).75 If the doctors disagree, what should
the students do?
73
his Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 volumes, in 1960
Lausberg published
(Munich: Hueber), and an abridgement of it, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, in
1963 (Munich: Hueber). It has been translated into Italian.
74London, 1968: Routledge & Kegan Paul. See my review in Critical Quarterly,
12 (1970), pp. 382-3.
75See Sonnino, pp. 53f on congeries, 103 and 64 on plok?.
The dangers of using Sonnino's Handbook are illustrated by the

example of Gregory G. Butler. He quotes the definition given in the
De m?sica (after 1559) of Anonymous of Besan?on of plok? 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 an
other." Evidently the musical theorist has already deviated from
rhetoric, where plok? 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.76 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 refer
ence would be to page 64, on plok?/copulatio. In amore recent article
Butler quotes Henry Peacham's graceful suggestion of analogies
between music and rhetoric:
Yea, in my no rhetoric more or hath

opinion persuadeth greater power
over the mind [than music]; hath not music her the same
nay, figures,
which rhetoric? What is a revert but her antistrophe? her reports, but
sweet her of points, antimetaboles? her
anaphoras? counter-change
airs, but with infinite other of the same
passionate prosopopoeias?
nature.
Butler comments that "Antistrophe (hypallage) is the inversion of

word order in a sentence to produce a contrary", citing Sonnino,
pp. 164-5.77 However, antistrophe (or conversio) is, in fact, another
name for epistrophe, repeating the same word at the end of succes
sive 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 announces that
Pyramus
76Butler (1), pp. 51-2. Buelow has described Sonnino as "an excellent aid":
cit. in note as
op. 26 above, p. 251. He also describes Unger's book "outstanding":
p. 252.
77
The Compleat Gentleman (1622); ed. V. B. Heltzel (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 116. Cf.
Butler (1)pp. 60f and Butler (2)pp. 57f.
78A Midsummer Dream, 4.1.215, 5.1.194: cf. Joseph, pp. 54-7, 288,
Night's
294, 295.
26 RHETORICA
I see a voice. Now will I to the chink

To an I can hear face.78
spy my Thisby's
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 interrupt
ing 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.79 Burmeister named this technique
noema, which in rhetoric is connected with indirect, allusive dis
course, as is shown by its Latin name, intimatio. Burmeister evi
wanted to refer to a device that would describe the marking
dently
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 gradation Johann Nucius (1613), who
frequently used figures in an eccentric sense, or renamed them,
equated homoioteleuton, which is where succeeding clauses or sen
tences end with words which have identical case endings (similiter
desinens), with aposiopesis, which is the sudden breaking off of a sen
tence yet in such a way that the listener can complete the sense.81
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
and end of a clause or sentence.82 I draw attention to
beginning
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 concen
tration, or to the fault of the authority he relies on, does not matter:
79See Brandes, pp. 31-46, Unger p. 121 f.

80For Burmeister on noema see Brandes, pp. 12, 31, Unger, p. 83, (giving a
closer, but later, definition); on auxesis Iclimax see Brandes pp. 15, 53f; Unger, pp. 77 i;
Palisca(2), pp. 50, 56.
81
For Nucius' confusion see Brandes p. 16, Unger p. 79; and for his general ec
centricity Ruhnke p. 141, and p. 151 on variations in terminology among the rhetoric
books.
82For Vogt's confusion see Unger, p. 76; and ibid., p. 77 on the confusion of
noema with exclam?tio.
what is disturbing is that such misidentifications should become,

in turn, the basis of theories about music and the identity of ex
pressive resources between the two arts. This is to build not on
sand but on air.
While recording the many links between music and rhetoric in

