Musik und Rhetorik im frühneuzeitlichen Frankreich – Diskussionsstand und Forschungsperspektiven

Abstract

Abstract The article provides a critical survey of the musicological literature on the relationship between rhetoric and music in early modern France. During the recent decades the topic aroused increasing interest in musical scholarship, especially regarding the repertory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet, the pertaining studies largely adopt methodologies which have been developed within German musicology in regard to primarily German Baroque music. This approach which aims to discern formal structures analogous to the rhetorical dispositio and to discern musico-rhetorical figures faces several problems when applied to French music. In contrast, the relation between rhetoric and music, as far as it is made concrete in the contemporary theoretical discourse, relates to a complex of rhythmic phenomena (the so-called mouvement) and the basically declamatory nature of (vocal) music. Furthermore, several recent studies have began to uncover how rhetorical concepts and ideas informed aesthetic stances and notes related to music on a more general level and in an often implicit way.