Expectation and Rhetoric

Rhetoric is a field of knowledge that exerted a strong influence on music treatises from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and after a hiatus of more than a century, has regained its importance for research into early music over the past few decades. Some of the early treatises adopt rhetorical terminology and use it to label musical phenomena. Other treatises are simply influenced by rhetorical discourse in their description of the composer's aim, the performer's task, and the listener's response. The extent to which rhetoric permeated the theoretical discourse on Renaissance and Baroque music is hardly a surprise, given the quantity of books on rhetoric circulating in print during those periods, and rhetoric's part in the seventeenth-century school curriculum. Not only the authors of treatises, but also professional musicians, became acquainted with the rudiments of rhetoric during their schooling as choir boys. That was probably the case with Henry Purcell.

Musicologists’ preoccupation with rhetoric varies both in method and in the degree to which it is pursued systematically. The point of departure of numerous influential and innovative studies of recent years is the thorough examination of a key term (or a group of terms) taken from early rhetoric treatises. This is usually done in order better to understand early modern concepts of creativity. Of the studies mentioned so far in this book, good examples are Dreyfus's work on inventio and Herissone's more recent exploration of Erasmian emulatio. In his extensive examination of historically informed performance, Bruce Haynes even argues for the exchange of the inadequate term “early music” for “rhetorical music.” By doing so, Haynes demonstrates that rhetoric is considered, by him and by many others, to be the core of Baroque aesthetic and the foremost feature in the definition of Baroque style.

Rhetoric, in the context of the present chapter, refers to the way in which music, and certain patterns in the music, is received by the listener. In treatises on general rhetoric, the receiver of the text plays a lead role. John Smith, for example, defines rhetoric as “a faculty by which we understand what will serve our turn concerning any subject to win belief in the hearer: hereby likewise the end of the discourse is set forward, to wit, the affecting of the heart with the sense of the matter in hand.”