the Renaissance and Baroque periods, we must insist on the im
portant and currently overlooked point that it is at this final level of
identification of a linguistic with a non-linguistic art that funda
mental problems occur. Peacham cast his identification of the fig
ures of rhetoric with figures of music in the form of a rhetorical
question. His model was Francis Bacon, in the Advancement of Learn
ing (1605), pointing to similarities between different disciplines:
Is not the to avoid or or
trope of music, slide from the close cadence,
common with the trope of rhetoric of deceiving expectation?
In both cases
the brevity of the discussion, and the raising of im
portant 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."83 Neither Peacham nor Bacon was jest
ing, indeed Bacon subsequently gave a more extended list of sug
gested identifications84, but these are questions which it is easier to
raise suggestively than to answer systematically. Ipropose to review
a dozen or so of the rhetorical figures claimed for music
by Burmei
ster 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 mu
sic 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
83Bacon, Works ed. J. Spedding et al., 14 vols. (London, 1857-1874), III. 348-9;
also IV. 339, II. 388-9.
84For Bacon's suggestions see the thorough discussion in Palisca (2), pp. 42-6.
Professor Palisca claims to find a "progression of Bacon's from a recognition
thought
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 some modern students, from
by
analogy to identification.
28 RHETORICA
said to match the denotational or referential level of language? Iwill

come back to this semantic problem once I have dealt with the sim
pler figures.
One of the commonest figures in rhetoric is anaphora, the repe
tition of a word at the beginning of a sequence of clauses or sen
tences: "The Lord is my shepherd ... He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He re
storeth my soul . . ." (Psalm 23). In Burmeister's musical applica
tion it is "the imitation of a musical subject in only some of the
voice parts." As both Palisca and Unger agree,85 the musical appli
cation is narrower, and has involved a change of meaning. Theo
retically, 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 Iwas 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 amqv cb, apir db,
. . . that is known as symploke. Unger claims that for both figures
there exists a "v?llige ?bereinstimmung" between music and rheto
ric, but he gives no examples.861 would imagine that for such repe
titions to be felt in music they would have to occur rather close to
gether, and might prove rather cramping?this 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.
can occur within a of course, as when
Word-repetition period,
the last word(s) of one clause become the first of the next (x . . . a,
a . . . . . . in rhetoric as climax (the Greek for
b, b c). This is known
ladder), or gradado, the Latin name also pointing to its affinity with
steps or stairs: "we glory in tribulations also: Knowing that tribula
tion worketh patience: And patience, experience; and experience,
hope: And hope maketh not ashamed" (Rom. 5.3-5). As that ex
ample shows, the terms are commonly arranged in ascending or
85Palisca (2), p. 65 n. 38; Unger, p. 68: Burmeister (1606) calls it a fugue, Thurin
gus (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
in rhetoric as "the of the same subject at the beginning of successive
figure repetition
clauses of sentences" italics: for read 'word'). His argument seems to
(my 'subject'
me overambitious.
or complexio as the repetition
86Unger pp. 73, 77. Nucius' definition of symplok?
of the opening motif of a musical period at its ending confuses it with epanalepsis,
in fact.
29 Figures of
der of importance, or magnitude. When that arrangement ismade

without the terms being repeated, it is known as auxesis:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality their . . .
o'er-sways power
Shakespeare, Sonnet 65.
The rhetoricians of music in fact confused auxesis and gradatio, in

terchanging the names, but never dealt with the more complex
structure of gradatio.87 Even with auxesis they seem forced to take it
in its most general terms. For Burmeister it occurs "when a har
mony made up only of consonances under one and the same text
while being repeated once, twice, or three times or more, grows
and rises."88 Music takes over the name, but only the idea of "in
crease" or "enlargement." In rhetoric pallilogia describes the repeti
tion of a word, as distinct from a group of words, sometimes in
volving a change of meaning: in Burmeister's musical rhetoric it
is "a simple repetition of a series of pitches."89 This is to borrow
merely the general idea of repetition.
Ifwe move from figures of repetition to figures of what I shall
call displacement we will see a similar process of as
simplification
the rhetorical model becomes applied to music. In rhetoric hyper
baton 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
87Unger, p. 77, records that it was called auxesis or climax [sic!) in the seven
teenth century, gradatio in the eighteenth. Perhaps the later theorists were better in
formed, or were using more reliable sources.
88Translated Palisca (2), p. 50; see also Brandes, pp. 15 (who defines it as put
two noemas, the second an increased created
ting together having expressiveness
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 and in
harmony growing
creasing, points to a far-reaching between both arts. Clearly the phenome
analogy
non 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.
89Palisca (2), p. 65 n. 38; also Brandes, pp. 53ff, and Unger, p. 157: the repetition
of a melodic motif at the same pitch ("Es gen?gt dabei, wenn nur der
jeweils
Anfang
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.90
If hyperbaton is large-scale dislocation, hypallage is small-scale,
affecting the misplacement of two or more words within a sen
tence, as in the two examples from Shakespeare's Bottom quoted
above, or as in another one when?semper idem?he offers the Epi
logue to the rustics' play:
Will it to see the or to hear a dance
please you Epilogue, Bergomask
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 court
case, 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 spe
cific structure. Unger concedes that it is not directly applicable to
music, since Burmeister describes it as a "Gegenfuge," or a "suc
cession of intervals inverted." Gregory G. Butler, translating thus,
comments:
It is obvious that the between as a rhetorical and as a

