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.

Doctrine of Affections, as quoted from the Harvard Dictionary:

   "The belief, widely held in the 17th and early 18th centuies, that
   the principal aim of music is to arouse the passions or affections
   (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc., conceived as rationalized,
   discrete and relatively static states).  By the later 17th c. the
   view also inclided the notion that a composition (or at leaste a
   single movement or major section of a larger work) should have a
   unity of affections.  The general notion that music should move or
   arouse the affections is taken up by writers on musin in the later
   16th c (including Zarlino, 1558), evidently by anaolgy with the aims
   of rhetoric described by classical writers and their followers.
   Major attention is devoted to the subject by writers in the mid 17th
   century, amond them Decartes, Mersenne, Kircher, Printz Werckmeister,
   Heinichen, Mattheson, Quantz and Marpurg.

   Although these writers often described the affective character of
   intervals, scales, types of pieces and the like, they did not share
   a precisely formulated "doctrine of affections" relying on the use
   of stereotyped musical figures as was implied by the German scholars
   (Kretschmar, Goldschmidt and Schering) who gave currency to the term
   Affektenlehre.  The enumeration and description of musical figures
   beginning in the 17th century was a seperate aspect of the general
   effort to conceive music in the terms provided by rhetoric

Some examples of text painting:

In Bennet's "All Creatures Now" there is a line of text which reads "Birds
over her do hover" The word hover is set to a lengthy melisma in which the
harmony hovers in the range of b-flat major for the duration of the word.

In" Fair Phyllis I Saw" we find the text "Up and Down She wanders" The word
up is set to a high note, down to a low note.

In the Crucifixus of the Bach b minor mass, "et sepultus est" is set to a
very low tessitura and there is a pause before the word est, depictint the
sealing of the tomb.

There are countless others.

Kevin