Genealogy and Musica Poetica. In Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory

Genealogy and Musica Poetica. In Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century TheoryAuthor(s): Karl BraunschweigSource: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 73, Fasc. 1 (2001), pp. 45-75Published by: International Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/932809 .

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Genealogy and Musica Poetica in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory

Karl BRAUNSCHWEIG

Wayne State University

The first difference [...] between a vocal and instrumental melody, consists in the fact that the former is, so to speak, the mother, but the latter is her daughter [...]1'

Johann Mattheson

The similarity that obtains between the lan-

guage of human beings and their music [...] extends not only to their origin but also to their full development, from its first beginning to its highest perfection [...].2

Johann Nikolaus Forkel

W HILE WE GENERALLY ACCEPT the importance of text-expression and musical rhetoric in the theory and practice of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, the writ-

ings grouped under the concept of musica poetica have consistently offered interpretive problems for the researcher. Consider, for instance, the continuing debates over the rela-

tionships between affect, figure, and text, and the distinctions over invention, variation, and

parody, within the compositional process. These uncertainties stem largely from the apparent divergence not only of theory from practice, but theory from itself: each treatise of this discourse seems to define its subject matter in an idiosyncratic way, and to address only those aspects of musical rhetoric most relevant to its author. This difficulty is compounded by increasingly rapid changes in musical style and national varieties of musical aesthetics,

resulting in a discourse that is largely heterogeneous.

This is particularly true for the writings on the musical-rhetorical figures, stretching from Burmeister to Forkel, as has been demonstrated in recent years by George Buelow and

Johann MATTHESON, Der volikommene Capellmeister, Hamburg, Herold, 1739; facs. ed. Kassel, Birenreiter, 1954, II, ch. 12, pp. 4-5: 'Der erste Unterschied [...] zwischen einerVocal- und Instrumental-Melodie, bestehet demnach darin, daoB jene, so zu reden, die Mutter, diese ober ihre Tochter ist [...]' Translation by Ernest C. Harriss,johann Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 198 1, pp. 418-9.

2 Johann Nikolaus FORKEL, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, G6ttingen, 1788; facs. ed. Graz, Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1967, 1, p. 2:'Die Aehnlichkeit, die sich zwischen der Sprache der Menschen, und ihrer Musik findet, eine Aehnlichkeit, die sich nicht blos auf den Ursprung, sondern auch auf die vollkommene Ausbildung derselben, vom ersten Anfang an bis zur h6chsten Vollkommenheit erstreckt [...]' Translation byWye J. Allanbrook, in Source Readings in Music History, revised edition, ed. Leo Treitler, NewYork, Norton, 1998, p. 1014.



46 Karl BRAUNSCHWEIG

Dietrich Bartel3. Yet much historical research continues to consider the musica poetica as a

single era in musical thought, and I will argue that it is the deeper concepts of language as discussed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers that provides the unify- ing ground for the collection of texts that appears quite heterogeneous on the surface. In the first part of this article, I summarize some of the discontinuities of the musica poetica writings; in the second, I explore a parallel discourse in the philosophy of language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which addressed the concept of origin and the natural derivations of time and place that link current practice to the purity and truth of the

origin. Finally, I suggest that an interpretation of these concerns according to the concept of genealogy provides a historically appropriate way of understanding the role of language in musical thought, and for explaining why issues of origin and derivation were so central to the writers of the musica poetica discourse.

Early in the twentieth century, several important studies of the music ofJ.S. Bach assembled the

various usages of affects and figures into a coherent and systematic theory of text expression.4 Although this work was not without reward, the consistency it portrayed has since been questioned and largely replaced by more close readings of the primary source material, especially those by Buelow who recommends applying affects and figures on a more contextual basis.5

Interestingly, deeper studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century primary source material

have revealed increasingly that the musica poetica is a heterogeneous discourse. Bartel's obser-

vations throughout his survey of the primary texts and figures, which is the most comprehensive study of the musical-rhetorical figures to date, clearly suggest this.6 Amo Forchert has also

3 George BUELOw,'Rhetoric and Music', New Grove, ed. Stanley Sadie, vol. 15, pp. 793-803; BUELOW,'Music, Rhe-

toric, and the Concept of the Affections: A Selective Bibliography', Notes 30/2 (1973), pp. 250-9; Dietrich BARTEL, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, which is a revised and expanded version of his earlier Handbuch der musikalischen Figurenlehre,

Regensburg, Laaber, 1985. See also, Hellmut FEDERHOFER,'Musica Poetica und musikalische Figur in ihrer Bedeu-

tung fOr die Kirchenmusik des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts', Acta Musicologica, 65/2 (1993), pp. 119-33. 4 Arnold SCHERING,'Die Lehre von den musikalischen Figuren im 17. und 18.Jahrhundert', Kirchenmusikalisches

jahrbuch, 21 (1908), pp. 106-14; Hermann KRETZSCHMAR, 'Allgemeines und Besonderes zur Affektenlehre',

johrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 18 (1911), pp. 63-77 and (1912), pp. 65-78; Manfred BUKOFZER,'Allegory in Baroque Music',journal of the Warburg Institute, 3 (1939-40), pp. 1-21.

5 BUELOW,'Rhetoric and Music', and especially,'Johann Mattheson and the Invention of the Affektenlehre', New Mattheson Studies, ed. G. J. Buelow and Hans Joachim Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983,

pp. 393-407. 6 Two reviews of Bartel's study arrive at much the same conclusion about the eclectic character of the treati-

ses in question; the review by John Butt appears in Early Music History, 18 (1999), pp. 398-404; and the one

by David Yearsley in Notes, 55/2 (1998), pp. 383-4. It should be mentioned, however, that at other moments Bartel clearly tries to portray the musica poetica as a German tradition, in what seems to be a spiritual sense as much as practical, that then seems to symbolize German baroque music as a whole. This point is the

basis of my review-essay of Bartel's important study, in Theoria vol. 9 (forthcoming).



Genealogy and Musica Poetica 47

exposed several important conceptual shifts that occurred during the musica poetica discourse, and has questioned the historical basis for applying the figures and affects directly to instances of'word painting' in vocal music.7

(Questioning the unity of certain terms and/or concepts related to the musica poetico was an approach already occurring in the 1960s, as exemplified by Carl Dahlhaus in his study of the changing meanings of the term 'musical poetics,'8 and by others in related areas: the fluctuations in style classifications and categories throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in thoroughbass practice, and especially in the affective associations of modes and keys.9 Such recognition of discontinuities and differences must, of course, be read as reactions to earlier studies promoting the unified and systematic coordination of affects and figures, as well as musical poetics in general.'0)

The notion of musical-rhetorical figures can be traced to a specific collection of treatises,

many of which were written by German musicians or scholars connected with the Lutheran church: Joachim BURMEISTER, Musica poetica (1606); Johannes LIpplus, Synopsis musi- coe novo (1612); Johannes Nuclus, Musices poeticae sive de compositione cantus (1613); Joachim THURINGUS, Opusculum biportitum (1624); Johann Andreas HERBST, Musica poeticO sive compendium melopoeticum (1643); Althanasius KIRCHER, Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni (1650); Christoph BERNHARD, Tractatus compositionis ougmentatus, and Bericht vom Gebrauche der Con- und Dissonantien (1660); Wolfgang Caspar PRINTZ, Phrynis Mytilenaeus, oder Satyrischer Componist (1676-79); Johann Georg AHLE, MusikOlisches FrOhlings-, Sommer-, Herbst-, und Winter-Gesprache (1695-1701); TomAs Baltazar JANOVKA,

Clavis ad Thesaurum magnae artis musicae (170 1); Mauritius Johann VOGT, Conclave the-

sauri magnae artis musicae (1719); Johann Gottfried WALTHER, MusicOlisches Lexicon (1732); Johann MATTHESON, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739); Meinrad SPIESS, Tractatus musicus compositorio-practicus (1745); Johann Adolf SCHEIBE, Der critische Musicus (1745); Johann Nikolaus FORKEL, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788-1801)."

7 Arno FORCHERT,'Musik

und Rhetorik im Barock', Schitz-joahrbuch, 7-8 (1985-86), pp. 5-21. 8 Carl DAHLHAUS, 'MUsica poetica und musikalische Poesie', Archiv fdr Musikwissenschaft, 23 (1966), pp. 1 10-24. 9 Palisca's study of Mattheson's style classifications remains a crucial consideration in interpreting the musica

poetica: 'The genesis of Mattheson's style classification', New Mattheson Studies, op.cit., pp. 409-23. Buelow criticizes Arnold's well-known compendium of thoroughbass for promoting the impression of a more unified practice than the actual sources suggest: BUELOW, Thorough-Bass Accompaniment According to johann David Heinichen, rev. ed., Ann

Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1986. He also has been the primary writer coun-

tering the earlier view of a unified and systematic Affektenlehre: BUELOW,'Johann Mattheson and the Invention of the Affektenlehre', New Mattheson Studies, pp. 393-407.

10 More recent skepticism about the entire concept of musical-rhetorical figures has also been voiced: Brian VICKERS,'Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?', Rhetorica, 2 (1: 1984), pp. 1-44; Peter WILLIAMS,'The Snares and Delusions of Musical Rhetoric: Some Examples from Recent Writings on J. S. Bach', Alte Musikl Praxis und Reflexion, ed. Peter REIDEMEISTER and Veronika GUTMANN, Winterthur, Amadeus, 1983, pp. 230-40; Maria Rika MANIATES, 'Music and Rhetoric: Facets of Cultural History in the Renaissance and the Baroque', Israel Studies in Musicology, 3 (1983), pp. 44-69.




To illustrate the variety of expressive and/or technical issues embodied in the figures of the musica poetica writers, I have reproduced an example from these writings for each

distinct role a figure could assume.'2 They appear in (approximate) chronological order, and

suggest the shifts in musical style and aesthetic understanding already mentioned above.