analogy hypallage
musical is not exact, for rhetorically, this involves lateral
figure figure
or horizontal inversion of word order which if to music liter
applied
involve and not melodic inversion.91
ally would r?trogradation
Since music has two "planes," horizontal (melodic, rhythmic) and

vertical (harmonic) it has a dimension beyond the reach of lan
guage. But Burmeister does not merely displace the figure from the
level of melody to that of harmony, he also reduces its area of appli
cation. 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
p. 80, quoting an admirable definition of the figure from Gottsched.

90Unger,
91
Unger, p. 79; also Brandes, p. 27; Butler (1), p. 58.
fugue92?a musical form that is obviously difficult, if not impos

sible, 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 com
parationis that preserves just one element of the complex contained
in the rhetorical In rhetoric aposiopesis describes a speaker's
figure.
off a sentence out of a sudden passion, while still giving
breaking
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 will do
to them:
Quos motos praestat componere fluctus.93

ego?sed
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 No thou art dust,
tongue. Percy,
And food for? [Dies]
Prince For worms, brave Fare thee well great heart.
Henry. Percy.
(1Henry IV, 5.4.83-87)
He uses a very different form of aposiopesis for the impotent threats

of King Lear toward his evil daughters:
Iwill have on you both

revenges
That all the world shall?I 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
92See Brandes, p. 26; Unger, p. 84; Ruhnke, p. 151; Palisca (1), p. 142; Palisca (2),
p. 64; Butler (1), p. 51?admitting that the use of this term in musical rhetoric is
"highly general."
93Virgil, 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' of this incident
painting
is now in the Fogg Art Gallery, Harvard University.
32 RHETORICA
or a colon."94 Here the figure has lost all the specificity it enjoys in
language.
As has become clear in the course of this discussion the forma
tion of a musical rhetoric takes the form of a theorist looking at a
rhetorical textbook95 in order to find a figure in rhetoric that ap
or could be adapted to, a musical effect or structure. At times
plied,
the application is limited: thus apocope in rhetoric describes the
omission of a letter or syllable at the end of aword. To Burmeister it
could be applied to describe an incomplete fuga realis,96 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 rhetori
cal figure on to a different plane. In rhetoric hyperbole means the
of the normal, or probable, or truthful, an exaggera
exceeding
tion that is used to communicate truth through lies, as one rheto
rician put it. It is a figure with a complex theory,97 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
a
high for the normal range of the voice, and is therefore placed on
line above the five lines of the stave. To match this figure Burmei
ster invented its complement, hypobole, when the voice descends
below the stave.98 Here Burmeister has shifted from the semantic
94Ruhnke, p. 156: "In Burmeisters Beispielen steht die aposiopesis aber nur nach
S?tzen oder nach einem Doppelpunkt." From which point, how
abgeschlossenen
ever, he reasons that the musical is not dependent on the rhetorical one: "Von
figure
Figur vom rhetorischen
einer Abh?ngigkeit der musikalischen Sinngehalt kann also
nicht gesprochen werden." But is it not rather the case that the musical concept is
on the rhetorical one, is unable to render the detailed connotations
dependent yet
into its own language?
95
We know that Burmeister drew his knowledge of rhetoric direct from Me
lanchthon's Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521), and from reworkings of Melanchthon by
Lucas Lossius: details in Ruhnke, passim.
96On apocope see Brandes, p. 70; Palisca (1) p. 142 (where it is de
p. 27; Unger,
fined as "partial imitation"), and Butler (1), p. 58.
97 in
See Brian Vickers, "The Songs and Sonnets and the Rhetoric of Hyperbole,"
John Donne, Essays in Celebration, ed. A. J. Smith (London, 1972), pp. 132-174.
98See Brandes, p. 18; Unger, p. 80 (conceding that under these terms "bezeich
net Burmeister etwas rein ?usserliches, n?mlich das Verlassen des Notensystems
nach oben oder nach unten," and describing rhetorical as "durchaus un
hyperbole
geeignet" for imitation in music); and Ruhnke, p. 158.
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 some
one reading the music, or performing it.
the figures based on semantic properties
All face similar diffi
culties. 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.99 One cannot in pure
represent
music allegory or metaphor,
nor irony in its strict sense of "mean
ing the opposite of what one says." Yet even the figures often
depend on semantic features. The figure of mirror-inversion, anti
metabole or commutatio, which repeats two or more words in in
verted 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 distinc
tion of meaning."100 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 under
stood either from what precedes or from what follows (or "which
attributes a present effect to a remote cause").101 In musical rheto
ric, to accommodate this figure, once again "content" is transposed
to "form": in place of the process of suspended or inferred mean
ing 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 mu
sikalische Figurenlehre in irgendeinem zur poetischen
Abh?ngigkeitsverh?ltnis
steht, so m?ssten aus der Ersteren die von vornherein aus
Figurenlehre Tropen
scheiden, da sie mit ihren inhaltlichen und gedanklichen keine Pa
Ver?nderungen
rallele in der Musik finden, weil und musikalische
sprachlich-gedankliche Logik
ganz verschiedene Voraussetzungen haben" (p. 25); also pp. 26f.
100Vickers, 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.
101
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 continua
tion (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 dis
position among the voices, not to its meaning, nor to any deduc
tions about its meaning.
The transposition effected for metalepsis was made for other fig
ures 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 external?or formal, as Iwould put it.102For 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.103
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 dubi
tatio can refer to a doubtful modulation, or a moment of indecision,
and most listeners could cite instances of a composer using hesita
tion 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 Quintilian 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.104
Music has transposed the concept into its own terms, which are
more restricted than those of rhetoric, and has inevitably substi
tuted formal properties for semantic ones.
102Translated Butler (2), p. 51; see Brandes, p. 19, Unger, p. 73.

