An invited lecture at the Colloquium of the Department of History, Bar-Ilan, December 2025) (originally in Hebrew)

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I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Professor Stuczynski for inviting me to speak before you today. I am always proud and happy to address forums of historians. In this particular case, I am even pleased to say that this lecture—precisely because I decided to prepare it especially for this occasion and not to base it on an already completed piece of research—led me down a path that surprised even me. From my perspective, this is of course a blessing, and for me it marks the beginning of a larger project. So I owe an additional debt of gratitude for this invitation.

Today’s lecture concerns the relationship between two domains of knowledge: rhetoric and music. Naturally, the angle from which I will examine this relationship is that of a third field—history—which is also what makes it relevant to this forum. In fact, the further I progressed in preparing the lecture, the clearer it became to me that although I will play excerpts from Telemann’s fantasies, these will really serve only as a case study. The historical issue at stake here is much broader.

The inspiration for this lecture derives quite explicitly from figures such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, and Frans Brüggen, [photos of the three on the slide] whom I will later present as representatives of the “later” of the two historical arenas I will be discussing: the “long” seventeenth century, and the mid-twentieth century. 

I agreed with Professor Stuczynski that the lecture would be accompanied by several musical demonstrations, and indeed, the object that interests me is the music itself. And although later on I will project a few yellowed pages that constitute my primary sources, our principal object will be music. I will therefore begin with three minutes of music, which I will play on a treble recorder.

But one moment before that: the philosophical question you may take home from the first part of the lecture is one that, as historians, it is important for us to ask—what is the historical source? Is the music what you will hear (the sounds themselves), or is the historical source the notation on the basis of which I produce those sounds (a 300-year-old sheet of paper, the kind of thing we historians like and readily identify as a “source”)?

I will play the opening movement (of two) from Fantasy No. 3 for solo flute by the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann. And on the slide, as promised, is the yellowed page with the notation of the piece. I will play only the first seven of the eleven staves on the page.

I will perform the fantasia on the recorder rather than on the transverse flute (for which it was originally written). Telemann knew the recorder, valued it, and wrote a great deal of music for it, more than any other composer. Moreover, the practice of playing a piece written for transverse flute on the recorder was a familiar one in the first half of the eighteenth century. It requires a simple operation known as transposition, and it constitutes a very minor—if any—violation of the composer’s intentions. For methodological reasons, I would like you to focus entirely on the sounds, and so I will darken the presentation for a moment. [play musical excerpt]

Music has always been regarded as a divided discipline. Aristotle, in a well-known passage from the Politics (Book VIII)—a passage that every music student encounters in the second or third session of an introductory music history course—states quite emphatically that the citizen ought to understand music, judge music, critique music, and perhaps even perform music during his education, but under no circumstances should he engage in musical performance as an adult free citizen. Performing music—especially in competitions and the like—is a demeaning profession for a free citizen.

So who, for Aristotle, is the musician? Is it the respectable citizen who understands music, or the common performer who debases himself in contests of singing and playing?

This split takes on different forms throughout history. As is well known, in the Middle Ages music was considered one of the four branches of the Quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. But what does the quadrivial side of music—proportions, numbers, divisions into scales and modes—have to do with the music played by a piper in a tavern, or by a trumpeter atop the city watchtower? What does the study of harmonic proportions and their representation on the monochord have to do with playing the vielle beside the king’s dining table, or with the chanting of hymns by a choir of monks?

Just as with the respectable citizen versus the debased professional performer, so too with the learned scholar who studies proportions between sounds versus the fiddler who entertains kings during their meals. Music is split between different registers, different domains, and it is often divided dichotomously: what is fitting for the citizen versus what is fitting for the slave; Apollonian versus Dionysian; learned versus entertaining.

In a lecture I gave last year in another historians' forum in our university—some of you were present—just under a year ago, I also spoke about the rise of the composer (what I called the Composer, with a capital C). The Composer did not always exist. In that lecture I showed that from roughly the twelfth century onward, we begin to see “composers,” and that these composers make choices—of one kind or another—that change the way music sounds stylistically. This is a significant process that cracked the divide between the learned musician and the practical musician. That crack allowed for a two-way flow that continued to widen with the onset of the early modern period: practical musicians became more learned, while scholars increasingly engaged with questions of practical music.

Where, then, should we place the Composer? The Composer is a distinctly Western figure who required, on the one hand, complete mastery of theory, but on the other hand was engaged in writing music that was sometimes purely entertaining. Not to mention the fact that around the same time, Oxford and Cambridge began conferring degrees in music—and here it was already customary that the final project, the one that demonstrated the candidate’s theoretical knowledge, was a musical composition! The Composer is both a descendant of the entertaining fiddler and a descendant of the speculative scholar.

It is relatively easy to grasp the idea of musica poetica when dealing with settings of Petrarch or Virgil—for example, Josquin’s Fama malum or Adrian Willaert’s Dulces Exuviae. 