Several of these figures will be discussed in more detail below; here let it simply be observed

that they tend to be defined by an explicit juxtaposition of two versions, figured and unfigured. The significance of this cannot be overstated: a figure depended-in essence-upon the conception and/or perception of both versions, one underlying the other.

Example I

I.fugue techniques fuga realis, from

Burmeister, Musica poetica, Rostock, S. Myliander, 1606; facs. ed. Kassel, Birenreiter,

1955, pp. 57-8; modern notation given in Benito Rivera's translation, Burmeister, Musical Poetics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 159-61.

Sfa gcF-cn W

fa gc-c b6 c vox W

T---r g cc dg-g ,f g voxrey-

c Fa

- r....r --r ----- t .

Gc- Xcb c vox T crd'CPewyg r- G CE

DG-GA.F G vox

•O9wvc& r

,•.

second follower

third follower

II For the extensive secondary literature on these writings, see the bibliographies in BUELOW,'Rhetoric and

Music'; BUELOW, 'Music, Rhetoric, and the Concept of the Affections: A Selective Bibliography', and BARTEL,

Musico Poetica.

12 These eight categories are my own; although I find the categorizations of the figures by Buelow and Schmitz

useful, I have slightly different ones for the purposes of the present discussion.




c fa gc Cb t -bh

a ga ac r-r r g cc dg-- gf- fe f

r- -r

--. ..r r--- r ? Fa

t6g g g a g g4nda ge c f d d d G c - c 6 c d # b a I bjtoscuidr : r G CE D G FG Ap

FGrI- (par. 5 ths sic)

& I - I - vI ,e , leader

first fallower

second fallower

third fallower

Example 2

2. text-setting techniques (esp. repetition) polillogio, from Burmeister, Musica poetica, p. 63; modern notation in Rivera's translation, p. 179.

3. affect exclamatio, from Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon The exclamatio or ecphonesis is a rhetorical figure which signifies an agitated exclamation.This can be realized very appropriately in music through an upward-leaping minor sixth. 13

Exemplum.

Et.fanum nomen cjus ij

Etfandum aomcn ejus.

Et san-ctum no-men e - ius, et san-ctum no-men e - ius. et san-ctum no-men e - ius

13 WALTHER, Lexicon, Leipzig, 1732; facs. ed. Kassel, Birenreiter, 1967 :'Exclamatio (lat.) EXwovrluLt (gr) ist eine

Rhetorische Figur,

wenn man etwas beweglich ausruffet; welches in der Music gar figlich durch die aufwerts springende Sextam minorem geschehen kan.'




Example 3

4. dissonance treatment transitus irregularis, from Bernhard, Bericht, in Die Kompositionslehre Heinrich SchiJtzens in der Fassung seines SchJlers Chr. Bernhard, ed. Joseph M. MOiller-Blattau, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Hirtel, 1926; 2nd ed., Kassel, Birenreiter, 1963, ch. 12, ? 6.

Wlk. ; !• i i F i pw,!4B= i. l i F i F i • - • • ! E I I

Ist eben alB wenn es so st~inde:

diI I ILI , I lll' , ! I! ' I' , I I I iI I' i, i Ii i=4

Example 4

ellipsis, from Bernhard, Tractatus, ch. 37, ? 3

l i I i • boom..--w "-

I Ib . . . . .I o i

Solte also stehen

Nis-% PE! I-Op P.", I 1I II III ' I -" ' i ] iS W

I, .

ri W,-,:

~~ ~ ~~~~I/ ,, Iio ,-.. . . .

Example 5

5. ornamentation accent [Accent], crossing [Uberschlag], from Mattheson, Capellmeister, II, ch. 3, ?25-6.

lAf MtoiU mi btnmo en4idal 6tugtn, ig ll Umi bcm didfdltbcenu 5 c.

%45 toilmidjtnl !ditbfl pugel, id; riumi~ b edm Sdicfdl 6tugn Kn .




Example 6

6. illustration (hypotyposis,'word painting') contrast, from Mattheson, Copellmeister, II, ch. 9, ?42,45.

2n ciner 2ricte, aud Wm i) D i F.

rl AV i-I •, --

I M= 43maaP bW fdib bit i ex e ss 1f4n; od f~rbrc

"it--s - i l'Ik IdiI Z4 ftot W it bodroconbc ~a Fagt fluau a Ufl unb uno~n~ new03,rrollFePnerpto4b~ai; b@4) IWUsn Wr

~cftR lug p1~aabt, Illf rd~on WS btort gcbrooca.

Example 7

7. grammar/punctuation (new theories of melody) punctuation, from Mattheson, Capellmeister, II, ch. 13, ? 82.

zI I- -1 E - j - t

vont..

Example 8

8. abstract synonymia, from Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte, p. 51 [two passages that have the same'meaning'].

d..Cii --??? -----~-- C-?

UY

Beyond this initial reality of the divergent roles for musical-rhetorical figures, difficulties for further research have been compounded by historical and geographical variants, particularly in accounting for the style changes occurring during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, national/regional differences in aesthetics and practice, and the rhetorical aims of each treatise.

Concerning the musical styles that incorporate such figures, Burmeister, Nucius, and Thuringus wrote primarily of the strict styles of Renaissance polyphony and fugue. Kircher and Bernhard incorporated the new techniques of opera (especially recitative) from Italy, while Printz addressed ornamentation, emanating largely from Italy in the vocal style and from both Italy




and France in the instrumental style. Janovka, Vogt, and Walther attempted to catalogue figures from all previous styles, and Ahle concerned himself primarily with issues of text. In contrast, Mattheson, Scheibe, and Forkel characterized rhetoric increasingly as a theory of melody (the ordering of ideas, punctuation, and grammar) for the new galant style.

Moreover, while the duties of the German Protestant Kantor required a certain set of information to be passed on to succeeding generations, new currents in musical thought concerning opera and instrumental music were emanating strongly from Italian cities, and

physiological theories of affect originating in France were capturing the attention of musicians and philosophers alike. Increasingly, issues of aesthetics and new styles were part of an international discourse, and writers of the formerly provincial discourse could no longer

ignore important international developments in music.4 French theories of affect appear in Kircher, Bernhard, and Mattheson, and form the primary basis for figures and affect; the same writers demonstrate an awareness (even focus) on the Italian styles of opera (and later, concerto). They demonstrate an intemational awareness, in contrast to Burmeister,

Nucius, and Thuringus, who seemed to remain largely German and provincial in scope-

part of the Protestant Kantor tradition.

Additionally, the audience for which each treatise was intended varied widely. Burmeister wrote

mostly of fugue and Renaissance vocal polyphony as a practical guide for the German church

musician. Nucius and Thuringus followed suit, simply reordering Burmeister's categories. Kircher

wrote an encyclopedic/aesthetic tome focusing on affect, and addressing a larger, increasingly international community of scholars. Janovka, Vogt, and Walther wrote lexical works, at that

time a relatively new rhetorical genre within music, providing only brief definitions of musical

terms and concepts rather than elaborate explanations. Printz exclusively described ornamen-

tation, presumably oriented towards the practicing musician. Mattheson wrote a comprehensive treatise for the complete musician-no longer the Protestant Kantor, but the complete court/church musician who could write operas as well as motets. Scheibe promoted the auton-

omy of instrumental music and its own rhetoric, and was a strong advocate for the virtues of

galant aesthetics within the larger learned community. Forkel looked to the past, combining

early eighteenth-century ideas of rhetoric with the newly emerging aesthetics. He addressed

issues in aesthetics, history, and biography, writing for learned readers and less for the practical musician.

Finally, it should also be mentioned that the rhetorical basis on which the musical-rhetorical

figures rest was not stable either,

the former authority of the Latin texts and the Classical

pedagogy (imitation of the masters through close study) was gradually being replaced by

14 Mattheson, for example, participated in a Parisian debate over the affect associations of modes and keys

during the 1720s: Rita STEBLIN, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,

Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 1981, pp. 52-3.




vernacular rhetorics, which paralleled the emergence of German as a literary language (also appropriate for learned discourse).'" Interestingly, those responsible for this shift not only adapted the standard topics of rhetoric to the German language but also chose to recog- nize the 'natural' capacity for rhetoric as universal. That the common person on the street

speaks rhetorically and with figures (a 'Volk-eloquence') became a commonplace during the eighteenth century, one which Mattheson mentioned during his discussion of musical rhetoric.'6 This also resulted in a significant transition from the imitation of masters, accord-

ing to established (ritualized) figures, to the expression of affect, considered as universal states of the human heart, or to the articulation of grammar, which was seen as abstract and also largely universal. Together they signal the shift from imitating and preserving an elite, strictly maintained procedure and style, to addressing and expressing the seemingly 'universal' affects in a natural manner (and according to a new melodic/harmonic grammar).

In light of all of these discontinuities and differences, we might well wonder whether there is sufficient evidence to group these treatises into a single discourse, whether the presupposed continuity of the musica poetica has been artificially constructed, a result of historical emplotment. This is probably true to a certain extent, but I will argue in what follows that emerging from the texts of this discourse-sometimes explicitly, and at other times between the lines and in the margins-is a notion that language itself provides historical and theoretical continuity, in two particular ways: first as a conceptual metaphor-music as a (rhetorical) language-and second as a mode of explanation I will call genealogy.'7

II

As is well known, one of the most frequent commonplaces of nineteenth-century romanti- cism was the belief that music is a universal language of the human heart; Schopenhauer, for

example, wrote that a composer, 'reveals the inner nature of the world, and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand.'"8 Historians generally agree, however, that this notion emerged earlier, within musical thought of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as composers increasingly organized their musical material more

15 Eric A. BLACKALL, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language 1700-1775, second ed., Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1978.

16 FORCHERT, 'Musik und Rhetorik im Barock'. 17 Although Mark Evan BONDS argues for a similar role for the metaphor of music as a language in creating

historical continuity, it is significantly different from the version presented here; Wordless Rhetoric Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 199 1.

