Sixteenth-Century Studies

 

Rhetoric


WEB-RESOURCES

Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory (Loeb Edition online)

The Forest of Rhetoric


READING

Patrick McCreless, ‘Music and rRhetoric’ in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 847–79 (library)

Dietrich Bartel, Musica poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) (library)

Joachim Burmeister, Musical Poetics, edited and translated by Benito Rivera (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) (library)

Claude V. Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994): see ‘A Clarification of Musica Reservata’, 239–81, and ‘Ut oratoria musica: The Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism’,  282–311 (library)

Brian Vickers ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music’, Rhetorica, 2 (1984), 1–44 (jstor)


ESSAY TITLE

Discuss Brian Vickers's conclusion that rhetoric ‘is inalienably about communication, and can only use words, and meanings’. Does that view fully take account of late sixteenth-century music and musical discourse?