On the abundance of things, words and music

Abstract

In 1606, the German musician Joachim Burmeister published his musical poetics in Rostock with the aim of systematizing the musical creative process, constituting didactic material for the Latin school where he worked, disseminating this knowledge and preserving current musical practices. This treatise is recognized for the originality of the systematization it proposes and which initiated a specifically Lutheran tradition of music writing, reading and interpretation, based on the close relationship between poetry and music. For the formulation of this systematization, Burmeister took as a starting point the idea that the space of musical elaboration would be that of the elocutive compositio of the words and that this same elaboration should be proportional to the style of the words, so that the resulting music would contribute to make them more persuasive. In these terms, we can understand that the different musical styles would be characterized, in part, by different poetic styles and, in part, by the particular forms of their musical elaboration, rhetorically codified by the existing treatises. In his Musica Poetica, Burmeister categorized a series of artifices and musical techniques based on the closest and most common references of his time, among which I highlight the De utraque verborum ac rerum copia (1512) by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Just as Erasmus reformulated and updated in his treatise the precepts relating to the abundance of thoughts and words, Burmeister reformulated and updated, for the Lutheran context, the precepts relating to the abundance of musical artifices. In this article, I propose to analyze the relations between Burmeister's and Erasmus' treatises, to investigate the path of ideas that unite them, their similarities and differences, and get to know the foundations of what has been conventionally called musical rhetoric since the 17th century.