18 Arthur SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 4th ed., 3 vols., London, 1896, I, p. 336. For the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of this trope, see Kevin BARRY, Language,

Music and the Sign, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987; and Robert MORGAN, 'Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism', Critical Inquiry, 10/3 (1984), pp. 442-6 1.




according to text and allegories of text expression, and less by the older structures of con-

trapuntal devices based upon intervals and mathematical ratios.'9 That this idea is directly related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of musical rhetoric is obvious,

yet an important part of this connection is frequently overlooked in documenting this discourse: efforts to establish musica poetica as a continuous and relatively autonomous

discipline, both by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers and by twentieth-century studies, downplay the extent to which musical rhetoric necessarily involves larger philosophical questions about language itself-ones which exceed the borders of the largely German discourse of the musical Figurenlehre. In particular, the following questions about the idea of music as a language require a larger historical context: how can language mediate between a set of meanings considered to be universal and a dispersed geography of actual

languages and local dialects? How do these meanings transcend chronological changes of

grammar and idiom? After considering how these questions emerged within the philosophy of language, I will argue that they were important issues for musical thought as well.

During the mid- to late-seventeenth century, the model of the ideal language-a perfect and universal system of representation-continued to be founded upon the Biblical crea-

tion myth: in God's creation of Adam was also formed an exact knowledge of the world,

entirely unified with a language by which everything in the world could be fully known.

One of the foremost proponents of this view was Kircher, the same prolific Jesuit scholar

(and professor of oriental languages at the Jesuit college in Rome) who wrote on music

and musical-rhetorical figures. Paraphrasing from his Turris Babel sive Archontologia...:

Men did not slowly learn to speak once they had stopped living in isolation and had come together to form a society [...]. On the contrary, the first speech had been given to Adam by God in the Garden of Eden, and its words had corresponded to the natures of things themselves. Just as the images in our minds correspond to the things outside of them which they represent [...] so too at one time, words had mirrored exactly the things for which they stood. And just as the senses give the same reports to all men at all times-as with identical impressions on wax-so too the first language, which God had

concreated with Adam, had perfectly mirrored material reality.20

The ideal of the perfect, universal language was part of an ancient mythic past, before the

'fall' into sin and the human condition of need and suffering. The search for such a language assumed the universality of human nature, which, contrary to the colonial objectification of the 'other,' was actually confirmed by increased contact with far away, foreign cultures.

This unity of language and knowledge was said to be lost after the Tower of Babel episode and its consequent 'confusion of tongues,' when the peoples of the world were scattered

19 George Buelow gives a clear example of this periodizing of musical thought by mathematical and then lin-

guistic models;'Rhetoric and Music'. 20 Paul CORNELIUS, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages, Geneva, Droz, 1965,

pp.7-8.




and condemned to speaking languages that were not only opaque to others, but were

inherently imperfect for the task of representing the things and ideas of the world.

Consequently, many seventeenth-century philosophers (including Bacon, Vossius, Comenius, and Leibniz) sought to discover or recapture the perfection of this mythic origin, and looked to the increased exploration of far away lands for proof of such hopes and speculations.2' China in particular, with its ideographic language, fascinated Kircher and others because its graphic characters appeared to represent ideas and things more directly than the letters of European languages, and because its pronunciation system was not only simple and efficient, but musical. This tonal aspect of the Chinese language, along with accounts in ancient texts of the potential power of an integrated music/language, brought music into these quests for and speculations over a universal human language-this because the musical contours of tonal pronunciation had the ideal property of reproducing the inflections of the voice associated with particular states of emotion. Music, as integrated with language in Chinese and in Greek and Roman accounts of music must have also been part of the original state of perfection embodied in Adam: 'The voice of God, music, language, and understanding are conflated, all immediately present to Adam in the Gar- den.... Language, music, and knowledge were all unified in a single, divine origin.'22 Either the original unity of language-music-knowledge had to be discovered somewhere in the world, or it had to be reconstructed from its scattered and buried remnants:

[...] since words are signs of thought, and since reason is universal, one must be able to find latent traces of this universal reason in every language, and to construct a universal grammar that would be one with logic. Many seventeenth-century language theorists sought to rediscover, or to artificially re- create, this language in which naming would be identical to defining and understanding.23

Several philosophers undertook the effort to outline such a language of representation, proposing an 'algebra' of philosophical categories arranged in certain abstract sequences, perfectly designed to represent the order of the things of the world. Leibniz, for example, sketched such a system (worth quoting at some length):

Leibniz [...] believed that all ideas were either simple or complex-just as were all numbers. From the basic simple ideas, all other ideas were derived. [...] Leibniz next proposed drawing up a catalog of all human ideas, simple and complex. In great encyclopedic tables, similar to Wilkins's "philosophical tables", he hoped to arrange in their appropriate places the simple and complex ideas. Finally, he wanted to compose catalogs containing axioms used in the sciences, and other catalogs containing all

21 Ibid., pp. 5-II. Cornelius explores how the quest for a universal perfect language that would truly represent the order of things appeared not only in the philosophical writings of the time, but also in the 'fiction' of imaginary voyages, such as Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone and Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage to the Moon.

22 Downing THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 34.

23 Ibid., p. 35.




the truths that had been discovered through induction [...]. Leibniz next hoped that he could find

symbols that would represent all the ideas. Using the method of algebra as the standard for all human

reasoning, he searched for a characterology similar to that of algebra, which would be suitable for all human thoughts [...] he hoped to find symbols for all things which would 'free' the reason and allow men to think on all subjects in a mathematical way. [...] Leibniz's philosophical vocabulary [of his

'universal' philosophical language] [...] was composed of words, the syllables of which represented the

parts of composite ideas. He believed that, having substituted this 'algebra of thought' for the imperfect languages which Europeans then were using, he had made it possible to 'calculate' on all matters in a mathematical way. By replacing the analysis of vague concepts with the analysis of the words of his

philosophical language, he hoped that he had found a method by which men could reason in theology, metaphysics and ethics, just as they could in geometry and mathematics. 24

In his assessment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, Michel Foucault inter-

prets this system of representation as fundamental to the epistemology of the Enlight- enment, which he formulates in a quasi-structuralist grid he designates as the 'Classical

episteme': the ordering of things and ideas according to an analysis of their identities and

differences, represented by a system of signs that is itself arranged by this analysis.25

Because of the belief in its original unity with language and knowledge, music would nec-

essarily play a significant role in any (re)constructed tonal language. Particularly in France, music was understood as,

[...] the same throughout the world because [...] the essence of music [is located] in sounds and

proportions that are naturally reproduced in the human voice. With these universal musical elements as

given, it could be possible to tap them in order to create a code, supported by mathematical principles, yet capable of forming a universal "language".26

Though lacking consensus on details, there was little doubt among late seventeenth-cen-

tury thinkers that music played some role in the 'original' language and would naturally be

present in some form in its attempted recovery.

The quest for a universal language, optimistic at first, quickly became frustrated by the

inherent inadequacies of representation and by the stubborn reality of people exhibiting different perceptions and responses to identical things. It was also frustrated by the irrec-

oncilability of the diverse peoples of the world with the Biblical myth of creation.27 In short,

the belief in a universal human reason became difficult to sustain. The project consequently transformed into a more 'anthropological' (human-centered rather than God-centered)

24 CORNELIUS, pp. 99-102. 25 Michel FOUCAULT, The Order ofThings. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, New

York,Vintage Books, 1994. 26 THOMAS, MUSic and the Origins of Language, p. 37. For an exploration of Mersenne's theory of a universal

musical 'language', see Dean T MACE, 'Marin Mersenne on Language and Music',journal of Music Theory, 14/1

(1970), pp. 2-35. 27 See CORNELIUS, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages.




discourse on the origins of language and their development over time. This project, however temporary, also addressed a fundamental problem in seventeenth-century thought, and one that was to become even more central and problematic in the next: the dichot-

omy inherent in representation between words and things, which led to an increasing distrust in figurative language:

[...] scholars have pointed out that many men of the seventeenth century advocated a plain and natural way of writing which emphasized "things" rather than "words". They have also seen the connection between the changing attitude towards prose style and the rise of the scientific movement .... But they have not emphasized enough, I think, the linguistic assumptions that were behind these attitudes. Look- ing backwards into the Biblical past as well as forward into the future, the men of the seventeenth century vividly remembered that there had been but one language throughout the entire world during the first two thousand years of man's existence on earth. That a Primitive Language had lasted for so long, and that perhaps it or its roots continued to exist somewhere in the world-these beliefs, which now seem so remote from our understanding of the world and man's history in it, were vivid realities for our seventeenth-century ancestors, and were in the background of many of the recommendations made in England for a simpler prose style. When we consider that many of the reformers of language wanted a manner of writing that was simple, clear, concise, and brief, we must also remember the lin-

guistic world of the seventeenth century.' 28

This quest for a perfect system of representation would have profound consequences for rhetoric as well as rhetoric in music.

With the frustration of the project for discovering a universal language, and the emergence of the vernacular with the new middle class, a new type of speculation on the origins of

language developed. The older discourse broke down as writers faced the evidence of diverse and often incompatible languages and cultures of the world; no longer could all

newly discovered 'exotic' languages be connected directly to the Biblical creation narrative.

Similarly, the corresponding project for a universal music, most ambitiously undertaken in France with Descartes and Mersenne, which attempted to chart the certain (largely physiological) connections between particular rhythms, meters, melodic figures, and modes/keys and particular affects, also confronted a lack of consensus in the empirical reality of differing responses to similar musical gestures: 'The possibility of a universal, combinatorial discourse of musical affect no longer seemed possible even if music continued to be considered as discourse of affect.' 9 The metaphor of music as a language was still present, but the

apparent contradiction between a perfect musical language and the diversity of meanings was resolved through the establishment of a historical narrative, a diachronic solution to a

28 Ibid., pp. 22-3. 29 THOMAS, MUSIC and the Origins of Longuage, p. 3 1. See pp. 25-33 for his discussion of the difficulties this dis-

course encountered between the seemingly objective mechanistic responses of affect to music and the diversity of responses actually collected. Thomas identifies this as a fundamental dialectic between science and rhetoric.




synchronic incompatibility. Even if the current variety of musical meanings eluded codifica- tion, at some mythical point of origin they were completely unified in a perfect and musical

language.

