Armstrong Atlantic State University
ENGLISH 5730 U/G
Dr. Richard Nordquist

"We then turned to the first of our topics for today, the application of ideas drawn from the discipline of rhetoric to music.  I gave a
brief account of Listenius's suggested categorization of music into
musica theoretica, musica practica, and musica poetica, and then drew on some of my own work in cross-domain mapping to clarify some of the implications of this innovation.   I first made the point that the field of rhetoric was familiar to those educated in the sixteenth century; rhetoric, in other words, was a relatively well-known domain. In contrast, music -- especially music construed as a set of well-ordered and specifiable relationships -- was relatively less well-known. Thus, in applying rhetoric to music, sixteenth-century writers were mapping knowledge from a familiar and fairly concrete domain (rhetoric) onto a less-familiar and abstract domain (music). This process of cross-domain mapping was important for those aspects of music that most resisted easy explanation, which included basic compositional strategies and the treatment of dissonance. In consequence, rhetorical figures came to serve both as rationale and mnemonic for a variety of musical strategies that might seem arbitrary to someone not familiar with music.  Rhetoric, as a well-structured and familiar domain distinct from music, thus provided a ready means for theorizing about musical organization. Rhetoric also offered a way to account for human musical practice that did not rely on number or proportion."
--Prof. Lawrence Zbikowski, Univ. of
   Chicago, Dept. of Music




RHETORICAL TERMS


RHETORICAL RESOURCES

rhetoric & music
updated 02 January 2005 

The ideas of rhetoric and music have long been linked. In the Medieval and Renaissance eras, many writers tried
to draw parallels between oratory
and music. This old idea,
originating in classical times,
later led to the Baroque
idea of the Doctrine of Affections.


LINKS


"Cultural Approaches to the Rhetorical
Analysis of Selected Music Videos," by
Karen Charles Rybacki and
Donald Jay Rybacki

"On Music and Words" (from
Lecture on Rhetoric), by Nietzsche (1871)

"The Perceptibility of Four
Music-Rhetorical Types," by David Huron et al (1997)

"Rhetoric and Baroque Opera Seria," by Erik T. Lam

Rhetoric of Reggae Music (course),
Dr. Alfred C. Snider


"Synechdoche in Music,"
by Robert Judd


"Towards a Theory of Musical Ekphrasis," 
by Siglind Bruhn