III.

23 Music
Alan Maddox and Jane W. Davidson

Recent years have seen a considerable amount of research on the expression of emotions in
early modern music, especially in relation to concepts of musical rhetoric and its associated
‘doctrine of the affections’.1 However, the use of music as a source of information about
emotions outside its own domain remains relatively little explored. The ways in which music
was understood to express emotion changed significantly throughout the period, and this is
reflected in surviving music notation and in treatises and other sources about musical
composition and performative practices.
The development of the printing press and a flourishing system of music education in many
churches and cathedrals allowed for the training of hundreds of singers and composers across
Europe. These musicians were highly sought-after, particularly in Italy, where churches and
aristocratic courts hired composers and teachers. A common, unifying musical language
emerged in the polyphonic style (a texture in which two or more lines of independent melody
weave simultaneously). By the second half of the sixteenth century, the work of composers such
as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/6–94), Orlande de Lassus [Orlando di Lasso]
(c. 1532–94), Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) and William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) tied
polyphony to liturgical function. Working with the same liturgical texts repeatedly, textual
constraint led these composers to harness musical techniques to provide subtle, largely
melodic effects to give emotional commentary on the words. As a result, the beautiful but
rather austere Counter-Reformation style of ‘strict’ polyphony came to represent the archetypal
sound of liturgical music, particularly in Catholic Europe and its dominions. Martin
Luther (1483–1546), too, enthusiastically encouraged music in worship, emphasizing its
affective power to engage believers, while his fellow reformer Jean Calvin (1509–64)
acknowledged music’s affective potency just as unequivocally by taking the opposite position,
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severely restricting the use of music in church, since it has

a secret and almost incredible power to move our hearts in one way or another. . . . As Saint Paul says, every evil word
corrupts good manners, but when it has the melody with it, it pierces the heart much more strongly and enters within; as
wine is poured into the cask with a funnel, so venom and corruption are distilled to the very depths of the heart by melody.2

As the period progressed, reclamation of ancient Greece and Rome literary and artistic works
and aesthetics coincided with the rise of humanism. This led to an extravagant flowering of
affective expression in secular music, especially in Italian madrigals of the sixteenth century.
Composers such as Cipriano de Rore (1516–65), Luca Marenzio (1553–99) and Carlo
Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613) pushed the technical resources of polyphony almost to breaking
point with increasingly mannerist harmonic devices and melodic ‘word painting’ figures
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 designed to reinforce every expressive nuance of the poetry.
The ensuing period of music production (c. 1600–1750) has retrospectively become
labelled as the Baroque period and it has until recently been distilled into a specific canon of
works by not much more than a handful of composers. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643),
Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643), Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), Antonio Vivaldi (1678–
1741), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) and his son Domenico (1685–1757) are regarded as
vitally important to understanding Italian Baroque music, whereas Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–
87), Marin Marais (1656–1728), François Couperin (1668–1733), and Jean-Philippe
Rameau (1683–1764) are seen to reflect the contrasting French style. Key Germans include
Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), Johann Hermann
Schein (1586–1630), Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767),
George Frideric Handel [Georg Friederich Händel] (1685–1759) and Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685–1750); and Henry Purcell (1659–95) is seen as the English representative of the
period. It is, of course, a male-dominated hegemonic culture that has its own history of
emergence and one that has received considerable criticism in recent study of musical canons
and retrospective understandings of musical history.3 Nonetheless, this canon serves to show
common features which subsequent composers and scholars have identified as characterizing
the period.
These works share several fundamental philosophical concerns relating to the expression of
feeling (or emotion), and are of vital interest in understanding the history of emotions at the
time. Musical effects were consciously aimed at the expression of feeling, and focused on
dramatic representation of this through the deployment of musical devices such as contrast,
with juxtaposition of soft and loud, slow and fast, and solo and ensemble, and so were also
characterized by the development of melody and accompanying harmony, rather than the
previous style employing many individual lines of polyphony. This change was itself a
consequence of a new consciousness of music as a form of rhetoric.
The new ‘monodic’ style of the seventeenth century was explicitly designed to facilitate a
kind of dramatic declamation in music, which above all, had the goal of moving the affections.
The idea that the content of the words is to drive affective delivery was promoted to the status
of a primary principle amongst the humanist scholars and musicians associated with the neo-
Platonic camerata of Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534–1612) and subsequently Jacopo Corsi (1561–
1602) at Florence. It was restated throughout the Baroque period as the highest objective of
both spoken oratory and music.
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Following the classical Greeks’ identification of rhetoric as the art of persuasion for the
orator, it became closely related to the development of opera as a powerful tool to develop
expressive communication using music. In the words of the humanist Girolamo Mei (1519–94),
When a musician . . . does not have the ability to bend the souls of listeners to where he wishes, his skill and knowledge
may be considered null and vain, because the discipline of music was instituted and counted among the liberal arts for no
other end.4