The emergence of this new type of narrative was part of a larger solution that involved

language and definitions of human development. In part due to the continuing discovery of radically different languages and cultures through exploration, and the local emergence of the vernacular-breaking down the former unity Latin had provided for the elite institu- tions of court, university, and church-philosophers encountered increasing difficulty inte-

grating this empirical diversity within the Biblical account of Adam's perfect language (e.g., Chinese history was discovered to predate the events of the Old Testament). Moreover, the emergence of rationalism, logic, and the certainty of the self-evident at the center of

Enlightenment philosophy, with its transfer of credibility away from the discourses of rhetoric and the other fields of practical reason (law, ethics, theology), pushed Vico to disperse rhetoric and logic-figurative/poetic language and plain/representative language-along a

historical narrative. Because they were increasingly competing for the right to be seen as

the foundation of knowledge, rhetoric and logic, once dispersed diachronically, would no

longer be incompatible but rather successive stages along a new 'history' of language.

According to this new account, rhetoric (through figurative language) became associated

with the origin, even with the language that God had bestowed on Adam, thus restoring some of the respectability it had lost during the eighteenth century:

In Vico's system [...] rhetoric becomes the 'providential' tool through which God teaches human

beings, in their primordial phase (the dawn of both the individual and the group), certain truths that

they would not be able to understand in bare form. So God must present them in the garb of fabula and examples, dressed in imaginative language. Only later,

when the psychological evolution is com-

pleted and human beings have reached the stage of adulthood, will they be able to understand the direct language of logic, so the general movement proceeds from philology to philosophy. 30

This historical narrative locates figurative, poetic language at the origin, and delays literal,

philosophical language until human reason had 'progressed' enough to represent knowl-

edge accurately through a comprehensive array of similarities and differences.

Vico was part of a larger discourse that included Addison, Warburton, Condillac, Diderot,

Rousseau, De Brosses, Turgot, A. Smith, and Wordsworth, who expanded upon this basic

idea to include systems of writing and the detailed progress of reason itself, collectively

asserting the following configuration:

30 Renato BARILLI, Rhetoric, trans. Giuliano Menozzi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 83

(Theory and History of Literature Series, vol. 63).




mythical 'origin' -- Greek, Latin -4 Enlightenment Europe

poetic language -- philosophical language (figurative) (literal/representational)

ideograms, hieroglyphics, alphabetic language symbolic language

The justification for placing alphabetic languages at the end of a progressive development of reason (aside from supporting an ideology of European superiority), was the view that the rules of combination that governed an alphabetical language were the same as those that governed reason itself; in other words, an alphabetical language was ordered accord-

ing to the same distribution of things in the world, which it could then analyze and represent with certainty and 'truth':

[...] alphabetical writing, by abandoning the attempt to draw the representation, transposes into its analysis of sounds the rules that are valid for reason itself So that it does not matter that letters do not represent ideas, since they can be combined together in the same way as ideas, and ideas can be linked together and disjoined just like the letters of the alphabet [Condillac]. The disruption of the exact parallelism between representation and graphic signs makes it possible to bring language, even written language, as a totality, into the general domain of analysis, thus allowing the progress of writing and that of thought to provide each other with mutual support. [Smith].3'

In this narrative, then, language moved from rhetoric (tropes and symbolic signification) to

logic (literal representation) as human reason itself progressed to a higher plane of philosophic thought.

However, exactly how this 'original' language emerged and what it meant for music, knowledge and society, was vigorously debated. Vico presented one of the first accounts of the origin of human society in poetic language, summarized here by M. H. Abrams:

The post-diluvian giants, according to Vico, were dominated by sense and imagination, not by reason, and their first mode of thought was passionate, animistic, particularistic, and mythical, rather than rational and abstract; therefore they "were by nature sublime poets". For poetic sentences "are formed with senses of passions and affections, in contrast with philosophic sentences, which are formed by reflection and reasoning". Articulate language developed in part from the vocal mimicry of natural sounds, and, in part, from interjections "articulated under the impetus of violent passions'-'the first dull-witted men were moved to utterance only by very violent passions [...]" Since men naturally "vent great passions by breaking into song," the primordial emotional language must have been at the same time poetry and song, and, of necessity, densely figurative. [emphasis added].32

In this view, original language was musical because it was fully integrated with the emotions: the inflections of passion in the voice were expressed in the contours of a sort of melodic

31 FOUCAULT,

The Order of Things, p. 112. 32 M. H. ABRAMS, The Mirror and the Lamp, NewYork, Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 80.




speech-a tonal language. Music occupied, in other words, a fundamental part of the uni-

fied origin of human society. In this new version, however, speculations on the origin were as much about the consequent development of language, (music) and reason, as they were about the chronological 'beginning.'

Condillac, for example, emphasized the progress of human knowledge in this narrative, and outlined a genealogy of knowledge, a project by which things could be reconnected with their origins and thereby achieve a kind of grounding and truth in the certainty of nature. By determining the natural basis for words in the 'primitive' cries and gestures (the 'language of

action') of early humans, the seemingly arbitrary representations that analyze knowledge in

modem languages could be verified with natural connections. In Foucault's terms, Condillac

asserted that the modem French language as embodied in its representational order could be traced back to an original 'designation,' through a genealogy of tropic 'derivation': one

sign substituted for another to improve the certainty and clarity of the representation, which

was subsequently improved again, and so forth. Hence, from the symbolic expressions of

primitive language, human reason had progressively substituted better and better signs for

its representations, achieving a high degree of philosophical truth in Enlightenment French.

For Condillac, this development of language towards philosophy and literal representation was clearly associated with the progress of reason and of the human condition, for the

development of increasingly accurate signs for communication lifted humans above the

animal kingdom and increasingly freed us from the constraints of nature. Language (an

arbitrarily applied but naturally based system of signs) distinguished humans from animals

and provided us with the tools with which to communicate and think logically (signs represented ideas, such that manipulating signs was equivalent, within a mode of representation, to manipulating ideas); thus was established our 'uniquely human' ability to understand,

communicate, and predict:

As soon as the memory is formed, and the habit of the imagination is in our power, the signs recol-

lected by the former, and the ideas revived by the latter, begin to free the soul from her dependence in

regard to the objects by which she was surrounded. As she has it now in her power to recall the things which she has seen, she may direct all her attention towards them, and transfer it from the present object [...] Thus we sensibly perceive in what manner reflexion arises from imagination and memory.

[emphasis added].33

Condillac viewed language (and music, as integrated within the original language) as that

which freed human beings from the necessity of nature and the animal world, and afforded

us with certain faculties that allowed our reason to progress, and to attain a level of auton-

omy from and dominance over nature.

33 CONDILLAC, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans.Thomas Nugent, 1756; Gainesville, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971, p. 59; cited in THOMAS, MUSic and the Origins of Language, p. 59.




Rousseau began from the same premise, that human reason provided the possibility to improve our knowledge and our condition in the world-as represented in eighteenth- century French language and the Encyclopedia project.34 For Rousseau, however, this linear direction of the progress of reason was combined with a second motion, an increasing loss of immediacy and emotion in language, and a consequent sense of alienation and coldness in society:

Anyone who studies the history and progress of the tongues will see that the more the words become monotonous, the more the consonants multiply; that, as accents fall into disuse and quantities are neu- tralized, they are replaced by grammatical combinations and new articulations. But only the pressure of time brings these changes about. To the degree that needs multiply, that affairs become complicated, that light is shed [knowledge is increased], language changes its character. It becomes more regular and less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It no longer speaks to the heart but to reason. For that very reason, accent diminishes, articulation increases. Language becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller and colder. 35

Increasing the precision of philosophical reason (the perfection of representational lan-

guage) also had the capability of destroying the 'natural' bases of society, and led to social

injustice and amorality. (WVe can read this as a possible way to explain the occurrence of

specific situations of profound human suffering within human history.) In other words, both fear and hope motivated this narrative: 'the fear of the corruption of nature by civilization

through its (perversion of) representational practices; and the desire to determine a natural basis for these practices and to perfect them.'36 Rousseau intimately linked language, music, and knowledge to social order, since they were what transformed (as a naturally based system of signs) humans from roaming individuals into an organized social com-

munity. At the same time as viewing progress of reason as a loss, he offered the possibility of social reconciliation, if the conditions of the origin-the immediacy of the original language-could be recovered and restored; it was music (specifically melody) that offered such a promise. I will return to this vision after first examining how music functioned in Rousseau's version of the origin.

To a great extent, Rousseau based his musical description of an original language on that of Condillac, who viewed the melodic inflections of the voice as a direct and natural link to the human passions:

Given the necessity of asking for and giving assistance, the first men studied this [natural] language; they thus learned to use it with greater skill; and the accents, which for them were initially only natural signs, gradually became artificial signs which they modified with different articulations. This likely explains why the prosody of many languages was a kind of song.37

34 THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Longuage, p. 56. 35 ROUSSEAU, 'Essay on the Origin of Languages', On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander

Gode, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 16; cited in Jacques DERRIDA, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 270-71.

36 THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Language, p. 45.




Rousseau's narrative described a similar role for music, in which 'language displays or assumes the shape of the passion it seeks to express, and conveys this passion in(to) the listener. [...] the voice figures passion by shaping sound into images and figures.' 38 In both versions, the musical language of the origin, as a naturally-based system of signs, provided the link by which humans were connected to both nature and culture. In this sense, it was analogous to Rameau's theory of the fundamental bass, which was an analogous link between 'natural' acoustics (the undivided string and, later, the corps sonore) and 'cultural' musical practice.39 The respective positions of Condillac and Rousseau to the fundamental

bass, however were opposed: Condillac accepted Rameau's theory and used it to support his genealogy of knowledge, whereas Rousseau used it to demonstrate the increasing decline of music that accompanied the loss of the original language and the progressive abstraction of language from its natural immediacy in musical gesture.

