The Musical Language: Musica Poetica

Harking back to Aristotle's' notion think, do, and bring about, the humanistic circle in the 16th century divided music into musica theoretica, practica and poetica (theory, practice and composition).

The Rhetoric of Music

Musica poetica refers to the work (opus) that its creator, the musicus poeticus produces. Just like the art of public speaking, music is seen in terms of Rhetoric (alistenius, 1537; Faber, 1548; Burmeister, 1606; Herbst, 1643; Walther, 1708).

The following points were considered in the teaching of composition:

• finding a motive (often a formula)
• the general construction of the piece,
• the development of the motive
• embellishment of it (inventio, dispositio, elaboratio and decoratio)
• the division of in into sentences or fragments ( incisiones, periodi) and formulas for certain (text) representations, the so called figures

Musical 'figures'

Thus a high note means highness, or 'mountain' or 'heaven', a low note is lowness: 'valley' hell. The chromatic semitone expresses suffering and pain, sudden rests mean abrupt silences or death etc. There are about 150 such figures, which with their humanistic Greek-latin names can be grouped into types, such as descriptive gestures(a) melodic shapes (b) etc.

With the help of the figures, the text is set to music and at the same time can be interpreted, for example in the Symphoniae sacrae example by H. Schütz (1647): the opposition of 'rich' and 'empty' are expressed by changing tonalities (from C major to D major, a mutatio per tonum) ; empty is expressly repeated (repetitio) to sound like an echo, which brings to mind an empty space; the bass is not moving here at all: also emptiness here. The sudden interruption of the rest just before the ending (apocope) strengthens the impression of emptiness still further.

The number and variation of these interpolations (varietas) in a composition, touch the listener, and make the music relevant and beautiful. These qualities, are just a part of that un-teachable entity which is music, whereby many different elements come together to form an work of art.