103Unger, p. 74. A later and over-expansive theorist, Forkel (1788), also relates it
to his concept of individualization in music.
=
104Unger, pp. 74f; Sonnino, p. 82 Quintilian IX.ii.19.
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 inmu
sic that took place between Lassus and Monteverdi. Yet in 1941 Un
ger's account of the tradition up to the eighteenth centuries already
showed that later theorists, although prone to excesses of in
genuity, related the figures in the two arts more coherently. Where
Burmeister had taken the figure anadiplosis, in which the word end
ing 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 im
itation, in 1719 Vogt treated it, more strictly, as a melodic figure, in
which a at the end of a musical period is caught up at the
phrase
start of the one following.105 Where Burmeister used the figure sup
plementum to describe a complex harmonic sequence at the end of a
musical it was left to Thuringus to find the appropriate
period,
rhetorical figure.106 Where Burmeister had interpreted climax or
in rather as the of a melodic motif
gradatio general terms, repetition
at various levels, Charles Butler in 1636 described it as a "stepwise
movement," Kircher in 1650 explicitly called it "gradatim ascen
dens," while J. G. Walter (1684-1748) defined it as "a musical figure
in which two voices proceed with each other upwards and down
wards by steps in thirds per arsin et thesin,"107 which is certainly
more faithful to the figure in rhetoric, even though musical ex
amples might be hard to find (perhaps the soloists' theme in the
slow movement of the Brahms concerto for violin and cello?). Bur
meister was a pioneer, then, and suffered the usual fate of pio
neers, 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
105Brandes, p. 14 and note.