Rousseau's Essai tells the story of a loss. The development of languages through philosophy and reason

eclipsed the passions upon which original vocal sounds had been based. Similarly, harmony, with its calculated use of the physical proportions of the corps sonore in the form of chords, divorced music from the realm of the passions and thus from (its origin in) meaning. Rousseau's rejection of harmony as

abject calculation and proportion, alien to human concerns, thus echoes his earlier refusal to consider the first language as a language 'of Geometers': 'man did not begin by reasoning but by feeling' [Rous- seau, Essay, 245]. Whereas melody is linked to the energy of southern speech, harmony is associated with northern clarity-a product of the repressive work and physical needs of colder climates. By adopting harmony, music has lost touch with the origin of culture. [emphasis added].40

Interestingly enough, Thomas interprets Rousseau's opposition to Rameau as stemming from personal disputes and damaged pride, and implies that Rousseau's entire position on the loss of immediacy in philosophical language-represented by French, in contrast to

Italian which has maintained at least a fraction of original immediacy-was conceived in

response and opposition to Rameau. 4' This may help to explain why Rousseau and Condil-

lac differed on the issue of progress while following such a similar account of the origin.

Rousseau's vision of a recovery of the original immediacy of language presupposed his

concept of melody as a link with the natural inflections of emotional utterances:

Melody expresses the passions through the imitation of vocal inflections and accents; and these accents are closely tied, not to a nature out there in the world, but to the constitution of the human being as a

37 CONDILLAC, De Ianalyse du discourse, in: Charles Porset, ed., Varia linguistica, p. 202; cited in THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Language, p. 71.

38 THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Language, p. 107. 39 Thomas makes this connection, pp. 71-2, and pp. 76-7. 40 Ibid., p. 138.Thomas reads (implicitly) Rousseau as viewing harmony (analogous to grammar in language)

as attempting to compensate for the loss of immediacy resulting from the 'natural' decline of both in the northern climates.

41 This point is also made by Robert WOKLER, 'Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution', Studies in the Eighteenth Century, IV (1979), pp. 251-83.




participant in cultural structures and exchanges which ultimately revolve, Rousseau claims, around the emotions that first determined them. These vocalizations which, at the origin, were predisposed for emotive display (being the "direct" expression of the passions of the soul), continue to affect listeners when they are resurrected within the context of eighteenth-century musical practices. What were once the natural sounds of the passions -the "plaints," "the cries of suffering or of joy, threats, moans" -must now be re-created through the artifice of musical composition [...].42

This strange paradox-recreating the natural through artifice-immediately suggests Jacques Derrida's theory of the role of the 'supplement' in Rousseau's texts, which per- forms the double function of adding seemingly unnecessary additional material to an already unified whole (most often, 'nature') and at the same time proving that this material com-

pensates for some original lack which needs assistance to recover its perfection: 'It is indeed culture or cultivation that must supplement a deficient nature, a deficiency that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature.'43 In this particular case, a composed (artificial) discourse of music can overcome the cold, abstract alienation of northern language and music which develops 'naturally' over time, but is at the same time an unnecessary and imperfect imitation of the natural unity and perfection of the origin which is complete in itself. This is the ultimate paradox of Rousseau's narrative: 'nature' is not completely and perfectly natural.

By envisioning a type of musical discourse that attempted to signify affect through naturally- based inflections of the voice, Rousseau was joining the larger discourse describing music as a type of rhetoric: "[...] using its imitation of the passionate sounds of the human voice, music is able to construct a discourse, a musical 'oration."" If executed in accordance with natural contours, such a melody was able to overcome its status as artifice and recover the unity of the origin:

[...] music is able to transcend its own mimetic artifice by adopting those sounds which human beings naturally use to express suffering and joy: '[melody] not only imitates, it speaks' (Rousseau, p. 282). Melody has the power (the 'energy,' the 'force') to the authentic 'passionate accent' behind the artificial mask of the imitation: 'This is where song [acquires its] hold on sensitive hearts' (Rousseau, p. 282).4s

This view reflects Rousseau's belief in the close relationship between music, language, and social community, and the possibility for reconciliation that music could provide as a 'language' of humanity.

As much as the narratives of these philosophers diverged, however, the mode in which they were cast remained largely the same: differences and/or contradictions in contempo-

42 Ibid., p. 123. [emphasis added] 43 DERRIDA, OfGrammatology, p. 146. 44 THOMAS, Music and the Origins of Language, p. 124. 45 Ibid., pp. 124-5.




rary theory and practice were projected chronologically onto a natural origin and a sub-

sequent series of derivations, the significance of which lies in the status bestowed upon various stages of the genealogy-what the origin means, or what essence it transfers to

contemporary practice based upon continuous filiation.

III

For interpreting the history of musical thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

turies, I have found Foucault's notion of the 'Classical episteme' and its characteristics of

representation to be extremely suggestive; his brilliant synthesis of ideas from the domains

of philosophy, language, natural history (taxonomy) and the distribution of wealth offers a

means by which to understand how musical thought fits into a larger cultural context and

represents its subject matter according to similar modes and categories.

In particular, Foucault describes how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers of

language mythologized the origin and history of language(s) through a kind of genealogy. As a mode of explanation, genealogy projects a set of original roots derived over count-

less generations to produce the current distribution of languages and regional dialects. It

exemplifies the mythical dimension to rationalism, rather than an empirical historcism.

Language can now reveal its genealogy [...] [its] continuous filiation [...] At the top of this space, one would write the roots-very few in number-employed in all European and Oriental languages; below each root one could place the more complicated words derived from it, but taking care to place first those that are nearest to the roots, and to follow them in a sequence sufficiently tight for there to

be as small a distance as possible between each word in the series. In this way one would be able to constitute a number of perfect and exhaustive series, of absolutely continuous chains in which the

breaks, if there were any, would indicate the place of a word, a dialect, or a language no longer in existence. Once this vast, seamless expanse had been constituted, one would have a two-dimensional space that one could cross either on abscissae or on ordinates: vertically, one would have the complete filiation of each root; horizontally, one would have the words employed in any given language; the further

away one moved from the primitive roots, the more complicated-and no doubt more recent-would the languages defined by any transversal line become, but, at the same time, the more subtle and effica- cious would the words be as instruments for the analysis of representations. And thus superimposed, the historical space and the grid of thought would be exactly coincidental.46

The space he describes here, in other words, is the ordering of things simultaneously

according to a reasoned analysis of observations (arranging and representing things accord-

ing to an enumeration of all identities and differences) and an ordering of these analyzed

objects along a line proceeding from simple to complex: together, they produce a genea-

logical path (and an epistemology) by which all things can be connected in a single chain of

46 FOUCAULT, The Order of Things, pp. 108-9.




step-by-step derivations. This ordering of the world clearly suggests a teleology or sense of progress typical of the Enlightenment: the origin is primitive and natural, and each subsequent generation advances this natural state to the cultivated present. 4

Within the philosophy of language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, genealogy offered solutions to two related problems: first, it could account for the discrepancies between coexistent languages, and second, it would link current language practice to a historically (or mythically) distant point of origin and thus ground it-legitimize it-in Nature. Appropriating a similar genealogy would be significant for discourse on music: in addition to justifying the compositional techniques of the new instrumental style, these

aspects of music that were difficult to explain could be linked through the older, strict style to a mythical point of origin in Nature. This was especially true for discussions of musico

poetica, for while harmony was more easily shown to be based on natural mathematical

principles, 48 principles of composition typically associated with rhetoric (inventing, order-

ing, and elaborating a musical subject) were more difficult to justify. To achieve a natural status equivalent to harmony, discussions of these other issues sought an analogous foundation in nature, but a concept of nature residing at a distant origin. Most musicians and

philosophers of art, of course, acknowledged the artifice involved in composition-this was not yet the era of the concepts of organicism and natural genius. But artifice for its own sake was different from artifice grounded in nature: artifice with little resemblance to the natural order of things was still marginalized as inferior art. We should recall here the

growing distrust of figurative language voiced by philosophers, who probably objected to

figurative speech employed merely as artifice, that is, figures unconnected to their representations in any natural way. Another way of saying this is that compositional techniques needed to be grounded in a natural order discourse on the origin of language became for music a rhetoric of legitimacy.49 By drawing on this wider cultural context we can understand why eighteenth-century explanations of these issues followed such paths.

With this larger historical context as background, we are now in a much better position to explore how this mode of genealogy informed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

47 To phrase it another way, an historical explanation in the eighteenth century qualified as such if it distributed events and changes in a manner largely informed by the ways in which individuals traced their own family heritage--a matter of no small importance in an aristocratic age, when such matters determined major features of a person's life.The sense in which I use the term genealogy differs from uses by Nietzsche and Foucault who use it to describe the process of unmasking the cultural construction of concepts that mas- querade as absolute (timeless, universal) truths.

48 Thomas CHRISTENSEN, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, has explained with great insight Rameau's rational-empirical objectives and his indebtedness to Cartesian and Newtonian method.

49 On the role of rhetoric in legitimizing disciplines, see The Recovery of Rhetoric Persuasive Discourse and Disci- plinarity in the Human Sciences, ed. R. H. Roberts and J.M. M. Good, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1993.




writings on music, which sought natural origins for contemporary practice, and accounted for discrepancies by a process of reasoned derivation, thereby legitimizing both theory and

practice in Nature.50 And if we return to our initial questions about the mediating role of

language, we can begin to assess how the mode of explanation offered a similar solution in music: how can (musical) language mediate between a set of meanings considered to be universal and a dispersed geography of actual (musical) languages and local dialects? How do these meanings transcend chronological changes of (musical) grammar and idiom?