When Willaert sets Dulces Exuviae from Virgil’s Aeneid, he determines how the text is delivered. Even if we momentarily set aside pitch, he determines rhythm! [demonstrate] He decides to repeat Accipite hanc animam; he slows down; he speeds up; he emphasizes. If this is not poetics, then what is poetics? If this is not rhetoric, then what is rhetoric?

It is somewhat more difficult to identify poetics in instrumental music—abstract music. If I now play you an instrumental piece by a contemporary of Willaert, where is the musica poetica there? Where can rhetorical structures be identified in instrumental music?

In this book, Burmeister describes various types of harmonic and melodic fragments and associates them with Greek names of rhetorical figures: hypallage, parresia, symblema, hyperbole, and so forth. For each such musical–rhetorical figure, he provides references, mainly drawn from the vocal music of Orlando di Lasso.

On page 63, on the slide, there is an explanation of palilogia, which occurs when we take a fragment and repeat it several times at the same pitch. Burmeister then provides an example, and writes: 'Simile est apud Orlandum in Mirabile mysterium'—a five-voice composition—and he quotes the example. Below, on p. 63 you can see that he begins to discuss climax, and if we move on to page 64, we can see that a “climax” occurs when an idea is repeated, but not at the same pitch—rather, at a different pitch.

And again, Burmeister provides references to works by Clemens non Papa, and of course Orlando di Lasso (note red highlighting). So his entire approach—analyzing patterns in masterworks, which parallels the analysis of patterns in exemplary speeches—really does offer scholars a historical model of rhetorical analysis through musical figures. True, Burmeister does not explicitly address a corpus of instrumental works, but his systematic classification of musical–rhetorical figures can quite easily be applied to the understanding of music without text.

For example, on this very page where we also see Burmeister's definition of hyperbole: 'Hyperbole est melodiae supra supermum ejus terminum superlatio'—that is, a melody that ascends beyond its upper limit.

Although this is originally a song with words, let us take the melody of “Jerusalem of Gold” without its text, and you will see how it contains a climax [demonstrate]—and another climax [demonstrate].

I will already say this now, as a kind of foreshadowing: McCreless notes that the golden age of conceptions linking rhetoric and music was in Germany from the sixteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. This implies that the phenomenon is historically bounded—both geographically and chronologically. What does not emerge, simply because McCreless does not address it, is when musicological research began to take an interest in this connection, why it began to do so, and, to some extent, why it came to seem self-evident that a book on the “history of music theory” should include a chapter devoted to the relationship between rhetoric and music.

And I will conclude this thought with a more explicit question: McCreless rightly claims that the golden age of this conception was in Germany between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—but was this also the golden age of writing about this relationship? Or do we perhaps assign it greater importance today than it had at the time?

It is no accident that I choose the word fabric, because the composer is less a weaver and more a tailor—someone who takes the cloth and stitches from it a garment that is more or less functional, with a precise cut and sensible proportions. That is composition. And do not miss the distinction between the Hebrew verb lehalḥin, which implies a kind of “magical” act—as if music were created ex nihilo—and the verb to compose, which suggests assembling or putting together.

Indeed, the main problem with Burmeister is that his approach analyzes music at the resolution of miniature figures, and does not address the large-scale gesture of the musical work. After all, every schoolchild in Burmeister’s time also knew that an orator must structure a speech, in broad terms, so as to persuade the listeners—and to do so, must follow five stages:

inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio.

That is, the speaker must formulate a claim and develop persuasive arguments (inventio), whether in support of the claim or in response to counterarguments.

The speaker must organize these arguments in a logical order—dispositio.

The speaker must style the arguments—elocutio—and here all the miniature figures can assist, but they are only a small part of the story.

Memoria, of course, concerns the memorization of the speech, and pronuntiatio its eloquent delivery to the audience.

But here is the point: memoria and pronuntiatio fall squarely within the territory that is usually associated with the performer rather than the composer.

The composer, by contrast, is typically concerned with inventio—the invention of musical ideas; with dispositio—the way these ideas are presented along the temporal axis; and with elocutio, which is somewhat harder to define musically. Is it articulation? Dynamics? It matters less. Let us say that elocutio lies in the space between composer and performer.

What is certain is that
after the dozens of figures operating on the small scale, and
after the five stages operating on a scale so large that it encompasses both composition and performance, we arrive at the internal division within dispositio, which is perhaps the level at which the connection between rhetoric and composition (instrumental composition no less than vocal) can be realized in the most immediate way.