106Ruhnke, pp. 126f.
107Charles 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.108 He origi

nally defined five types of fugal figures, but in succeeding editions
interchanged the categories, and the divisions, and had to redefine
them.109 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.110 Apart from those two innovations
he coined the name analepsis for a type of repetition, and gave ec
centric definitions of other figures; where pleonasmus or tautology
is a vice of style in rhetoric, for Burmeister it was a virtue.111 An
idiosyncratic feature common to several of these definitions is his
transposition of a device from the horizontal to the vertical plane.
Where syncop?, the omission of a letter or syllable in the middle of a
word, is used by other theorists in connection with rhythm, Bur
meister applies it to dissonance.112 To Brandes it seemed odd that
Burmeister should limit his coinage analepsis to the repetition of a
harmonic figure when itwould serve just as well for the repetition
of a melodic one, and it seemed inexplicable to him why Burmei
ster should use anadiplosis for a harmonic figure when later theo
rists used it for a melodic sequence.113 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.114 It seems to me that Bur
meister 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, accord
ing to a recent historian of music, belongs to an older or transi
tional 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 'vertical
minded' composer than most of his contemporaries."115
108
Brandes, p. 25.
109Ruhnke, p. 149.
110Ibid., pp. 152f, 154 (auxesis), 157 (anaphora), 159.
111
Unger, pp. 84, 85, 86; Ruhnke, pp. 153, 154.
112Ruhnke, p. 154. 113Brandes, pp. 28, 29. 114Butler (1), p. 58.
115
The New Oxford History ofMusic, Vol. IV: The Age of Humanism, 1540-1630 ed.
G. Abraham (London, 1968), p. 57.
From this and other signs one derives the impression that Bur
meister, teaching in the Gymnasium at Rostock while working on
his theoretical treatises, was rather out of touch with newer devel
opments in both music and rhetoric. Brandes found it strange that
Burmeister should not use the figure exclamatio, so obviously ap
plicable to music116?especially, we might add, to the new styles of
the m?sica 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.117 If rather out of touch
with new developments in music, Burmeister?whose main au
thority on rhetoric is a digest of the system of that early humanist
Melanchthon?is unaware of the increasing stress in rhetoric on
the ways in which rhetorical figures should describe and arouse
strong feelings. The figure anadiplosis, which Burmeister used for a
harmonic effect, was only supposed to be used, Scaliger taught, in
connection with great passions.118 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.119Where 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.120
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 oddi
ties of his system is his identification of the terms periodus and affec
tus. He defines a musical figure as being contained in the space
between two clausulae, and claims that each period or affectus repre
sents "a distinct affection through some manner inspired by the
text." This sounds very modern, fully in accord with the m?sica re
servata and rhetoric's emphasis on the figures of passion. Yet, as
Claude Palisca has commented,
116Brandes, p. 29. 117Ruhnke, p. 155. 118Brandes, p. 29.

119Unger, p. 69; Ruhnke, p. 152.
120On parrhesia see Sonnino, p. 127; Unger, p. 87; Ruhnke, p. 158.
38 RHETORICA
or has an ex
by Burmeister
not every device considered is expressive
of them are constructive ar
devices,
pressive purpose. Many simply
tifices that grew out of a need to knit the voices of a composi
together
tion once the cantus firmus was abandoned as the main thread earlier
in the century. . . . mimesis, and
Fuga, anadiplosis, hypallage, anaphora
are various ways of interrelating the parts of a polyphonic composi
tion. Climax and auxesis are means of achieving continuity.121
That seems to me an admirable description of the idiosyncratic way

in which Burmeister used these figures, and confirms the sugges
tion 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 ana
was pre-Renaissance, pre-rhetorical in that sense. His affinities
lyze
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.122
To the hasty reader the last few pages may have seemed like a ter
between specialists, one that can be safely
minological dispute
over. Yet, in all areas of knowledge, terminology is a funda
passed
mental issue. If one mechanic understands by "clutch" what an
other understands by "accelerator," the result can only be confu
sion, and danger. Inmusical 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 scholar
is towards ever more detailed reconstructions of the past,
ship
121
Palisca (2), p. 56. Palisca goes on to argue that such devices "are artfully dis
that permit the total sound to be renewed while details are
guised repetitions 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 rheto
rical figures that involve repetition." While this is partly a fair account of the differ
ent levels of "redundancy" in the two arts, it seems to me unhistorical, as an
apol
ogy 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 ex
pressive devices to be used only for the representation of strong feelings.

