Sunday,10:30 am–12:00
pm, W. L. Harkness 207
The nature of music has often led writers to make metaphorical comparisons with rhetoric and organicism. If there is a process by which music is made comprehensible through the development of an idea, then these metaphors are most appropriate.
Sometimes the development is so thorough that the original idea is transcended, in the end becoming something different than it had been before. Objectifying the manner in which this transcendence is achieved can lead to a better understanding and performance of a work and a more thorough appreciation of the transcendental idea. This paper examines some of the rhetorical and organic elements in works by Bach and analyses of Schenker and how these elements work together to create transcendence in both a musical and spiritual way.
The first part of the paper presents simple examples showing similarities in the rhetorical processes of a speech and a piece of music. In the musical example, the Sarabande to Bach’s E-flat major cello suite, an opening motive is transformed to such a degree that it transcends different levels of musical structure.
The second part of the paper shows how several elements of Schenker’s analysis of the first movement of a Haydn Piano Sonata in G minor (from his essay “On Organicism in Sonata Form”) can be understood as outgrowths of a rhetorical process. I conclude by quoting some passages from the Appendix to Free Composition that reflect some of Schenker’s notions of spiritual transcendence in music.
This paper presents a historically sanctioned argument that aims to place the episteme of our modern era of Science in perspective and, at least in the domain of Music, reconcile it with its presumed “opposite,” the Arts of Logos (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric and Dialectic). This line of reasoning promises to yield an optimistic postscript as it carries the potential of reconnecting much of 20th-century American Music Theory with its roots and raison d’être in the Humanities—keeping scientism at bay.
In outline, I would like to (1) offer a synoptic description of the medieval and renaissance paradigm of Rhetoric, including musical rhetoric, (2) show how a logico-poetic ars combinatoria functioned within that pre-Cartesian episteme, especially in conjunction with the techniques of artificial memory and the rhetorical “machines” of invention, (3) give an overview of the rhetorical concept of “Method,” including the system of the 14th-century Catholic mystic Ramon Lull whose ideas enjoyed a very influential 17th-century revival, and (4) consider how the search for the “Universal Language,” while firmly embedded in the traditions of the Arts of Logos, gradually yielded a decontextualized and mathematically abstract calculus; the familiar Combinatorics and Formal Logic, now attributed to Leibniz.