Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Varwig, Bettina Gisela

Titel

Expressive forms: Rethinking rhetoric in the music of Heinrich Schuetz

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation develops a historically grounded analytical and interpretive model for investigating issues of form and expression in the music of Heinrich Schütz. These two categories are frequently regarded as essentially separate or separable in musical scholarship, with form designating an underlying static structure, and expression comprising any aspects beyond such cold, autonomous abstractions. I propose here to treat the two as more integrated and interdependent forces, by showing hog Schütz's musical designs rely on an array of formal procedures that themselves create compelling expressive trajectories, shaped both by specific poietic strategies and their reception in listening. My discussion of formal procedures in Heinrich Schütz's music is based on a fundamental rethinking of the seventeenth-century analogy between music and rhetoric, which has traditionally been interpreted as based on the notion of musical-rhetorical figures, presenting a convenient device for deciphering the meaning or affective content of certain localized musical gestures. I argue that the scope of rhetoric at the time reached far beyond this idea of superficial decoration, instead providing foundational procedures of variation and amplification for arranging a series of phrases into a coherent argument. This procedural thinking can be shown to underpin not only the music-theoretical discourse at the time, but also Schütz's approach to the challenge of formal design. The category of form is thereby reinstated as a dynamic and temporally based collection of compositional processes that become expressively charged through engaging a (historically situated) listener's memory and expectations as an individual musical design unfolds. Such a revised notion of form not only opens up fresh interpretive perspectives on the music of Heinrich Schütz, but can also serve to re-evaluate more generally the interconnected roles of form and expression in any musical experience.