122
See Brian Vickers, "The Fragmentation of Rhetoric," forthcoming in work cit.
n. 31.
and?less healthily?ever 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 ifmisinterpre
tations 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,"123 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 the
of musical there are . . .numerous conflicts in terminol
ory figures
ogy 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 catego
ries have not proved successful" (p. 795). Having made these sen
sible caveats, he then proceeds to give "the most frequently cited
musical in an equally arbitrary" group. Yet his is
figures grouping
not just arbitrary, but also confused. He lists sixty-one figures, with
many musical examples, an impressive-looking detailed demon
stration. 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 amelody 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 ef
fect, even though using totally different rhetorical figures to de
scribe it. That is just possible, and might minimize some of the
123
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; "Fig
ures, doctrine of musical", VI, 545.
40 RHETORICA
conceptual confusion here. They certainly disagree about the phe

nomena described and codified by rhetoric. Homoioptoton, accord
to Kircher, is said to be the same as epistrophe to Scheibe, that
ing
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 legiti
mately 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 compo
nent. 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 altera
tions 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 the
matical 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 op
position 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 re
produce the general emotional effect, of course, but it cannot em
brace 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 spe
cifically musical resources, and the attempt to find equivalents for
verbal devices was problematic. A fundamental caveat made by

Heinz Brandes in 1935 has been practically ignored since 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.124 From the detailed comparisons I have made
it clear that the musical application of a figure is always more lim
ited than its rhetorical function, and that it usually involves a trans
position 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 discus
sions 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 auto
matic. One question, then, that historians may be able to answer,
iswhether we can show composers setting out to use devices codi
fied by theorists of musical rhetoric, as we obviously can with
writers?
My feeling is that this whole enterprise was of more use to crit
ics?condemned 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 mu
sic," 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 a
in New Key,125 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
124Brandes, 25-9:
pp. see the in note 99 above.
quotation
Mass., 1942; are from the Mentor edition
125Cambridge, quotations paperback
(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, there

fore there is a limit to "what the mind can retain from the begin
ning of an apperceptive act to the end of it." Further, nondiscursive
symbolism 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 expres
sion, 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 charac
teristics that mark it off from both art and music.
In the first place, every has a and a syntax. Its ele

language vocabulary
ments are words with fixed meanings. Out of these one can construct,
to the rules of the syntax, composite with resultant
according symbols
new
meanings.
in a language, some words are
equivalent
to whole com
Secondly,
binations of other words, so that most can be in
meanings expressed
several different ways. This makes it possible to the meanings
define of
the ultimate words, i.e., to construct a
single dictionary.
there may be alternative words for the same
Thirdly, 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 "com
posed 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 sym
bolism "has primarily a general reference," and "requires non
verbal acts, like pointing, looking, or emphatic voice-inflections to
assign denotations to its terms" (or, we might add, de
specific
pends on a linguistically-generated convention of signs and mean
"wordless ... is nondiscursive and untranslat
ings), symbolism
able," and has "no
intrinsic generality. It is first and foremost a
direct presentation of an individual object. A picture has to be sche
matized 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 178), pre
preeminently non-representational," (p.
sents "tonal structures" that can be mimetic, of course, and can
have verbal meanings attached to them, but also exists indepen

dently 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 com
position makes its emotive contents not so much general and ab
stract as "conceivable, so that we can envisage and understand them
without verbal helps, and without the scaffolding of an occasion
. . .A
wherein they figure. composer not only indicates, but articu
lates 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 combina
tion (p. 193).
Yet it is not, a for it has no vocabulary. To

logically speaking, language,
call the tones of a scale its "words," harmony its "grammar," and the
matic its "syntax," is a useless for tones lack the
development allegory,
that a word from a mere vocable: fixed con
very thing distinguishes
notations, or
"dictionary meaning" (p. 194).
In unlike a statement has "a content . . . ,which

language, music,
is uniquely determined and syntax. . . Musical
. se
by vocabulary
mantic factors, however, have never been isolated" (p. 196).
music can imitate downward, or even circu
Certainly upward,
larmotion, 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 of music, i.e. harmony, does not