The new merger of the expression of feeling in music, with the singer as a powerful
‘persuader’ is well articulated in the preface to Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e
Clorinda from his Eighth Book of Madrigals (1638), in which he writes: ‘It has seemed to me
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 that the chief passions or affections of our mind are three in number, namely anger, equanimity
and humility. The best philosophers agree, and the very nature of our voice, with its high, low
and middle ranges, would indicate as much’.5 The Neapolitan theatre director and opera
impresario Andrea Perrucci, too, required that in acting, ‘the voice must not always be the
same, but must change according to the movements and passions of the soul . . . [W]ith various
sounds one seeks to move the affections of the audience’.6
The most influential singing teacher of the eighteenth century, Pierfrancesco Tosi (1654–
1732) made a particular point of the goal of moving the passions when discussing recitative in
the chamber style, which ‘according to the opinion of the most judicious, touches the heart
more than the others’.7 Just as the words are calculated to move the passions, so the delivery
must skilfully match the passions expressed in order to reinforce their effect on the listener:
This [kind of recitative] requires a more peculiar skill, by reason of the words which, being for the most part adapted to
move the most violent passions of the soul, oblige the master to give the scholar such a lively impression of them that he
may seem to be affected with them himself.8

It is this new aesthetic that was to dominate the period, impacting on instrumentalists too.
Writing in the preface to his volume of keyboard toccatas and partitas in 1614, Frescobaldi,
influential organist of St Peter’s in Rome, described the manner of performing his organ and
harpsichord pieces as being modelled on that of the then new monodic madrigals, in which
rhythm was taken flexibly ‘according to the affection of the music or the meaning of the word’.9
Nearly a century and half after Frescobaldi, the primacy of affective expression in music
was equally apparent. One of the most celebrated authors of the era was the flute player and
composer Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773). His views can be seen to represent ideas of
the past as well as to indicate how new trends were developing. Indeed, Quantz informed
musicians that the ‘orator and the musician have, at bottom, the same aim, . . . namely to make
themselves masters of the hearts of their listeners, to arouse or still their passions, and to
transport them now to this sentiment, now to that’.10 With the voice as the model,
instrumentalists were asked to imitate the sounds of the singer. Quantz thus disparaged the
virtuosity of violinists like the brilliant Italian Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and his imitators
who ‘seem to have little feeling for the good and true singing style’ and conversely advised
German instrumentalists to model their playing on ‘the good manner of singing’.11
Without question, the theoretical writings reveal that aesthetic interest was in moving the
affections and that the practice was to use singing and speaking as a model. Indeed, the music
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historian Claude Palisca identified the objective of expressing the affections as the only
characteristic that meaningfully connects the disparate music of the period.12 We cannot hear
them and interpret their emotional meanings in precisely the same ways as listeners did when
they were new but sources including music notation, treatises and accounts of performances
and audience responses to them provide insights into early modern emotions of a kind that
arguably cannot be accessed by other means.

Further reading
Bartel, D., Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of
Early Modern Emotions : An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pitt-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4767452.
Created from pitt-ebooks on 2020-01-03 13:12:07.
 Nebraska Press, 1997)
—a comprehensive study of the musical devices used by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German composers, by analogy
with the verbal ‘figures’ of rhetoric, to express the Affections (rationalized emotional states) in music.
Palisca, C.V., Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
—‘classic’ study of the theoretical sources that provided the intellectual foundation for discussions of music and emotion during
the early modern period.

Notes
1 See J. Mattheson (1681–1764) in his Neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713)
2 Preface to the Genevan Psalter (1542) (trans. adapted from that of O. Strunk in L. Treitler (ed.) Strunk’s Source
Readings in Music History (Revised ed., New York: Norton, 1998), 366).
3 S. McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002); McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012); S. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009)
4 V. Galilei, Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, (trans.) C.V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
225.
5 P. Weiss and R. Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, 2nd edn (Belmont: Thomson
Schirmer, 2008), 147.
6 A. Perrucci, Dell’arte rappresentativa premeditata, ed all’improviso (Napoli: Michele Luigi Mutio, 1699), 115–16.
Translated by A. Maddox.
7 P. Tosi, Observations on the Florid Song, or, Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers, (trans.) M. Galliard, 2nd
edn (London: n.p., 1743), 68.
8 Ibid., 67–8.
9 G. Frescobaldi, Toccate e partite d’intavolatura di cimbalo . . . Libro primo (1615) (Rome, 1637), (pref. and trans.) C.
MacClintock in Readings in the History of Music in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 133.
10 J.J. Quantz, On Playing the Flute, (trans.) E.R. Reilly (New York: Free Press, 1966), 119.
11 Ibid., 324, 342.
12 C.V. Palisca, Baroque Music, 3rd edn (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991), 4–5.
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Early Modern Emotions : An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pitt-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4767452.
Created from pitt-ebooks on 2020-01-03 13:12:07.