Imitation of latin rhetoric text-books in musica poetica’s gender and style conception

Abstract

The link between music and the arts of trivium can be traced back to an old tradition. However, music and word only approximated in a more systematic way in the writings of Lutheran theorists. Music came to be understood as a persuasive art, subject to grammatical and rhetorical rules. The transfer of these verbal principles to music composition happened in an ever more intense way between the 16th and the 18th Centuries. These transpositions formed the basis of a musical composition theory known in the Lutheran world as musica poetica. In this article, I concentrate in the musical-rhetoric gender and style theory, as understood in 17th and 18th Century textbooks. This will show how musica poetica came closer to rhetorical humanist ideals, and how this approximation helped to consolidate the idea of music as a language in the end of the 18th Century.