According to the models of Cicero or Quintilian, a speech consists of six parts:

1. Exordium (opening)

2. Narratio

3. Divisio (or partitio or propositio)

4. Confirmatio

5. Confutatio, and

6. Peroratio (or conclusio)

After this theoretical background, I would like to return to Telemann’s Fantasias (1733), which are probably the most beloved works among both transverse flutists and recorder players. While Bach composed a single partita for solo transverse flute, Telemann composed twelve fantasias—and he is one of the very few composers who belongs in the highest league of Baroque composers. Today we value him less than Bach, but at the time no one thought to offer Bach the position of cantor at St Thomas Church in Leipzig before offering it to Telemann. Only when Telemann declined did they turn to Bach, who was effectively Plan B.

The idea of dividing Telemann’s fantasias according to such a Ciceronian/Quintilian model has already been implemented many times, and in fact quite a few early music performers attempt to understand Telemann’s works through this framework.

So now I will take the first fantasia and propose an analysis that follows very closely the analysis of a Dutch recorder player named Robert de Bree, who documented his analysis in his master’s thesis, which dealt with improvisation in Telemann’s time. In this respect, he differs from many performers who think along these lines but do not document it—they simply play it.

For de Bree, it is very clear what constitutes the Exordium (the light-blue section at the top) and what he calls the “true” Conclusio. He feels that the purple section is a “quasi-conclusio,” and that the yellow section is the “real” conclusio. So let us hear the exordium and then the "real" conclusio—and you will hear that it really does sound like an unqualified statement. [play "light-blue" and then straight to the "yellow"] In this form—with a very brief exordium and such a light, dance-like conclusio—the piece is rather dull. I "declare" something, and then I dance. There is no real conflict here, no accumulated tension that the dance then “resolves” There is no argument, hence it is not persuasive, as there is nothing to be persuasive about!

In other words, something is missing here of the coherence of the Ciceronian/Quintilian model—something of the inevitable flow from exordium to narratio, from narratio to confirmatio, from confutatio to conclusio. That sense of progression is absent. So first of all, de Bree says—and rightly so—that after the very short exordium, we flow into the narratio (in green), which already contains a kind of opposition at this early stage, even though the piece has not really begun ye [play "light-blue" and then proceed to "green"].

This section ends with what is called a “cadence on the dominant,” and in truth the comparison between a dominant cadence and a rhetorical question is an easy one to make. De Bree concludes this paragraph by explicitly comparing a dominant cadence—an "open V" in de Bree's words—to a rhetorical question. 

What comes next? The propositio—the body of the speech. And here we indeed arrive at the most sophisticated part of the piece: the fugue. [Play the "orange" two-voice fugue and highlight two-part texture on a single instrument]

Once again, de Bree hesitates, and he argues that the red section between the orange propositio and the purple conclusio functions quite effectively as a confutatio-combined-with-a-confirmatio. If the light-blue exordium ended like this:

then the beginning of the confutatio almost quotes the exordium:

And here—immediately after this quotation—Telemann quotes it once more, but alters a single pitch. Without going into overly technical terminology, one can hear this as a kind of casting doubt on the confident quotation that opened the confutatio.

And so we continue… after casting doubt, Telemann asks us: where might this doubt lead?

And where can it lead? To another version of the claim presented in the exordium—but now higher (I imagine Burmeister would have called this a “climax.”)

And again, doubt…

But, again, where might this doubt lead?

This doubt leaves us with an open question.
Not only do I experience it as an open question; de Bree identifies it as such as well. And with this tension in place, we can move on to the peroratio or conclusio.

First, an apparent conclusio [play "purple"] and then what he calls "the real conclusio"—with the dance that resolves the tension: the yellow dance movement that we heard earlier, which releases the tension [play the "yellow" conclusio].

Thus, the complete model here includes at least five (if not six) components of the classical dispositio:

– Exordium, in light blue
– Narratio, in green
– Propositio, in orange
– Confutatio and confirmatio combined, in red
– A quasi-conclusio in purple, followed by the true conclusio in yellow

One could, of course, identify additional ideas here, propose further interpretations, or argue with de Bree. What is certain is that there are works that fit the classical dispositio model “not too badly at all.” Now let us return to the fantasia with which I began.

Fantasia No. 3 opens with something to which the label “exordium” fits like a glove:

There is a four-chord harmonic progression, a clearly defined musical idea, and above all, it ends with something like a question mark. Something has to happen here…

What follows sounds like a narratio—or perhaps a propositio:

But what happens now?

What is this? The exordium again?

And twice over? In what Burmeister would have called a “climax”? This idea of material appearing at a certain pitch level and then reappearing higher already occurred in the confutatio of Fantasia No. 1, and it happens here as well. So are we in the confutatio?

And if we are in the confutatio, why does it sound so similar to the exordium? Perhaps this is actually the confirmatio?

For the sake of consistency, let us say that the climax we see here probably signifies the confutatio (after all, a climax also appeared in de Bree’s analysis of Fantasia 1), and that the following section should therefore be the confirmatio. I will continue with into whatever follows here (with the same red color on the slide), since earlier we did not distinguish between the colors of the confutatio and the confirmatio. Whatever it may be—Telemann returns to the fast section…

Something interesting happens here, because we return not only to the musical idea that was presented earlier, but also to the same key. What begins now may therefore be best understood as a conclusio or peroratio—we repeat the central argument in the most persuasive manner.

