“Musica poetica”

Abstract

In the period between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, musica poetica meant studying composition, i.e. Kompositionslehre (Mattheson). The origin of the term can be found in the writings of Nikolaus Listenius (Musica, 1537). The new vision of the pedagogy of music (drawn from the writings of Burmeister, Lippius, Nucius, Kircher, Bernhard et al.), was centered on the concepts of baroque aesthetics: rhetoric, the affect theory, the world of symbol, and allegory, the rhetorical figure. Perpetuated in the eighteenth century in rhetoric-oriented theories (supported by Walther, Mattheson, Scheibe), musica poetica lasts about two centuries in German music theory and practice.