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this notion appeared in assertions about the ori-

gins of dissonance-what our empirical sensibilities might call myths of dissonance. As one

of the most fundamental categories of musical thought, writers understandably attempted at least a general sketch of its genealogy, which typically established a root source for all

subsequent figures of dissonance, and thus legitimized them on a natural basis. Articulat-

ing a pre-Rameau view of dissonance based largely upon counterpoint and thoroughbass

practice, Christoph Bernhard traces all dissonances of the free style back to their origins in

the passing tone (transitus) and the syncopation (ligatura or syncopatio) of the strict style:

[...] I divide them [dissonances] into fundamental figures and superficial figures. I call those figures fundamental which are to be found in fundamental composition, or in the old style, no less than in styles employed today. There are two such: ligatura and transitus.51

Bernhard goes on to enumerate his rather elaborate list of superficial figures, in each case

juxtaposing the freer form with an underlying, natural version (conforming to the rules of strict

counterpoint), which would employ only the ligatura and transitus. (See again, example 4.)

Interpreting dissonances according to his new harmonic principles, Jean-Philippe Rameau

found their origin through his fundamental bass. He proposed that the cadence parfaite

50 Although some readers might object that French aesthetics and the philosophy of language does not apply to German music writings, I would maintain that these issues were part of an international, learned discourse and that writers were often aware of these larger concerns even if they chose not to mention them in their

writings.Thomas asserts that the debates on language and its origins was not merely a French preoccupa- tion, though his own study focuses on French sources ('the question of origins has no national borders', 7); he provides a striking example from Leibniz's writings that invokes the exact notions of origin, affect, music, and language that were being discussed in France (Thomas, 17). Even in the absence of direct evidence,

however, I would still suggest the appropriateness of Foucault's genealogical model for German discourse

on music, simply because the notion that music was a kind of language imposed certain epistemological limits for musical concepts and thus delimited a contained field for discourse; in hermeneutics, this might be refered to as the cultural 'horizon' within which the discourse appeared, and in Foucault's approach to the

'archaeology of knowledge' this field would serve as the 'conditions of possibility' for musical thought.The crucial difference here is between an attempt to connect historical nodes with empirical evidence and an

attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of thought imposed by the underlying metaphors and networks of

categories it presupposes. 51 BERNHARD, Bericht, Chapter 10, pp. 5-7.The two fundamental figures mark a simplification from his earlier

Tractatus, in which he proposed four fundamental figures: transitus, quasi-transitus (accented passing tone), syncopotio, and quasi-syncopatio (anticipation of the note of resolution).




contained the origin of both the 'major' and 'minor' dissonances, generalizing from the leading tone to all dissonant tones that resolve up by step, and from the minor seventh above the dominant fundamental to all those that resolve down by step, and noting an

underlying affect for each:

Thus, since the major third is naturally lively and gay, everything which is major or augmented will have this property. Since the minor third is naturally tender and sad, everything which is minor or diminished will also have this property. Zarlino says about the progression of these thirds:

'The major seeks to become major, i.e., to rise, and the minor to fall [...]' [ZARLINO, Istitutioni, Part Ill, Chapter 10, p. 182].

From these two different progressions, we derive the progressions of all intervals that can be characterized as major, augmented, minor, or diminished, and we should accept as a general rule that everything which is major or augmented should rise, while everything which is minor or diminished should fall. [...] The seventh, formed by adding a minor third to the perfect chord of the dominant, forms a dissonance not only with this dominant but also with the major third of this same dominant, so that the major third forms a new dissonance here with regard to the added seventh. This major third is thus the origin of all the major dissonances and this seventh is the origin of all the minor dissonances, without exception. 52

This origin provided natural grounds for dissonance in that the cadence parfaite itself was the most natural of fundamental bass progressions, being derived from the overtone struc- ture of the perfect triad, itself given by nature.

Kimberger echoed Rameau's assertion using slightly different categories (essential and non- essential dissonances) but basing them still on the same progression of the fundamental bass.53 More important for Kirnberger was an assertion about dissonance in general: that the origin of music was free from dissonance, which was only admitted subsequently in careful increments:

52 See RAMEAU, Traite de I'harmonie reduite b ses principes naturels, Paris, Ballard, 1722; facsimile in jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764): Complete Theoretical Writings, ed. Erwin R. Jacobi, vol. I, American Institute of Musicol- ogy, 1967, 11, 3, pp. 55-6:'de sorte que la Tierce majeure 6tant naturellement vive & gaye, tout ce qui est majeur ou superflu doit avoir cette propriet6; & la Tierce mineure 6tant naturellement tendre & triste, tout ce qui est

mineur, ou diminu6 doit suivre 6galement cette propriet6. A I'6gard de la progression de ces

Tierces: Zarlin dit, *que leur extreemitez aiment naturellement 0' se porter vers la partie qui approche le plus de leur 6tre; de sorte que la majeure souhaite de devenir majeure, c'est o dire de

monter, & la mineure de descendre

[...]. La Septieme qui provient d'uneTierce mineure ajoit6e a son accord parfait, forme non seulement une dissonance avec elle, mais encore avec laTierce majeure; de sorte que cette Tierce devient dissonante par rapport a cette Septieme; la premiere 6tant I'origine de toutes les dissonances majeures; & I'autre celle de toutes les mineures, sans aucune exception.' Translation by Philip GOSSETT, Treatise on Harmony, New York, Dover, 1971, pp. 64-5.

53 Johann Philipp KIRNBERGER, Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik, vols. 1-2, Berlin and K6nigsberg, 1776-79, trans. by David Beach and Jurgen Thym as The Art of Strict Musical Composition, New Haven,Yale University Press, 1982. The essential seventh originates as a passing seventh within Rameau's cadence parfaite, and the non-essential seventh as a metric displacement of a tone in the same (or similar) progression. Kunst, Chap- ter 4. Koch affirms Kirnberger's concept of non-essential dissonance-as a 'displacement' from its 'proper position'-see KOCH, Versuch, II, Section 3, Chapter 1, ?96.




It is likely that music existed long before dissonance came into use. Since dissonances impair the har-

mony and are troublesome to the ear, those who first used them must have had exceptional reasons for preferring an imperfect to a perfect harmony.54

For Kimberger, it was important to assert that the strict style itself was derived from an

even more perfect nature, and he hypothesized such historical or mythical origins overtly. After establishing the origin, he then had to show how the genealogical process of deriva-

tion ensured that changes in the original gestures remained 'natural':

In older times chords were always composed entirely of consonant intervals or of notes that combined to form an agreeable sound. Gradually it became apparent that under certain conditions it would also be possible to employ dissonant intervals in chords, thereby frequently giving the melody a coherence and charm not possible with consonances alone. For this reason more and more chords have been assimilated into music.55

Emplotting the history of music through dissonance in the mode of genealogy, Kimberger

projected an analytical ordering into a historical narrative.

This same process of derivation has played a crucial role in discussions of dissonance within

the theory of musical-rhetorical figures, appearing in the treatises listed above. In particular, the figures of strict and free dissonance treatment were discussed explicitly by Bernhard and Mattheson, and implicitly by those not usually included in the musica poetica discourse, such as Heinichen, Kirnberger, and C.P. E. Bach.56 As has been well documented, the figures provided the bridge between an older strict style and a freer practice associated

with the recitative and the eighteenth-century galant style, implicitly asserting that the

latter was derived from the foundation (in 'natural' rules) of the former."7 For example, Bernhard's historically unprecedented presentation of two levels of musical 'language' that

link the strict and free styles by means of derivation (from the strict rules) has been sum-

marized succinctly by Hilse in the introduction to his translation:

54 KIRNBERGER, Die Kunst des reinen Sotzes in der Musik, 3, p. 27:'Es ist wahrscheinlich, daB man die Musik lange ausge&bt hat, ehe man auf den Gebrauch der DiBonanzen gekommen ist. Da sie die Harmonie vermindern, und in so fern dem Ohr beschwerlich sind, so massen die ersten Erfinder derselben besondere Grinde

gehabt haben, eine unvollkommene Harmonie der vollkommenen vorzuziehenK (Beach, 41). 55 KIRNBERGER, Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik, 1, 3, p. 26:'In den dltern Zeiten bestunden die Accorde

allezeit aus lauter consonirenden Intervallen, oder aus T6nen, die sich zusammen in einen angenehmen Klang vereinigten. Nach und nach merkte man, daB es m6glich sey, unter gewissen Bedingungen auch diBo- nirende Intervalle in den Accorden anzubringen, daB so gar die diBonirenden Accorde dem Gesang oft einen Zusammenhang und eine Annehmlichkeit geben, die durch blosse Consonanzen nicht zu erhalten ware. Daher sind immer mehrere Accorde in die Musik aufgenommen worden. (BeachTThym, p. 40, p. 41).

56 I include Heinichen, Kirnberger,

and C.P E. Bach here because they clearly discuss aspects of musical rhetoric even though they do not always do so by the corresponding Greek, Latin (and German) rhetorical terms.

57 Among those sources not already mentioned, Lorenzo BIANCONI, MUSIC in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 63; Hellmut FEDERHOFER,'Christoph Bernhards

Figurenlehre und die Dissonanz', Die Musikforschung, 42/2 (1989), pp. 110-27.




[...] the more recent innovations in musical style were all, essentially, extensions or elaborations of stylus gravis-that the latter is the foundation, as it were, for the former. Again and again in all his treatises, Bernhard demonstrates how passages replete with ornamentation can be stripped of the latter, leaving skeletons fully in accord with the older practice. The adjective "natural" (nat(rlich) is consistently applied to these 'unomamented versions,' as to stylus gravis in general, suggesting that it is this style which Nature, with its immutable acoustical laws, has, so to speak, "given" to the composer (or performer), and that anything added thereto constitutes, almost by definition, an "artifice".58

As is evident here, the strict style provided the older basis for the newer derivations, as we have seen above in examples 3 and 4. The essence of Nature which inhabited the older

style is evidence of the prevailing notions about the origins of language and music: that the

original designation was natural or designed by Nature, and that the subsequent derivations were a product of 'artifice,' although at the same time these derivations offered the

possibility of improvement if exercised in accordance with reasoned substitutions.