A literal repetition is one of the most powerful rhetorical devices. 

Remember what I am saying: 

A literal repetition is one of the most powerful rhetorical devices. 

For the moment, let us set aside the short dance that closes the piece… Perhaps here too the dance can be understood as a kind of “true conclusio.” What we see here, then, are two fantasias by Telemann, both of which can—at least ostensibly—be analyzed according to the classical dispositio model.

The questions
– What do we gain from analyzing a musical work according to a rhetorical model? and
– Can the rhetorical model also serve as a model for composing music—that is, is the model not only descriptive but also prescriptive?

I would like to set both of these questions aside for the moment and instead speak about the way rhetoric was adopted by the figures I mentioned earlier as my sources of inspiration:
Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, and Frans Brüggen.

This trio is almost of the same generation—born in 1928, 1929, and 1934—and all three passed away in the previous decade (2012, 2014, 2016).

So we leap from 1733 to the early 1960s, that is, roughly 220 years forward. This is the moment when Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen burst onto the scene as musicians invited to perform throughout Europe and to record—incidentally, all three for the same German label, Das Alte Werk, which belonged to Telefunken and specialized in early music.

Each of these three great figures was a performer on a historical instrument: recorder, cello/viola da gamba, harpsichord/organ. Each of them also arrived, at a relatively early stage, at the realization that in order to realize his musical ideas he needed to lead his own ensemble. Thus the Concentus Musicus Wien, the Leonhardt Consort, and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century were founded.

All three of these figures, each in his own way, were also part of the leadership of a revolution in the 1960s and 1970s—a rather complex revolution that operated differently in several arenas. Yet Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen carried out their revolution in a continental manner, while bearing a well-argued philosophical and aesthetic banner in which rhetoric played a central role. All three articulated their views with great eloquence, formulating—in books, in liner notes to recordings, or in lectures for the general public—the ideas underlying the new way in which they performed music written up to around 1800.

Harnoncourt, Austrian, born in 1929 and deceased in 2016, adopted from Bach’s German contemporary, the theorist Johann Mattheson, the term mentioned in the lecture abstract: Klangrede—speech in sound. His classic book is entitled Music as Speech in Sound (Musik als Klangrede). Harnoncourt was probably the most eloquent of the three. Although he was an outstanding cellist and viola da gamba player, he was not a soloist, and he was also the first to abandon his instrument and concentrate on conducting.

A Catholic—and in fact of noble descent (as I will mention later)—he was extremely charismatic and a much-admired lecturer in early music courses. Today, the University of Linz in Austria hosts a small institute dedicated to the study of his musical legacy and archive. He was the most active of the three in disseminating the ideology of the revolution: through his ensemble, through intensive teaching in summer courses, and from a certain point onward also through conducting modern orchestras. His authoritative personality, together with the fact that he eventually became accepted even by those parts of the musical establishment against which he had initially rebelled, made him a more controversial figure within the early music community. Nevertheless, his lectures and essays from the 1960s and 1970s—collected in Musik als Klangrede—are still regarded as foundational texts of historically informed performance.

Harnoncourt writes as follows:

Jedem Instrumentalisten im 17. und in einem Großteil des 18. Jahrhunderts war völlig klar, daß er stets sprechend zu musizieren hatte. Die Rhetorik war ja, mit all ihrer komplizierten Fachsprache, selbstverständliches Unterrichtsfach jeder Schule, gehörte also, ebenso wie die Musik, zur Allgemeinbildung. Da nun die Affektenlehre von Anfang an ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der Barockmusik war - es galt, sich selbst in bestimmte Affekte zu versetzen, um sie auf die Zuhörer übertragen zu können -, war die Verbindung zwischen Musik und Redekunst naturgegeben. Wenn auch die Musik gleichsam eine internationale Sprache war, wie auch die Pantomime oder “Geberdenkunst”, so erkennt man doch deutlich den unterschiedlichen Sprachrhythmus der Nationen, der sicherlich zur Bildung verschiedener Stile beigetragen hat.

Every instrumentalist in the seventeenth century, and in much of the eighteenth, was fully aware that he had to play in a speaking manner. Rhetoric, with all its complicated technical terminology, was of course a standard subject in every school and thus belonged—like music itself—to general education. Since the doctrine of the affections was from the outset an essential component of Baroque music—performers had to place themselves in specific emotional states in order to transmit them to listeners—the connection between music and the art of oratory was natural. And although music was, in a sense, an international language, like pantomime or the “art of gesture,” one can nonetheless clearly discern the different speech rhythms of nations, which undoubtedly contributed to the formation of different styles.

