William Hong wrote:
>Obviously, I wasn't recalling correctly. Thanks Kevin--do you or anyone
>else know of examples offhand? I used to think the term would apply to
>works such as the late Monteverdi madrigals, but perhaps these are closer
>to word painting.
The doctrine of affections, like the earlier term "musica reservata",
is one of those historical ideas that nobody seems to have bothered to
define clearly, although unlike musica reservata it did encompass a number
of clearly defined practices. It included but was not limited to the
systemization of musical figures--melodic motifs--used to represent various
stylized or objectified emotions in music. This aspect of the "doctrine"
was mainly the work of the Germans, who called it Affektionslehre. It
was a kind of special application of the analogy of music to the art of
rhetoric, an analogy which took hold in the baroque because of the emphasis
on melody as a kind of impassioned or intensified speech. Mattheson was
one writer who applied the theory both to the invention of figures to
represent emotional states and to the standard constructive devices
of imitation, inversion, repetition, sequence, etc. Once a figure
representing the emotional state had been chosen, the composition could
flow forward as a continuing elaboration of the figure, unifying the
entire piece around a single "affection," which was the general state of
things from the mid-17th century onward. I think it's fair to say that
emotional states were considered as objective rather than subjective or
"psychological", hence they could be easily represented or embodied by
musical figures. Manfred Bukofzer points out, however, that musical
figures took on a specific meaning only within a musical context
(presumably determined by other factors such as tempo, instrumentation,
mode, pitch level, and texture), and by means of a suggestive title. The
same figure could mean two entirely different things in different contexts.
(Music in the Baroque Era 388-390) See also the article on rhetoric in
the New Harvard Dictionary of Music. P.H. Lang's Music in Western
Civilization, pp. 436-440, is perhaps less helpful, although he does point
out that Mattheson also assigned "personality characteristics" to the
various instruments (e.g., "proud" bassoons), and reminds us not to confuse
this with 19th-century usage of instruments for their sensual tone-colors.
Chris Bonds
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