Le origini e gli influssi della melodia musicale

Abstract

Apart from intellectual training, the purpose of pedagogy is also effective, emotional, aesthetic, and social training. Art, and particularly the art of music in this field, plays an extraordinary role. Music, and especially musical melody, imitates, reproduces, and recalls various feelings and thus stimulates emotional-affective reactions. Affectivity and music (especially melody) are, in consequence, closely linked. Of the different means music has at its disposal, melody which seems to be able to express and stimulate affective reactions more directly and more profoundly than other musical elements, such as rhythm, harmony, or sound colour. In this article, I wish to demonstrate the origins of affective and ethical formation of musical melody from Antiquity to the Baroque period, when the theory of affectivity was born.