So far we have dealt with the fundamental figures. As men of former times did not depart from these, therefore these alone should be employed in their genres of composition. Since then, it has been observed that artful singers as well as instrumentalists, when such works were to be done, have digressed somewhat from the notes here and there, and thus have given cause to establish an agreeable kind of figure; for what can be sung with reasonable euphony might indeed be written down as well.

Accordingly, composers in the last epoch, already began to set down one thing or another which was unknown to men of former times, and which seemed unacceptable to the unenlightened, but charming to good ears and the musici. Until the art of music has attained such a height in our own day that it may indeed be compared to a rhetoric, in view of the multitude of figures, particularly in the newly founded and, up to this present moment, ever more embellished recitative style. Such figures and works, however, have the old masters as their foundation, and what cannot be excused through them must rightly be weeded out from composition as an abomination.59

This amounted to a vindication of the new expressive licenses of composers, for, as long as their expressive deviations could be grounded on strict rules through reasoned derivations (which also provided the background against which the expressive devices were per-

58 BERNHARD/HILSE,'The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard', p. 5. 59 BERNHARD, Bericht, p. 13:'1) BiBhero haben wir gehandelt die Figuras fundamentales. Wie nun die Alten von

denselben nicht geschritten also soil man auch derselben sich bey ihren Arten der Composition allein gebrau- chen. 2) Nachgehends hat man observiret, daB kOnstliche Singer auch Instrumentisten, wann dergleichen Sachen zu machen gewesen, von den Noten hier und dort etwas abgewichen, und also einige anmutige Art der Figuren zu erfinden AnlaB gegeben; denn was mit vernOnfftigen Wohl-Laut kan gesungen werden, mag man auch wohl setzen. 3) Dahero haben die Componisten in vorigem Seculo allbereits angefangen, aines und das andere zu setzen, was den vorigen unbekant, auch den Unverstdndigen unzul•ilich geschienen, guten Ohren aber und Musicis annehmlich gewesen. 4) BiB daB auff unsere Zeiten die Musico so hoch kommen, daB wegen Menge der Figuren, absonderlich aber in dem neu erfundenen und bisher immer mehr ausgezierten Stylo Recitativo, sie wohl einer Rhetorica zu vergleichen. 5) Solche Figuren und Sitze aber, haben die alten Componisten zu ihrem Grunde, und was durch solche nicht kann excusiret werden, dasselbige soil billich aus der Composition als ein Ungeheuer auBgemustert werden.' (Hilse, 91).




ceived), they could assume that such new innovations exemplified 'progress' in musical art that did not lose its 'natural' basis in the human emotions.

Additionally, the affect associations of the musical-rhetorical figures offered an appropriate example of an original and natural designation. If the 'modulation' of the voice in arias of the eighteenth century was understood to imitate or express (represent) particular passions or sentiments, as Mattheson (and others such as Rousseau) explicitly claimed, it was

because the original designations of these representations were analogous to those in lan-

guage, where signs were bonded by experiential association to a particular emotion, which

listeners recognized by association with their own proximity of experience. For example, a melody that momentarily ascended into a tenor's high register might represent intense

longing because an initial designation between high voice and intense longing was estab-

lished (a listener's response) not by true outward resemblance but by experiential associa-

tion. Bernhard articulated several of these 'natural' musical figures:

[...] one should represent speech in the most natural way possible. Thus one should render joyful things joyful, sorrowful things sorrowful, swift things swift, slow things slow [etc.]. In particular, that which is heightened in ordinary speech should be set high, that which passes unem-

phasized set low... Questions, according to common usage, are ended a step higher than the penultimate syllable... Musical repetition occurs when two successive utterances are similar in subject matter. Musical repetition a step higher occurs in connection with two or more successive questions, when

their words correspond in subject matter, and when the last seem to be more forceful than the first.60

These associations were grounded in the natural cries of human passion located chrono-

logically at a social 'origin,' as Rousseau had claimed.

For Mattheson, in particular, figures had an origin in nature because rhetoric itself was

natural, as proven by the use of figurative language and well-ordered speech by people untrained in traditional rhetoric:

Even in everyday speech nature itself teaches us the use of certain tropes, or figurative, allegorical mean-

ings of words, certain arguments or reasons, and how to maintain a certain order in them; irrespective of the orators who have never heard the least of a rhetorical rule or figure. And from this very natural

60 BERNHARD, Tractatus, p. 35:'[...] daB man die Rede aufs nat0rlichste exprimiren solle, 4) Daher soil man das freudige, freudig, das traurig, traurige, das geschwinde, geschwind, das langsame, langsam [etc.] machen. 5) Vornehmlich soil dasjenige, was in gemeiner Rede erhoben wird, hoch, das niedrige niedrig gesetzet werden [...]. 7) Die Fragen werden gemeinem Brauche nach am Ende eine Secunde h6her als die vorhergehende Sylbe gesetzt [...]. 9) Die Wiederhohlung der Noten hat statt, wenn die vorhergehenden und nachfolgen- den Reden einander in der Materie hnlich sind. 10) Die Wiederhohlung derer Noten eine Secunde h6her hat Platz in 2 oder mehr auffeinander folgenden Fragen und Gleichheit derWorte an der Materie, wenn die letztern hefftiger als die ersten zu seyn scheinen.' BERNHARD/HILSE,'The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard', The

Music Forum, 3 (1973), p I1II.




impulse, which entices us to produce everything with a good ordering and elegance, rules have finally been discovered and specified by ingenious minds. 61

The explanatory strategy involved rhetoric to validate musical practice because rhetoric itself had been discovered (speculated) at the origin, as a natural faculty of human beings. Such explanations used rhetoric, therefore, not simply because the verbal arts and the rhetorical tradition symbolized a venerable tradition and authority, but because rhetoric itself as a faculty was found at the origin and provided validation within a new Enlighten- ment epistemology, which relied less on tradition and more on the assertion of universals.

Certain patterns of the voice therefore depicted emotional states by virtue of association, which could be traced back through 'generations' of usage to the original, natural

language. These root-meanings of a musical vocabulary of affects were important for writers to enumerate, not for the sake of composers who probably had learned these associations

through imitation and models, but for symbolically linking such artifice to a coherent and

perhaps universal language of such musical utterances.

As an example, the musical-rhetorical figure of exclamatio could represent a moment of exclamation in a text with an appropriate musical setting (recall Walther's definition of the

ascending-sixth exclamatio); but this musical device itself would also be linked by resemblance or derivation to a gesture of exclamation within an original musical language. In other words, the choice of musical gesture here was not arbitrary but rather called upon the natural vocabulary of a common musical language. Here are two additional descrip- tions of what musical gestures depict exclamation:

MATTHESON: 'Should someone now suggest that, just as a twofold differentiation is made in the inter- rogatio, there is similarly a threefold differentiation in the exclamatio, they would, upon further examina- tion, be proven correct. The composer is also obliged to express such outbursts in as many different ways, even though they are indicated by one and the same sign (!). The first type consists of an astonish- ment, a joyous shout, or an encouraging command [...]. Here joy is always master and the ruling affec- tion. Therefore only lively and brisk musical expressions are used in such cases, and particularly large and leaping intervals. The second type of outburst or exclamatio expresses all kinds of desire and fervent longing, all pleading, beseeching, complaining, as well as frightening, fearing, dreading, etc. The latter require a melodic vehe- mence best expressed through rapid or at least brisk notes. However, sorrow and grief is the mother of longing and the other sentiments [...]. Therefore the composer will use uncommon intervals, now large ones, now small ones, according to the circumstances. At all times tenderness is of particular importance.

61 MATTHESON, II, 14, p. 6: 'So gar in den allergemeinesten Gespr-chen lehret uns die Natur selbst gewisse Tropos oder uneigentliche, verblmte Deutungen der

W6rter, gewisse Argumente oder GrOnde gebrau- chen, und in denselben eine geh6rige Ordnung zu halten; unangesehen die Redenden niemahls von einer rhetorischen Regel oder Figur das geringste geh6ret haben. Und eben aus diesem natirlichen Triebe des Verstandes, der uns locket, alles mit einer guten Ordnung und Zierlichkeit vorzubringen, sind endlich von sinnreichen Kapffen die Regeln entdecket und angegeben worden.' (Harriss, 470).




The third type of exclamatio consists of a veritable scream resulting from extreme dismay or astonish- ment because of horrifying or atrocious events frequently of the highest order of despair.... Here des-

peration reigns supreme, which therefore also permits a fallacious use of intervals which exhibit an

unruly character when brought together, such as simultaneous major and minor thirds. To accompany such vicious and scandalous screaming, one may choose a raging turmoil of fiddling and piping.'62

SCHEIBE: 'The first figure is the exclamatio. Its properties are as diverse as its origins, causes, or effects. It should be generally noted that it is commonly expressed through an ascending passage, using consonances in joyous events or affections and dissonances in sorrowful ones. This applies in regard to both melody and harmony. The exclamatio must always be distinctly discernible and clearly distinguish- able from the accompanying instruments. It should also be noted that, in passages expressing despair or other vehement passions, the exclamatio is best expressed through enharmonic melodic or harmonic

passages.