"grammar"
such "words" as elements at all. The between mu
recognize analogy
sic and breaks down if we carry it beyond the mere semantic
language
function in general, which are to share. mu
they supposed Logically,
sic has not the characteristic of terms
properties language?separable
with fixed connotations, and syntactical rules for deriving complex
connotations, without any loss to the constituent elements. Apart
from a few themes . . .music has no literal
onomatopoetic 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 estab
lished 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). Ifmusic is symbolic, its symbolism cannot
be translated into any other medium. As Wagner said of "orches
tral language," lacking conventional words, "it expresses 'just what
is unspeakable in verbal language, and what, viewed from our ra
tionalistic (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 in
finite combination of meaning (think of all the semantic possibili
ties of the figure antimetabole, of which the simplest instance is "eat
to live, do not live to eat"). A fundamental distinction must be made:
with music has all the earmarks of a true

Compared language, sym
bolism, except
one: the existence of an connotation. It is a form
assigned
that is capable of connotation, and the to which it is amen
meanings
able are articulations of emotive, vital, sentient But its im
experiences.
is never fixed. In music we work with free forms . . .
port essentially
(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 never?and proba
bly never wants to?escape from the constraints of significance,
that interplay between the sign-system of the individual and that
of society which constitutes our shared, negotiable but still ulti
mately 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 in
sight is the gift of music" (p. 207).
There, perhaps, is the final difference: itmay hope for insight,
but rhetoric is inalienably about communication, and can only use
words, and meanings.

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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

Grundlageneinheit" appeared in Helicon 5 (1944), and is reprinted in Gurlitt's Mu

sikgeschichte und Gegenwart, ed. H. H. Eggbrecht, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1966), 1.62-81:

Gegenwart, ed. F. Blume, (Kassel and Basel, 1955).

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

studies have recently begun to appear in

In retrospect, it is entirely natural that the links between music

pearance gradually, throughout most of this time not only instruc

R. Lehmann 1919); Wilfried Barner, Barock-Rhetorik. zu

phie", in H. Schanze (ed.) Rhetorik. Beitr?ge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom

tory of elocutio," Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), pp. 105-132.

familiar with all of the main processes of rhetoric. Those compos

7On Quintilian's influence in the Renaissance see M. Wychgram, "Quintilian

But does vary both tone and sublime

nary with utterance, in every

Quintilian was much quoted in the Renaissance to support the

Give me the knowledge of the principles of music, which have power

He gives three exempta: Pythagoras calmed some young men about

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

yet were not unanimously received. Joachim Burmeister, for in

denschaftsdarstellung und zum Argumentationsverfahren bei Hoffman von Hoffmanswaldau

(M?nchen, 1972); B. Stolt, Wortkampf. Fr?hneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetorischen

over the emotions became one of the most ubiquitous concepts in

Comments on music's emotional power are rather general at

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

Si vis me flere, dolendum est

Mattheson wrote in 1737:

Nucius, Musicae poeticae sive de compositione can

gemeines und zur Affektenlehre",

Verum una in re haud dubio nos intervallo praecellunt;

29Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (1737): cit. Brandes, p. 84; C. P. E.

The three concluding verbs recall many classical texts guaranteeing

tional impact attributed to it, which is sometimes described with

Whether the words of the hymn are cheerful, troubled, mournful, or

fore our very It is the man who is really sensitive to such

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

37VIII. iii. 61-2; vol. Ill, pp. 245-7.

ones with unmixed to use words suited to

conveying delight and pleasure.39 Rhetoric has given writers on

He [the content] so with and mel

Later in the century, the Italian theorist G. B. Doni argued that if

ately, in accommodating, according to necessity, the thoughts and words with la

fetti simili."41 In this sense, then, the Prologue to Monteverdi's

lo la m?sica son, ch'ai dolci accenti so far tranquillo turbati corre,

It is perfectly appropriate that Adriano Banchieri should write, a

An anonymous De m?sica (between 1559 and 1571) described the

Claude V. Palisca, whose work on music and rhetoric has ex

text dictate the rules."46 While he cogently analysed the changes in

man darf der einseitigen des musikalischen

The rhetoricization of music continued unabated in some circles?

Sixty years later, Johann Birnbaum, Professor of Poetics and Rheto

This brief survey has established some of the forms taken by

49Cit. Gurlitt, pp. 77-8.

"theme, motive, phrase, metrics, rhythm, period, exposition, epi

Unger, pp. 17ff and Ruhnke, pp. 133ff.

55Unger, pp. 57-8.

pages is almost on its own to generate scepticism.