The Sermon in Sound: 'Miserere' and Musical Rhetoric

Chapter Four – The sermon in sound: Miserere and musical rhetoric 4.1 Developing the music-rhetorical analogy 4.1.1 Historical elements: blemish, exegesis, periodicity In his 1477 treatise The Art of Counterpoint, Johannes Tinctoris first concentrates on concordant intervals. He describes the concords as the ‘principal elements’ of counterpoint, and, over the course of his lengthy Book One, he presents them in turn, exhaustively indicating how they may be approached and quit correctly in two-part homophonic writing (contrapunctus simplex).1 Through this process, he establishes basic technical norms for contrapuntal composition, against which his discussion of discords in Book Two may be understood. Discords, Tinctoris indicates from the outset, are not to be conceived as independent of concords, nor as oppositional to them.2 Rather, they are expressive departures from the norm, whose relationship to concords within ‘florid’ counterpoint is therefore complementary and symbiotic.3 Tinctoris clarifies this idea with numerous musical examples that illustrate the appropriate placement of discords within successions of concords. Most effective, however, is his metaphorical summary. Tinctoris first rebuffs the notion that musicians use discords arbitrarily, simply to sweeten the effect of surrounding concords. ‘Is some fatuity to be inserted into an articulate and artistic speech’, he writes 1 See Johannes Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, trans. and ed. Albert Seay (s.l.: American Institute of Musicology, 1961). 2 Id., 17. 3 Compare Patrick Macey, “Josquin and Musical Rhetoric: Miserere Mei, Deus and Other Motets,” in The Josquin Companion, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 489-90. Macey comments that the rules of note-against-note counterpoint formed ‘the basis of composition from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries’. For ‘florid counterpoint’ see Albert Seay, “Introduction,” in The Art of Counterpoint, by Johannes Tinctoris, (s.l: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 5. 232 sarcastically, ‘so that the rest of it may seem the more elegant?’ He then explains that the proper use of discord involves aesthetic judgment: ‘musicians sometimes permit slight dissonances to be adopted in the ways aforementioned just as grammarians permit reasonable figures of speech, for the sake of artistry or necessity’.4 Speeches and figures: Tinctoris’ analogy here is not merely between music and language, but between music and rhetorical language. The passage bears comparison with Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, which describes ‘figures of speech’ in much the same way as Tinctoris describes discords. In Quintilian’s account, figures are expressive ‘blemishes’, or deliberate departures from normal modes of speaking, whose ‘special merit’ lies in ‘reliev[ing] the tedium of everyday stereotyped speech and sav[ing] us from commonplace language’. Just like the musical discords, such figures acquire their meaning and effect through judicious use within broader, less marked progressions: Quintilian stresses that ‘economy in their use, no less than variety, will prevent the hearer being surfeited’.5 Patrick Macey makes a conceptual connection here between Tinctoris and Quintilian, and the link is plausible for several reasons. First, there is rhetoric’s central status within humanistic education in the late 1400s. Tinctoris was undoubtedly grounded in the subject, as his direct reference to the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium confirms.6 Secondly, there is the particular ubiquity of Quintilian’s treatise. One of the best-known and most authoritative Classical texts on rhetoric following its rediscovery, Institutio Oratoria was published in some eighteen editions between 1470 and 4 Macey, “Josquin and Musical Rhetoric,” 489-90 (translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens). For Seay’s translation see Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, 127. 5 Quotations taken from Macey, “Josquin and Musical Rhetoric,” 487-8; Patrick Macey, “Josquin’s Miserere Mei, Deus: Context, Structure, and Influence” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985), 41-2, citing Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (London: W. Heinemann, 192122), IX.iii.3-4 and IX.iii.27. 6 See Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, 140. This treatise was formerly attributed to Cicero. 233 1500.7 And finally, there is a terminological parallel: both Tinctoris and Quintilian employ the same term, vitium (‘blemish’), in their respective discussions of discords and figures.8 The norm-departure model of two-part counterpoint, then, represents one way in which musicrhetorical analogy was explicitly ‘thinkable’ in the late fifteenth century. After 1500, links between music and rhetoric became increasingly regulative. Musical writers began to idealise rhetoric’s methods, vocabulary, and pedagogical transmission. Joachim Burmeister’s 1606 treatise Musica Poetica made one of the earliest and most important systematic attempts to adopt rhetoric as an intellectual model for composition.9 Many other theorists of the German Baroque followed Burmeister’s example, sedimenting music-rhetorical analogy within a sub-discipline known as musica poetica, and producing the body of writings known as the Figurenlehren.10 These developments, like Tinctoris’ more fragmentary allusions, were consistent with rhetoric’s high standing in Renaissance thought: indeed, rhetorical theory was widely applied throughout the nonverbal arts.11 However, as Dietrich Bartel explains, Martin Luther’s influence also lent crucial stimulus to the particular ‘integration of rhetorical and musical disciplines’ pursued by Burmeister and his successors. Luther expected preachers to be orators, and to use techniques of persuasion to ‘admonish and edify’ congregations. He also maintained that such oratorical preaching could occur ‘specifically through music, particularly when music is combined with a sacred text’. The combination of music and text was to yield a ‘sermon in sound’, in which music played a twofold role, both orienting the listener towards a receptive state and imparting potency to 7 Brian Vickers, “Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 2/1 (1984): 4. Compare Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 69. 8 Macey, “Josquin and Musical Rhetoric,” 489. 