Rhetorical Elocution and its Relationship with Music Analysis in the Lutheran 1600s

Abstract

From a hermeneutic approach, this article explores the relationship between rhetorical elocution and musical analysis in the context of 17th-century musical production, highlighting how artistic expressions were used to disseminate values and ideas. It relates the poetic prescriptions and analysis contained in the treatise 'Musica Poetica' (1606) by Kapellmeister Joachim Burmeister to the homonymous motets 'In me transierunt irae tuae' by composers Orlando di Lasso (1562) and Jean Maillard (1551). Burmeister, like many other musicians of his time, advocated the analytical study of the current musical repertoire to understand the technical artifices, their forms of use, application possibilities, and effects. This proposal for musical analysis, from a historical and rhetorical perspective, contributes to the understanding of the ancient repertoire to which it refers and helps to overcome the anachronisms resulting from a still-recurrent presentist conception, in favor of an understanding that considers the original values of this repertoire, its references and uses, revealing not only what gave it value but also the conventions on which it was based and its usefulness in the social practices in which it was inserted. Above all, it enables us to reposition this repertoire in our own time, expanding the possibilities of understanding and performance.