'Mutato semper habitu': Heinrich Schutz and the Culture of Rhetoric

Abstract

This article proposes a fundamental reappraisal of the scope and significance of rhetoric in early seventeenth-century compositional theory and practice. Moving beyond the inherited conception of musical rhetoric as a hermeneutic tool to match musical gestures with specific affective meanings, it reconstructs the discipline as the dominant intellectual force it was, and situates early seventeenth-century German music and music theory within this wider cultural domain. The conceptual world of the German musica poetica theorists around 1600 was shaped in particular by rhetorical procedures for verbal composition first explored by Erasmus of Rotterdam, who defined and popularized pervasive creative paradigms of variation and amplification. Reading the compositional practice of Heinrich Schutz and his contemporaries against the background of such an Erasmian procedural approach opens up fresh perspectives on the structural intricacies and expressive potency of this repertory.