4. Rhetoric in Music: notes to move the emotions
On the musical side people in the Renaissance found it was no longer to enough to say 'make your melody fits the words' in the old general and unspecified way; instead they started asking exactly what were the sounds which moved stones, which caused the walls of Jericho to fall, which stopped the jealous lover from burning down his friend's house? The idea was firmly established that a skilled rhetorician could sway his audience to any state of mind, so then was born the idea that if music could reflect the text well enough maybe it could have the same effects. This coincided with the efforts of reformers within the Catholic church to replace the existing elaborate muddle which mostly just showed how clever the composer was, with a clearer texture in which the various singers in a polyphonic piece were at least singing more-or-less the same words at the same time: Palestrina's 'Mass for Pope Marcellus' is one example often quoted in music histories. One leading centre for experiment was the noble academy at the court of Count Bardi in Florence known as the Camerata, with composers such as Caccini, Cavalieri and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer), whose produced the first operas with their new style of favolare in musica, 'telling a story in music', further developed in Venice where Claudio Monteverde was head of music and people like Heinrich Schütz came from Germany to study.
Every educated person had learned the basics of spoken rhetoric before he turned to music and the functions and practice of music corresponded to those of poetry and rhetoric; at the detailed level, the old teachers described the connection in phrasing, emphasis, breathing, length of syllable and note, ways of teaching and so on. Some remnants of this tradition can be traced in modern ’art’ singing, where it is sometimes possible to hear the words; but in 'art'-music generally ’expression’ has become a standard cliché, such that a composer can mark a piece with nothing more precise than 'con espressione' , and a teacher can say 'I can’t tell you what you're supposed to express - just play with expression'.
On the other hand, writers from Ganassi in the 16th century to Mattheson in the 18th make it quite clear that the criterion of a good instrumentalist was not only that the listeners recognised what specific emotion was being expressed, but that they even understood the individual words.
At the same time the languages of both speech and music have always been used at a more superficial level, simply to give pleasure to the ear or the mind: consensus and practice have swung like a pendulum between the two extremes - clarity versus simple beauty.
Music was taught in three stages of complexity:
And particularly at this third stage, the ornamenta orationis, the ornaments of speech, have their counterparts in music: and the musical performer had to recognise them to be able to bring out their effect in the musical performance:
There was a basic practice which everyone learned first, music in which everything was as expected with no surprises, like the oratio pura of speech:
And then there was music in which the master took licentiæ, artistic licence:
An example from a modern master which demonstrates all of this is Henry Mancini's music to the 'Pink Panther'.
Most remarked on of the musical 'figures of speech' was hypotyposis, the bringing to life of a story, which might use all the unexpected features at once - a sigh, sudden quick notes, a chromatic alteration, an uncomfortable leap, a dissonance handled irregularly - the mark of a Monteverde, a Schütz or a Matthew Locke...
So a practice was built up for phrase lengths, melody, harmony, form and so on, all dependent on ’text thinking’: and this practice is used even when you later compose without a text - a violin sonata is essentially the same thing as a solo madrigal, though without a text and with a larger range which reflects the physical capabilities of the instrument rather than of the voice.
Since this rhetorical tradition largely died out during the 19th century, the implications of all this have often not been clear in modern performances of music created in older times: but when they are understood, the performer
When looking at the musical notes, the performer notices first which are the basic consonant harmonies; and then where there are dissonances he emphasises these a little, so that the following consonance will be all the sweeter; where there are passaggi - groups of running notes, often four or eight, to link the main harmony notes - he makes these a little softer and a little shorter, so that the listener is clear about which is the main note, corresponding to the syllable in the text.
Remembering that the basic style of melody is moving by step, any leaps he sees will be slightly more articulated, in a hierarchy so that the greater the leap, the more a special point is made of it; similarly with any occasionally-altered note, flattened or sharpened - in a hierarchy depending how far from the basic scale they are. And again the same with any unusual rhythms. All these features will have been put there for a special effect by the composer, to reflect a feature of the text - whether it is an actual text written in near the notes, a text imagined by the composer, or the resonance of all the clichés floating around in the composer’s consciousness as he wrote an instrumental piece...
This can mean adopting the maxim that things must be ten times as large as life on stage, if they’re to appear life-size when they reach the listener: or it can mean adopting the harpsichord and organ player’s technique, of articulating by the use of silence - a note which comes after a longer pause has greater effect, even if it is no louder: you don’t need to shout out your great surprise, you can just keep silent a moment longer than anyone expects - - - and then whisper it ...
Everything is
done with decorum - appropriate to time and place, to company and situation.
As Vincenzo Galilei put it,
'go to the theatre... observe, when one quiet gentleman speaks with another, in what manner he speaks, how loudly, with what gestures, and how quickly or slowly... notice how the angry or excited man speaks, the married woman, the girl, the child, the lover speaking to his mistress ... examine them with care... to select the form which is fitting for the expression...'
The question of ’how far to go’ is one of personal judgement, of course: even among those who recognise the rhetorical basis of early music in their modern performances, there are the two extremes of ’reservata' and ’concitata' - the ’cool’ and the ’excitable’, and advocates of each find the other’s taste questionable.
And this dichotomy is part of the historical traditional too. To Monteverde’s generation, around 1600, the artist must be possessed of a genuine passion at the moment of creation, and the performer must recreate it in the moment of performance; but ’serious’ musicians poked fun at the comedians who took the dramatic element so far as to point upwards when they said heaven, and growl in their throats enough to frighten a child when they pronounced ’hell’. To Quanz, in the mid 18th century, the kind of expression aimed at was a polite public representation of something which once had been private and genuine - ’Can you imagine anything so disgusting as a display of real emotion?!’: while for his colleague at the same court, CPE Bach, in theory at least it was still the expression of genuine feelings which was the goal.
An emotional experience is the model for natural speech; natural speech is the model for rhetorical speech; rhetorical speech is the model for singing; and rhetorical singing is in its turn the model for playing: the whole way of singing, including the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, is applied when you play a part which has a text - or when you imitate another part which has. Remember, the listeners expect to be able to understand the words which the player pronounces.
Without a text, whether singing or playing, the performer applies the same habits which were built when using a text - consideration to the basic mood, the formation of the syllables, phrasing, pausing, accent, breathing, the performance of rhetorical figures.