Argumentative patterns of musical discourse illustrated in emblematic creations of the German Baroque

Abstract

Musical rhetoric experienced a significant evolution during the Baroque period. Any musical genre was considered appropriate for the reproduction of emotional states, from cantata or oratory to works for keyboard instruments. Emotion was not considered a spontaneous emanation but was based on well-defined resources of the musical composition, including figures of sound, rhythm, meter, figures of tone, modulation, harmonic figures, or counterpoint development, articulation, and forms, and new figures, metaphors created to transmit a certain form of expression. The musical figures could also be based on numerical symbols or proportions. In order to promote rhetoric – a domain that any educated person knew – the musical Baroque reveals a systematization of speech and means of expression that led to the extreme, up to the creation of patterns, of standardized formulas.