9 See Bartel, Musica Poetica, 73-6. 10 See id., vii-xiii. 11 See id., 57. 234 the textual message. Music, under Luther’s mandate, was not to be a ‘passive reflection’ of its associated text, but a ‘tireless advocate’.12 Within this theology, it was music’s affective qualities that made it suitable for rhetorical comparison. This listener-oriented conception, in which music-rhetorical analogy is relocated from contrapuntal abstraction to exegetical imperative, is a second element of historical ‘thinkability’ that I want to stress immediately. Texted music, of course, opens up its own analytical possibilities for exploring the shared expressive resources of music and language. In a 1983 article, Ritva Jonsson and Leo Treitler discuss word-music interaction in examples drawn from the medieval monophonic repertory. In essence, their argument links melodic features of the chants to structural features of the texts, such as accent, morphology and syntax. Jonsson and Treitler first describe segmentation into ‘a hierarchy of sense-units called commas, colons and periods’ as ‘the most important analytical strategy for the Latin language’. They then propose that ‘the composition and analysis of melodies’ follows this segmentation, ‘establishing a phrasehierarchy articulated by the counterparts of the commas, colons and periods, namely the cadential formulas and the pitch hierarchies of the melody-types and modes’.13 The phenomenon of musical architectures (here melody-types) that parallel linguistic forms is sometimes termed ‘periodicity’. It has a long history of discussion in musical literature, which the authors trace as far back as Johannes’ manual De Musica, dated circa 1100.14 Jonsson and Treitler’s appeal to periodicity is especially significant, however, because it clearly understands the concept as pointing to medieval musicians’ decisions about – and enactment 12 Id., 7-9. Compare Michael Spitzer’s account in Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 171-2. 13 Ritva Jonsson and Leo Treitler, “Medieval Music and Language: A Reconsideration of the Relationship,” Studies in the History of Music 1 (1983): 7. 14 On periodicity see further Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, 71-2 and section 4.1.2. For Johannes see Jonsson and Treitler, “Medieval Music and Language,” 8-10; Harold S. Powers, “Language Models and Musical Analysis,” Ethnomusicology 24/1 (1980): 50. 235 of – effective textual communication. Some periodic strategies, for instance, facilitate comprehensibility of the text’s basic sense. Jonsson and Treitler demonstrate how surviving melodies for particular metered verses, whose Latin word-order tended to be ‘mannered’ and unwieldy, generically exhibit tighter syntactical reinforcement than the melodies attaching to the prose texts with which the verses alternate.15 Other decisions seem to reflect more calculated interpretative responses to a text’s internal progression, as Jonsson and Treitler show by comparing the musical emphases of divergent sources preserving melodies for a shared text.16 Their approach, in short, affirms that melodic strategies influence and are influenced by the ‘meanings’ of their associated texts. The authors write that the medieval musician ‘must choose where to place a caesura or a cadence, when to pose a modal contrast, how to open a phrase (with what intervals or formulas) and how to close it, and when to make associations between and among phrases’.17 Since these choices are ultimately performative, an analogy with rhetorical language once more seems appropriate, and is indeed precisely what Jonsson and Treitler reach for in their summary, referring to ‘the rhetoric of the melody’.18 Moreover, their periodicity-based analysis enables them to make a much broader point: that expressive text-setting was not a ‘Renaissance invention’, as numerous musicologists had then been suggesting.19 Rather, the new techniques of the sixteenth century – including many of those eventually systematised in the Figurenlehren – overlapped with much more longstanding and continuous traditions of music-text interaction in medieval liturgical music. 15 See Jonsson and Treitler, “Medieval Music and Language,” 12-6. Id., 16-20. 17 Id., 22 (original emphasis). 18 Ibid. 19 Id., 1-3, singling out especially Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1976). Jonsson and Treitler’s argument, which is effectively an attempt to revise the model of music in the medieval West held up by older and more structuralist music-critical traditions, was of course more radical in 1983 than it seems today. 16 236 Periodicity, therefore, is the third major component of historically ‘thinkable’ musicrhetorical analogy used within this chapter. My major claim will be that these elements of music-rhetorical technique feature decisively in Pärt’s Miserere, composed in 1989. I pursue this argument by analysing Pärt’s music, and also by comparing it with Miserere Mei, Deus – a 1503 motet on the same text by Josquin des Prez, which has long been understood through a hermeneutics of rhetoric. The diverse materials glossed above prepare this comparison in two ways. First, they begin to particularise music-rhetorical analogy, reducing it from amorphousness to something more manageable. While 1500 is not necessarily a privileged date in the history of music-rhetorical practice, it is certainly privileged for this chapter’s purposes. The above sources each help to illustrate what it might mean to associate music from this time with rhetoric.20 Secondly, these opening materials pre-empt features of texted tintinnabuli music that will be especially important to the chapter’s music-rhetorical analysis, notably homophonic M/T-voice pairings and their variation (Tinctoris’ norms) and hierarchised melodic periodicity (Jonsson and Treitler). I will also associate Pärt’s characteristic calibrations of system and gesture with Luther’s sermon-in-sound. However, this chapter ultimately seeks to move beyond Miserere into a more general investigation of ‘rhetoric’ and the tintinnabuli-concept. Accordingly, before shifting towards music-analytical terrain, I next try to discipline my intended use of music-rhetorical analogy. 4.1.2 Conceptual elements: suasive and semantic Music-rhetorical analogy is a species of music-language analogy, and music-language analogy is both ubiquitous and diverse. Kofi Agawu attests to its ubiquity, writing that it is 20 See also sections 4.1.3 and 4.3.1 (on the issue of composer-intention and rhetoric). 237