Leonhardt, one year older than Harnoncourt (born 1928), died in 2012. Although he led his own ensemble, the Leonhardt Consort, he was not a conductor in the romantic or modern sense of the word. A reserved Protestant, he held until his last day a position as organist at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and he was considered the most “profound” harpsichordist of the second half of the twentieth century. He recorded around 200 albums. He was not a showman, he did not speak much, yet the admiration for him was universal.

A text he wrote for the booklet accompanying his 1977 recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos is often quoted as a kind of personal credo. Leonhardt’s student, the harpsichordist Davitt Moroney, published a critical edition of this short text in 2013, after Leonhardt’s death. The text was written in German, and Moroney published it in the journal Early Music with a new and critical English translation. The first paragraph reads as follows 

Wenn man zu überzeugen vermag, macht das Dargebotene einen authentischen Eindruck. Wenn man sich bemüht, authentisch zu sein, wird man nie überzeugen. Nur der Interpret, der—ganz allgemein—versucht, in die Gedankenwelt eines großen Geistes und dessen Epoche einzudringen, kann, wenn er sich eine adäquate Technik angeeignet hat und selber das Geheimnis einer Begabung besitzt, den Eindruck erwecken, Wahres und Echtes zu bieten.

If one is able to persuade, what is offered creates an authentic impression. If one is striving to be authentic, one will never persuade. Only those performers who attempt—in general—to penetrate into the world of ideas of a great mind and of his epoch can, if they have acquired a suitable technique and possess that mysterious thing, natural talent, arouse that impression of offering something true and sincere.

Although Leonhardt does not mention the word “rhetoric,” for his student this paragraph deals, directly and unambiguously, with rhetoric. See Moroney’s interpretation and commentary. I will read you the beginning of Moroney’s commentary on the first two sentences . Note the English—this is Moroney’s translation—and his focus on “persuasion” and on “what is offered,” the offering, which I was forced to translate as “the result.” Moroney explains it as follows:

“In the first paragraph Leonhardt refers to the art of elegant persuasion, the art of rhetoric as practiced by orators since ancient Greek times and transmitted through Cicero and Quintilian to the humanist authors of European rhetoric manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (especially Erasmus of Rotterdam). Erasmus came up frequently in private conversations with Leonhardt, and Leonhardt was proud to have received, together with Harnoncourt, the Erasmus Prize in 1980 for his contribution to European culture. The art [of rhetoric] exists through the ‘offering’ of something to readers or listeners (that is, the public). What is ‘offered’ may be not only verbal (written or spoken) but also— as Leonhardt implies—musical. Here he uses rhetoric both verbally (in what he wrote) and non-verbally (in his recording). Whatever is ‘offered’ and heard must contain not only good ideas and organization (the domain of the writer or composer) but also good delivery (declamation), which is the domain of the speaker or performer.”

Brüggen was the youngest of the trio and also the greatest showman. He is in fact considered the father of artistic recorder playing. The phenomenon of the professional recorder player—the conservatory professor whose primary instrument is the recorder—is something he initiated, and many recorder players believe that there has never been another at his level. Personally, however, around 1980 he stopped playing the recorder and focused on conducting the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, which he founded in Amsterdam.

In 2012, in an interview with the Chopin Institute (the video is available on YouTube), Brüggen directly linked the rhetorical background of education in a given historical context with the relevance of the performance style of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. That is, Brüggen argued that his ensemble was suited to performing repertoire from periods in which knowledge of rhetoric was commonly shared. He said:

[In] the course of the years, we became more and more aware that the rhetorical traditions of the 18th century, let us say when the Latin school was still very much there and pupils at school were trained in how to deliver a good speech according to certain rhetorical rules and translated into music on the same principles, actually. [We] found that in the first half of the 19th century actually those old rules and the knowledge about rhetoric was still very much there. So we considered ourselves allowed to move into the 19th century as long as those rules still apply. One could say that those rules slowly but securely vanished together with the end of the Latin education around the middle of the 19th century. Then it really stopped. So also the repertoire which we play of the 19th century goes not further than that[.]

Thus, the revolutionary principle shared by all three of our protagonists is that whoever understands rhetoric can understand early music and can perform it. This revolutionary principle was summarized and became the basis for a major and highly readable theoretical work: the book by one of Brüggen’s most prominent students, the American oboist Bruce Haynes, entitled The End of Early Music (Oxford University Press, 2007). The title The End of Early Music sounds like an attack on early music performance, but in fact it is a 300-page pamphlet in praise of Brüggen’s revolution and that of his colleagues. 

This principle, including the decline Brüggen describes, in fact points to a significant historical narrative.

If we said that the conception of music as a rhetorical art emerged toward the end of the sixteenth century and was adopted primarily in the German-speaking world, then this conception declined during the age of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Romantic philosophy, and, in our context, modern philology all changed the way people articulated themselves and the way they sought to argue and substantiate claims. The musical consequences were far-reaching in every possible respect: a profound shift occurred in reliance on a canon of past works—composers were expected to write timeless works, and if possible, everyone preferred that they be dead composers from the past; instruments changed, concert halls changed, audience sizes changed, the economic model behind musical creation changed, the training of musicians changed, reliance on notation changed. And, of course, the connection to rhetoric loosened and perhaps even broke entirely.

Paradoxically, the moment considered the zero point of interest in early music—Mendelssohn’s performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829—was also the moment when nineteenth-century performance values, whose reliance on rhetoric was already weaker, began to be applied to rhetorical music. Incidentally, in The End of Early Music, Bruce Haynes proposes calling the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “rhetorical music”—rhetoric is so central to his understanding of the Baroque that he uses it to define the entire period.

Thus, in a continuous process from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth, the way “rhetorical music” was understood became increasingly corrupted, relying more and more on tradition and less and less on an understanding of rhetorical structures. When Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen inhaled the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, they sought to negate this ossified tradition. The reintroduction of rhetoric was a subversive act.

A few years ago I published an article in Zmanim in which I attempted to position Mendelssohn between two camps of musical performance. I gave you a copy of the article so that you could read about the differences between the traditional approach to performance—that is, the approach that crystallized during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth and remains dominant—and the historically informed approach. Although one can find early traces of the latter already in the eighteenth century, it truly broke through in the 1960s, with Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen as its key “continental” figures.

In broad terms, they sought to undo the nineteenth-century tradition. They aimed to perform music on period-appropriate instruments, using period-appropriate techniques (how to hold the bow, whether to hold the violin under the chin or against the chest), to ornament and embellish music in ways appropriate to the period, to read period notation (for example, from facsimiles of 200-year-old editions), to understand the philosophy of the period (as Leonhardt wrote: “performers who attempt, in general, to penetrate into the world of ideas of a great mind and of his epoch”—that is historically informed performance!), and to base every possible decision on historical sources.

Returning to Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen, the revolution they led was astonishing:
each of the three began editing music anew;
they studied musical and rhetorical treatises of the past in order to understand early works in their historical context;
each of them attracted hundreds of students;
they began retrieving historical instruments from museums;
they collaborated with instrument makers who studied museum instruments and built new ones based on them.

And like any revolutionary movement, they were driven by rebellion and by the rejection of the existing establishment, joining forces with parallel movements.

When the Concertgebouw—the most important and prestigious concert hall in Amsterdam, home to the Netherlands’ leading orchestra—was searching for a new music director in the late 1960s, Brüggen joined a guild of avant-garde composers, and, after not a little drinking, they disrupted a Concertgebouw concert and forced the orchestra’s management into a discussion in the foyer. There Brüggen declared: “The Mozart you play is a lie, from A to Z.” That is to say, the way you—the traditionalists—interpret Mozart’s notation is disconnected from the rhetorical foundation that the composer used when encoding his music on paper.

Harnoncourt, who was nothing less than a cellist in the Vienna Symphony, severed himself from his institutional lifeline, founded an ensemble specializing in early music, and later formulated—in Musik als Klangrede, Music as Speech in Sound—the very heart of the revolution, saturated with the idea of reviving rhetoric.

There is much more to say about this movement, which outside the continent was led by figures no less fascinating than the Englishman David Munrow and the American Thomas Binkley. For those interested, I have included in the bibliography an article in which I focus specifically on Munrow and Binkley as revolutionaries in the way recorded “albums” of early music were conceived, and on how they created concept albums influenced by rock music within the framework of early music. Just to give a sense: the ISF project I proposed and which is currently under review demonstrates the mutual influence between popular music and early music at that time—so it should be clear that the kick against the classical establishment came from every direction they thought would hurt.

Among the many aspects in which Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen were perceived as revolutionaries, the call to return to rhetorical principles was perhaps the most fundamental and foundational of all. This call, coming from performers themselves, was one of the major forces that propelled modern research on the subject. Indeed, quite a few of the scholars who engaged with this topic divided their time between the archive and the stage (Dietrich Bartel, Judy Tarling, Bruce Haynes).

If we succeed in identifying the scholarly motivation to ground musical understanding in some ancient paradigm—rhetoric, for example—it is incumbent upon us to examine whether this motivation also leads us to cut corners. Let us therefore return one last time to Telemann and his Fantasias.

We heard two works for which the rhetorical dispositio model functions well. (I can tell you that this model can be applied to quite a number of Telemann’s Fantasias.) However, when examined from standard analytical–musical perspectives—musical material and what is usually called “harmonic motion”—the musical form of these two works is entirely different.

I therefore think that one of the things suggested by the tentative analysis I am proposing—and I must note that here there is, if not a scholarly novelty, then at least a certain surprise for practitioners of historically informed performance—is that a rhetorical reading of early eighteenth-century music contributes to the analysis of a single stratum of the work, which is not the musical-formal stratum. Moreover, the illusion that rhetorical analysis might replace musical analysis of music from this period has the potential to give rise—and indeed has given rise—to the illusion that rhetorical dispositio allows us to compose music. That is, some have argued that rhetorical dispositio, in its musical application, may be prescriptive rather than merely descriptive.

What I wish to argue is that the dispositio model can indeed serve as a guiding line in composition, but that the stratum it describes is first and foremost how music is perceived. Dispositio is a model of listening.

I would now like to demonstrate this claim in a somewhat elaborate manner, using Toccata no. 9 by Girolamo Frescobaldi, from his first book of toccatas of 1637. Frescobaldi is considered the greatest composer of keyboard music in the first half of the seventeenth century, and he wrote collections in nearly every keyboard genre of his time. The toccatas were regarded as highly innovative, primarily because of their speech-like, improvisatory quality—they are his most rhetorical music. Moreover, toccatas are by nature constructed as chains of short sections, sometimes four, sometimes six or seven. Let us hear a performance—this time not mine, but a computer-generated one—of this ninth toccata, and I will accompany it with a reading according to the rhetorical model.

At first glance, then, we appear to have a work—a Frescobaldi toccata—to which the dispositio model applies almost perfectly. But here I must confess to an inelegant trick: I changed the order of the sections from that found in the original source.

Frescobaldi actually wrote the toccata as seven sections in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I took the toccata and reordered the sections, not in an attempt to force them into the dispositio model, but simply to ensure that the flow between sections made sense in terms of what we call “harmonic scheme” (so that one section would not end in key X while the next begins in key Y). I was able, quite easily, to rearrange the sections so that they appeared in the order 6, 3, 7, 1, 4, 5, 2. And indeed, section 6 followed by section 3 truly forms a convincing exordium; section 5 really sounds like a confutatio; and section 2 can indeed pass as a conclusio.

I would also add this: had I left the toccata as Frescobaldi wrote it, it would also have functioned according to the model. And if another musicologist were to rearrange the sections differently, his rearrangement would likely work according to the model as well. Even if someone were to insert, in place of the fourth section of this toccata, a third section from another toccata (provided it fit the mode), that too would function quite well.

The conclusions drawn from the analyses I have presented operate on several levels. The purely musical conclusions—regarding the stratum for which the rhetorical model can offer a kind of “form,” and those strata it cannot explain—are interesting, but they must await a forum that would find them compelling. Why is it possible to insert a section from one work into another? This relates to deep changes in aesthetic thought and to a seventeenth-century conception that was somewhat less “organicist.”

The conclusions on the historical level, which may bore gatherings of musicians, are, to my mind, no less fascinating.

What we have here is a particular aspect of European culture and education from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries—rhetoric—which indeed served as a productive and useful analogy for music already at the time, just as it did for dance, fencing, or chess. With the great social and cultural transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rhetoric ceased to be a useful analogy for music, and this shift accompanied a number of other major changes in music and musical performance from that point onward.

The “rebellion” against these changes in the 1960s sought to restore rhetoric, which was now perceived as a kind of “key” to understanding many other aspects of early music. Earlier I said that of the many changes advocated by proponents of historically informed performance, reliance on rhetoric was the most foundational. But when one analyzes their strategy, one can see that reliance on rhetoric was also a practical move, enabling them to bypass resistance and to approach the traditional performance school from a position of intellectual superiority.

Historically informed performers were vulnerable on many fronts. Their use of original notation could earn them the charge of being archaeologists. Their use of historical instruments could be dismissed as “museum music” or as fetishistic. Their use of original venues could be accused of affectation. Their use of techniques reconstructed from treatises could be criticized as hypocrisy—“this is not your interpretation; it is merely your guess at how people played three hundred years ago.” Even their attempt to understand music through pre–French Revolution worldviews could be labeled reactionary. Indeed, one of them—Graf Johann Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt-Unverzagt—was undeniably an aristocrat, a descendant several times removed of Emperor Leopold I. When he sought to revive music from Leopold I’s court (and he did), he could be accused of harboring an anti-republican agenda, of being a reactionary agent of the Ancien Régime.

Thus, exposed to accusations from nearly every possible direction, reliance on rhetoric was a practical maneuver, since it could serve as a diversion from other aspects of the revolution. Historically informed performers such as Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, and Brüggen could argue: we are reclaiming the lost intellectual infrastructure of the period and approaching the music through it, whereas “you” (traditional performers) attempt to understand the music through irrelevant categories. Moreover, your audiences do not understand rhetoric either. So if they claim that we are less skilled—and the truth is that the playing technique of 1830, on violins of 1930, simply enables things that cannot physically be done on violins of 1630, and that no composer in 1730 ever demanded—then perhaps the problem is that they are judging us by the wrong criteria.

To be clear, the renewed interest in rhetoric did not begin with musicians. In 1964–65 Roland Barthes delivered his lectures on the history of rhetoric, published in 1970. That same year saw the publication of an important German book by Barner. George Kennedy’s influential book on the history of rhetoric appeared in 1980. Renato Barilli’s history of rhetoric was published in Italian in 1983 and translated into English in 1989, one year after Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric (1988). In 1983, the journal Rhetorica also began publication—a full journal devoted to the history of rhetoric.

But historically informed performers rode this wave from the late 1960s onward.

In fact, riding the rhetorical wave was a refinement of something that had happened—and still happens—frequently: when early music performers are accused of playing out of tune, they can respond, quite legitimately, “we are simply playing in a tuning system you are not accustomed to” (since so-called equal temperament—the piano’s tuning system—only became standard after 1800).

In short, it was easy to exaggerate the importance of rhetoric. Furthermore, understanding music through a rhetorical lens allowed them to marginalize all material aspects: original instruments, original notation, original venues.

At the end of the “exordium” of my lecture, I asked: “McCreless rightly argues that the golden age of this conception was in Germany between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—but was this also the golden age of writing about this connection, or do we today attribute more importance to it than it had at the time?”

Of course, contemporary writing on the history of women also constructs its historical subject, just as early twentieth-century Marxist writing about the oppression of workers at Versailles under Louis XIV constructed a historical issue in a way that did not correspond to the period itself. It should therefore not surprise us that today’s engagement with musical rhetoric is so intense that it actively constructs the phenomenon. Yet the dialogue with today’s musical scene is what I find most interesting. We are not applying a contemporary intellectual movement (Marxism, feminism) to read the past. Rather, we take the rhetorical tradition from the past, study it, and bring it back into the present in order to fight our contemporary cultural battles.

By way of a kind of confutatio, one might say:
note how Leonhardt’s own words were far more restrained than his student Moroney’s interpretation. Leonhardt never mentioned the word “rhetoric,” whereas Moroney immediately invoked Cicero, Quintilian, and Erasmus.
Note how Brüggen used rhetoric as a foundation to justify why his Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century performs music from the first half of the nineteenth century, while it was his student Bruce Haynes who went further and labeled all Baroque music “rhetorical music.”
There are also ideas from a foundational figure of the revolution such as Joshua Rifkin (of the same generation as Haynes, born in 1944), who questions the extent to which—and the aspects in which—the rhetoric–music connection should be applied.
Within the time allotted today, I also did not address the views of the flautist Barthold Kuijken, who played with Brüggen and extensively with Leonhardt, and who is, incidentally, my “grandfather” in the early music performance lineage via my teacher, Professor Michael Melzer. Kuijken is far less committed to stretching the connection between rhetoric and music, and he too belongs to the generation of Bruce Haynes. Thus, even among the founding generations, the historically informed performance movement was not monolithic.

On a personal note, the book I published a few years ago on techniques of source handling in historically informed performance makes clear that I am not merely a participant in the revolution—I am something of a dangerous fanatic in its service. Consequently, the conclusion I reached while preparing this lecture—that the issue of rhetoric has been inflated beyond its natural proportions—is not an easy one for me. I told one of my closest colleagues that I feel as though I am firing inside the armored personnel carrier. On the other hand, I still believe that rhetoric can offer us a great deal. For me, in the Leonhardt quotation, far more important than the words “persuade” and “offer,” which Moroney highlighted as rhetorical, are the words “to penetrate into the world of ideas of a great mind and of his epoch.” For me, that is the alpha and omega: when we approach early music performance, we must treat the people of the early period with respect and make an effort to understand them.

And even if the dispositio model describes more how we hear structure than how a composer writes structure, one cannot argue with the aesthetic principles of expression. A great chess enthusiast once told me that if a modern chess master were to travel back to the eighteenth century and play against a French player from the time of Philidor (who was both a chess player and a composer), he would be kicked down the palace steps, because modern play is violent and relentlessly victory-oriented—almost “barbaric”—in comparison with earlier play, which was conducted with far greater concern for “style” or “beauty” of the moves of the game. The aesthetic principles of rhetoric are an integral part of understanding the spirit of the Baroque period, and I believe this is a valid insight rather than an attempt to “circumvent” some ideological difficulty or another.

As a direction for future research, I think rhetoric packages—within period terminology—ideas that in fact only matured with the development of musical cognition or cognitive musicology. How does the repetition of a musical idea at the same pitch affect us as listeners? Burmeister called this palillogia (well—he called it palillogia), but this opens the door to a discussion of how we perceive such repetition. The question of how we perceive the repetition of a melodic pattern is one that cognitive researchers actively investigate, and musical rhetoric—and the groundwork laid by figures such as Burmeister—allows us to ask these questions because they structured these fundamental phenomena for us. The same applies to climax, hyperbole, and every rhetorical figure. If you like, Burmeister prepared for us the minimal, meaningful units of musical communication. What we choose to do with this framework is, ladies and gentlemen, a rhetorical question.