Karl Miller (or properly, The Harvard Dictionary of Music):

>Affections, doctrine of: An aesthetic theory of the late baroque
>period, formulated by A. Werckmeister (Harmonologia musica, 1702),
>J.D. Heinichen (1711), J. Mattheson (1739), J.J. Quantz (1752), F.W.
>Marpurg (Kritische Briefe, vol.  ii, 1763) and other 18th Century
>writers...

This deffinition is very curious, because is quite incomplete and partial
(really surprising fact, coming from Harvard Dictionary).  All the works
quoted above belongs to a later and decadent stage of this doctrine (at
the second half of XVIII there were already more "dynamic" theories about
emotions).  The first formulations of a musical doctrine of affections
comes from Late Middle Age (Marsilius Ficinus' commentary on Plato's
"Timeo", if I don't remember bad).  However (despite the numberless
treatises on the subject written in the Renaissance) the first systematic
attempt of codifying an emotional grammar and rhetoric of music was made
by the jesuit Athanasius Kircher's, in "Musurgia Universalis" (1650).
Concerning my former statements:  an interesting example of the link
between musical "affetti" and astronomy can be seen in Kepler's "Harmonices
Mundi" (1619).

As you see, my friend, one can't always believe what is written at
dictionaries:-)

Pablo Massa
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