Similarly with the figures of ornamentation, frequently called the Spielmanieren (performed

figures) as distinguished from the Setzmanieren (composed figures),64 certain musical devices

were linked, through a (mythical) musical genealogy to gestures of an original musical lan-

guage, and usually expressed a certain affect. (The practice of ornamentation was especially

62 MATTHESON, Copellmeister, p. 193: 'Sollte nun wol iemand meinen, daB, gleichwie in den Fragen ein zweifacher Unterschied ist, also in den Ausrufungen ein dreifacher ware? welches sich doch, bey der Untersuchung, gantz richtig befindet, und den Componisten allerdings verpflichtet, sothane Ausbroche auch auf eben so

vielerley Weise zu bearbeiten, obgleich nur einerley Zeichen (!) dazu gebraucht wird. Die erst Art begreifft eine Berwunderung, einen freudigen Zuruf oder einen aufmunternden Befehl. [...] Und hiebey spielt die Freude allemahl Meister; sie ist die herrschende Leidenschafft: Daher denn lauter lebhaffte und hurtige Klangf0hrungen dabey gebraucht werden m0ssen; absonderlich aber grosse und weite Intervalle. Die zweite Art der Ausbrache oder Exclamationen hilt alles W(nschen und hertzliches Sehnen in sich; alle Bitten, Anrufungen, Klagen; auch Schreckni3, Grauen, Entsetzen, etc. Die letztern erfordern eine melodische Hefftigkeit, so am besten durch geschwinde oder doch hurtige Klinge auszudrocken stehet; das Sehnen aber und die Gbrigen Eigenschafften haben die Betrjbnif allemahl zur Mutter .... Da mOssen, nach Befinden der Umstinde, bald grosse, doch nicht gemeine, bald kleine und ausserordentliche Intervalle angebracht werden. Die Zdrtlichkeit herrschet darin vorz0glich. Die dritte Art der Ausruffungen gehet auf ein rechtes

Geschrey, so aus dusserster BestOrtzung, Erstaunung, aus schrecklichen, grdulichen VorfAllen entspringet, die den h6chsten Gipffel derVerzweiffelung offt ersteigen [...]. Hier ist nun lauter desperates Wesen, und darff man also auch lauter verworrene Intervalle, die eine unbdndige Eigenschafft wieder einander haben, als

grosse und kleineTertzen zusammen etc. auf die Bahn bringen, und zu dem ruchlosen, Ilsterlichen Geschrey, ein w0tendes GetOmmel, Gegeige und Gepfeiffe zur Begleitung wehlen.'

63 SCHEIBE, Critischer Musicus, Leipzig, 1745; facs. ed. Hildesheim, Olms, 1970, p. 686:'Die erste Figur ist also

der Ausruf (Exclamatio.) Die Eigenschaften desselben sind so verschieden, als die Ursachen, wodurch er entsteht, oder als die Wirkungen, die ihn hervorbringen. Inzwischen ist dieses Oberhaupt dabey zu merken, daB er insgemein aufwirts geschehen muB, und daB er bey freudigen Begebenheiten, oder GemOthsbewe-

gungen durch consonirende Sitze, bey traurigen aber durch dissonirende auszudrucken ist. Dieses ist nun, so

wohl in Ansehung der Melodie, als in Ansehung der Harmonie, zu verstehen. Durchaus aber muB er deutlich seyn, und sich von der Begleitung der Instrumente wohl unterscheiden. Bey derVerzweiflung und bey den

heftigsten Regungen ist noch zu merken, daB man den Ausruf am besten durch enarmonische Sitze, sie

migen in der Melodie, oder Harmonie, bestehen, ausdrocken kann.' 64 Marpurg used these terms to articulate this distinction in his Anleitung zum Clavierspielen; see Wayne PETTY,

'Compositional Techniques in the Keyboard Sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Reimagining the Founda- tions of a Musical Style', Ph.D. diss.:Yale University, 1995, p. 15.




in need of justification, for its use was frequently criticized for being excessive and unre- lated to the underlying affect; linking these figures to original gestures of a musical language provided a badly needed basis for them in Nature.) For instance, Mattheson describes two ornaments-accent and crossing-as gestures in a musical language, showing in each case a figured and an unfigured version:

The newest and nowadays very common use of this accent is however that it must serve, in playing as well as in singing, leaping from the fourth to the octave, upwards and downwards: especially since something sarcastic, obstinate, audacious and arrogant can be expressed very naturally thereby [...]. Hence let us further assume that the written form is perhaps this:

Example 5A A.

and if someone would want to perform the falling accent of the fourth, fifth and sixth, conditions per- mitting, it would sound approximately like this in performance:

Example 5B 8p

I must not pass silently by an as yet unmentioned theory of accents, which one could call crossings as reasonably as one called the former appoggiaturas. These accents or crossings consist of the following: when a descent of the fourth, fifth, or lower should occur, the upper note is given a fine and short appendage or supplement from the upper neighboring tone, which must not be written down but its optional, like all other ornaments, and is very pleasing to hear, especially in pieces which have something of plaintiveness or humility. For example, the written phrase would be this:

Example 5C C.

rSd iilmd4tbeniidral tugen, iftiU mi4 bcmned~tfaIbntIgrI, i.

Which was once performed so expressively by the famed Madame Keiser in the cathedral here that this beugen seemed almost visible, as if one could hear it with the eyes; simply because of the following small supplement and crossing accent:

Example 5D b.bugen, MUi beniE)idibig

S4 sillmigf~estsedyidral liugal, idf~wi~llsui~banedycidr~ bengor 1c.

The significance of the juxtaposition of figured and unfigured here is that these ornaments were like the figures of speech, which added a certain thought or feeling to an underlying idea without fundamentally changing it, and which were therefore like such devices in language in that they were natural to human speech, that they were used by both educated and uneducated. As figures of a musical language, then, they were universal and natural.

Interestingly, the symbolic importance of the origin exceeded expectations: within eighteenth-century theory in general, we can observe a mapping of categories based upon this narrative of origin and filiation that had been central in the long range impact of its




most treasured concepts. Specifically, it invokes the oppositions of norm - deviation and essential - non-essential, both of which are mapped onto the 'origin' and 'present' as follows:

origin present nature artifice norm deviation essential non-essential

It follows that these writers, prefigured by the philosophy of language, would attempt to articulate some original ground or source for the manifold vocabulary of musical objects. Such original forms would provide the ultimate norm from which all deviation would depart. Thus, we can infer all 'norms' proposed in musical discourse to be some kind of origin, either social or natural, which grounds the artifice of contemporary musical practice on a

natural foundation: basic dissonances, the perfect triad (and perfect cadence), even-length

phrases, diatonic harmony, etc.65 Moreover, the entire theory of musical figures, which

rests on a prior, literal level, also implicitly asserts that the basic rules of dissonance resolu-

tion, rhythmic/metric placement, and diminution supply a natural origin from which the

figures can depart for representation of affect. In all of the above cases, the meaning of musi-

cal practice implies at every moment the prior level or origin in order to achieve its expressive effectiveness. In much the same way, eighteenth-century language was also understood

against an implied background of a set of original roots, which designated a fundamental

and natural level of representation within the order of things.

These genealogies of music profoundly structured musical knowledge of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, and legitimized theory and practice through a thorough ground-

ing in Nature. Yet the imperative to locate certain aspects of musical rhetoric at the origin also resulted in a marginalization of these same issues within the emerging awareness of

periodicity and form. This accounts for the sense of'progress' that accompanies this Enlight- enment genealogy--musical derivations from the origin also represented successive steps of improvement that together were creating an increasingly autonomous realm for music.

(Note the heightened abstraction embodied in Forkel's synonymia, example 8: the mean-

ing no longer conjured an affect or represented a word of the text, but pointed to other

notes inside the increasingly closed context of the piece.) Instrumental music (Mattheson's

'daughter') was coming of age, and emerging into the world on its own terms, once nur-

tured by but no longer dependent upon its 'mother.'

65 Such distinctions motivate the dynamics of'rhythmic harmony' (Kirnberger, Koch) as discussed by Putnam ALDRICH, "'Rhythmic Harmony" as Taught by Johann Philipp Kirnberger', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: A Tribute to Karl Geiringer on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. H. C. Robbins Landon in collaboration with Roger E. Chapman, NewYork, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 37-52; and Floyd GRAVE,"'Rhythmic Harmony" in

Mozart', Music Review, 41/2 (1980), pp. 87-102.




Let us close by returning to Forkel's statement about music and language having tra- versed a common origin and path of derivation; the full context of those words includes the following continuation, which should now be read within the context of the preceding discussion:

In its genesis music, like language, is nothing other than the expression of a feeling through the passions of the tones. The two of them arise from a common source-sensation. When subsequently they separated, each on its own path became what it was capable of becoming--the one, the language of the intellect, and the other, the language of the heart. Yet there remained to them both so many signs of their common origin that even at their furthest remove they still speak to the understanding and the heart in similar ways. The derivation and multiplication of their expressions from the first utterances of the feelings, the construction and composition of those expressions with a view not only to awakening feelings or concepts, but also to awakening and communicating them precisely and without ambiguity: in brief, all the qualities that make the one into the consummate language of the understanding make the other similarly into the consummate language of the heart.66

Although inhabiting a later historical moment, and thus bringing us to the edge of the explicit musica poetica, Forkel's words nevertheless express largely the same idea that had capti- vated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imaginations, and do so with emphasis on the derivations within each domain that connect back to an origin which insures the natural- ness and purity of human expression.

66 FORKEL, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1, ?2, pp. 2-3: 'Musik ist in ihrer Entstehung, eben so wie die Sprache, nichts als tonleidenschaftlicher Ausdruck eines Gefuhls. Sie entspringen beyde aus einer gemeinschaftlichen Quelle, aus der Empfindung. Wenn sich in der Folge beyde trennten, jede auf ainem eigenen Wege das wurde, was sie werden konnte, nemlich die eine, Sprache des Geistes, und die andere, Sprache des Herzens, so haben sie doch beyde so viele Merkmale ihres gemeinschaftlichen Ursprungs Obrig behal- ten, daB sie auch sogar noch in ihrer weitesten Entfernung auf dhnliche Weise zum Verstande und zum Herzen reden. Die Ableitung und Vermehrung ihrer AusdrOcke aus den ersten Lauten der Empfindung, der Bau und die Zusammensetzung derselben, um Empfindungen oder Begriffe nicht nur zu wecken, sondern auch bestimmt und ohne alle Zweydeutigkeit zu wecken und mitzutheilen, kurz alle Eigenschaften, welche die eine zur vollkommenen Sprache des Verstandes machen, machen auch auf dhnliche Art die andere zur vollkommenen Sprache des Herzens.' Translation by Wye J. Allanbrook, in: Source Readings, pp. 1014-15.



Documents

Genealogy and Musica Poetica. In Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory