This online conference was organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini and the Italian Institute for Applied Musicology together with the programme committee, whose members were Roberto Illiano, Fulvia Morabito and Massimiliano Sala (all from the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini), Massimiliano Locanto (Università di Salerno) and me (Joan Grimalt, Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya).
Three red threads could be distinguished running through this whole conference on ‘rhetoric beyond figures’: prosodic patterns in instrumental music as a new source for analysis; a critical revision of the Germanic tradition of Figurenlehre; and an inclusive, non-dogmatic approach to musical signification and analysis. This included an expansion of boundaries beyond the norm: while rhetoric as a point of scholarly focus is commonly associated with eighteenth-century music, the idea of this event was to widen the scope so as to include considerations of how rhetoric can also operate in later repertoires. The tone of the conference was cordial, the dialogue and exchange of visions kind and friendly.
After initial greetings by Massimiliano Sala and me, the first session was dedicated to ‘Integration between Analysis and Performance’. Doctoral student Galátea Daskalaki (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) provided a stimulating analysis of Brahms's Intermezzo Op. 116 No. 2 that integrated formal, harmonic and rhetorical aspects of the piece. Alon Schab (Bar-Ilan University), with ‘The Rhetoric of Intimacy: Exploring 20th-Century Music for the Clavichord’, focused on two twentieth-century composers – Herbert Howells and Keith Jarrett – who wrote for this ‘most expressive’ of keyboard instruments, as both C. P. E. Bach and his father would have had it. In both cases, a tradition that links intimate communication and the clavichord seems to have been continued. To document this tradition, some works by seventeenth-century painters Gerard ter Borch and Jan Steen were shown. These paintings seemed to depict a typical chamber-music situation of that time, featuring both short distances and eye contact between the few people present and with the lute, clavichord or spinet being played.
Valentín Benavides (Universidad de Valladolid) presented ‘Music that Weeps: The Rhetoric of Lament in José María Sánchez-Verdú's “Deploratio” (1997)’, an analysis of a short piece for cello solo by this contemporary Spanish composer. In it, Sánchez-Verdú (b. 1968) experiments with old and new traditions of musical mourning, in memory of a fellow composer, Francisco Guerrero Marín, who had died in 1997. The piece was shown in a video performance. A certain ritual, strongly gestural aspect reinforced the funereal sense of the music.
I delivered the first keynote lecture, which asked ‘What do We Mean by “Musical Discourse”?’. I divided my presentation into two strains. Philosophically, my interpretations followed the hermeneutic lines of a Hans-Georg Gadamer, or a Gianni Vattimo, meaning that the goal is no longer an ‘objective, scientific’ truth, but a set of contingent, intersubjective truths that will need constant revision from oneself and from others. Second, I saw my theory as being in a direct relationship with performance. As a performer, I want to help performance students to reach their own decisions, aided by an inclusive, integral type of analysis where rhetorical aspects play a decisive role. By ‘musical rhetoric’ I understand five major points: structural markers (at what point of the discourse one finds oneself), traces of prosody in instrumental music, the tone of the discourse, musical dramaturgy (or narrative design, as it is often called) and musical-rhetorical figures, albeit in a different spirit from that found in baroque treatises. Maybe the most novel points are the second and last. Regarding the tone of the discourse, I presented six instances where the tone, as also happens in oral discourse, can be more important than the contents: (1) the opposition between high and low, (2) a spontaneous versus predetermined tone, (3) an adversative or affirmative tone, (4) a dysphoric or euphoric tone, (5) an ironic versus a neutral tone, and (6) a dolce versus an agitato tone. The latter can be related to the traditional madrigalisms and topoi of ‘fire’, stile concitato and ‘tempesta’. Finally, I widened the way a performer and analyst can look at rhetorical figures that incorporate musical gestures, and started by recalling Burmeister's division between descriptive and affective figures (hypotyposis, pathopoiesis), focusing on the latter group. These expressive alterations of an imagined original material were attributed to a virtual ‘subject’, who can do three basic things: (1) manifest himself, (2) withdraw from expression or (3) stay in between these two states, representing a form of hesitation. Among the first category I adduced all sorts of rhythmical alterations, starting with the frequent device of ‘rhetorical anticipation’. As instances of withdrawal, I referred to the categories of rhythmic ‘expansion’, the ‘inner voice’ and the ‘void’, this last characterized by some form of absence such as a pause, a silence or even a unison texture. Finally, under the rubric ‘hesitation’, I introduced the baroque figures of dubitatio and interruptio, but also a new figure called ‘genesis’.
The second session on this first day had the title ‘Rhetorical Theory and Musical Discourse’. Paulo F. de Castro (Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança, Universidade de Lisboa), in ‘Virtual Dialogues: Towards a Critical-Historical Approach to the Concepts of Musical Topic, Topos, and Intonation’, reviewed the concepts and genealogies of the term topos, and of интонация (intonatsiya, intonation), which has inspired a large body of Eastern European musicological literature. Both terms have enjoyed academic success despite their fuzzy definition and their heterogenous usage. After all, one of the signs of a hermeneutical stance is the acceptance of a certain methodological anarchy, since human existence, including music, resists any rigid categorization. Lodewijk Muns (independent scholar, Almere), considered the use of quotation in musical discourse, another rich topic that has lately attracted quite a lot of scholarly attention. (See, for example, Violetta Kostka, Paulo F. de Castro and William E. Everett, eds, Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).) Muns focused on hymns being quoted in cantatas as an exemplary case and, invoking linguistic theory, distinguished between the ‘use’ and ‘mention’ of a musical quotation.
Martin Čurda (Ostravská univerzita) presented ‘Integrating Rhetorical Gestures, Virtual Agents, and Musical Topics in the Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music’. His account of the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto in A major k488 offered a convincing in-depth, inclusive analysis, incorporating reference to topical and rhetorical gestures as part of a hermeneutic interpretation that would help any interested performer. Čurda dedicated some attention to the anomalous pastoral-style opening of the movement, setting it in contrast to those heard in most of Mozart's concertos, which appear, rather, to be genealogically related to the martial semantic field.
On the second day, the first session was dedicated to the topic of ‘Instrumental Mimicking of Vocal Intonation’. Its first paper was delivered by PhD student Marjo Suominen (Helsingin yliopisto / University of Helsinki), who considered the topic in relation to the overture to Handel's opera Giulio Cesare. Suominen compared several recorded versions of this overture according to their respective emphases on one national style or another (French, German or Italian). Andrew Wong (independent scholar, The Hague), musician, physicist and engineer in turn, was fruitfully ‘Exploring the Unwritten Practices of 18th-Century French Baroque Vocal Traditions in Violin Playing’. In a stimulating paper, he demonstrated on his historical violin how the different vocal agréments described in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises for singers were imitated and adapted to instrumental practice by violin players of the time. Most efforts seemed to go into trying to convey (with a light, sensitive bow) the trembling and failing of the voice. Among these rhetorical resources, some examples of tremblement feint – ‘feigned trembling’, or, rather, ‘represented trembling’ – were offered.
The only four-hands paper of the conference was presented by Veronika Vejvodová and Barbora Števanka Kadlíčková (Národní muzeum – Muzeum Antonína Dvořáka). Under the title ‘Live Recitative without Words’ and using manuscript sketches for Dvořák's late symphonic poems that were based on poetry by Karel Jaromír Erben – The Noon Witch, The Water Goblin, The Golden Spinning Wheel and The Wild Dove – they convincingly showed how prosodic patterns derived from Erben's gruesome poems were inscribed on the sketches and reproduced instrumentally by the composer. Here, therefore, was a clear precedent for the famous ‘recitative without words’ found in Janáček's so-called speech melodies. It would be a good thing if those sketches for Dvořák's late masterpieces were published or made accessible online to further research. Ryszard Daniel Golianek (Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań) delivered a paper on ‘Affect, Expression, Narration: Interpretation of Empfindsamkeit Music’. To demonstrate the practical working rhetorical strategies of the so-called sensitive style, Golianek analysed a Fantasia in G minor by C. P. E. Bach, Wq117/13. Marked by a lack of barlines or time signature, this is a remarkably intense piece of music, even for this stylistically heterogeneous, still understudied composer.
Next, Robert Hatten (Professor Emeritus at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin) presented his keynote speech, including his own demonstrations on the piano. Hatten has been and is a pre-eminent figure world-wide in the vast field of musical signification. This time, his exploration of rhetorical strategies focused on the Allemande from J. S. Bach's Partita No. 4 in D major, bwv828. Two of many crucial terms contributed by Hatten to the study of musical signification stood out in this paper: ‘markedness’ and ‘expressive trajectory’. In his performance, phrasing and agogic decisions about where to place caesuras, or ‘breathing’ time, were based on the observance of striking compositional details such as an unusual harmonic swerve, a rhythmic transition or a textural stratification. Texture was another keyword here, and it seems that this will form the central parameter of Hatten's next book.
Melanie Plesch (University of Melbourne) presented ‘“Aposiopesis”, Dysphoric Topics and the Performance of Sorrow in Carlos Guastavino's Guitar Sonata No. 1 (1967)’. The classical rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, or reticentia, consists in omitting the continuation of a sentence, so as to leave the listeners guessing, for instance, to communicate a feeling of reluctance to speak something aloud. In this case, the figure was used by Guastavino to represent a subject that cannot speak/sing on because he or she is overwhelmed by emotion. Since Guastavino's work can be ascribed to an Argentinian musical nationalism, it is no wonder the musical references here included nationally specific topics such as vidalita, triste and estilo.
The last session of that day concerned itself with ‘Deconstruction of the Traditional Figurenlehre’. In ‘Unveiling the Rhetorical Insights of Johann Joseph Fux's “Gradus ad Parnassum”’ Caio Amadatsu Griman (Universidade de São Paulo; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) considered some of the most frequently used translations of that venerable text. Too often the last, rhetorical part of the treatise has been neglected in favour of the previous sections, where Fux discussed what would become known as the style antico. Griman is currently working on a PhD about two titans of baroque music theory, Fux and Athanasius Kircher. Marcos Krieger (Susquehanna University) then addressed ‘Aristotelian Kairos and the Performer's Agency in Delivering Rhetorical Structures: A Case Study of German Keyboard Compositions of the Early 18th Century’. One of the many insights that arose was the closeness of improvisatory practice and ‘composed’ instrumental music not only in the eighteenth century, but, beyond that, well into the twentieth. For Athanasius Kircher, for instance, in his Musurgia universalis of 1650, instrumental music in general could be equated with the stylus phantasticus. In Kircher's view, it is the performer who needs to choose which rhetorical strategies to use, in order to reach an audience and to move it.
In turn, Roberto Cornacchioni Alegre (Universidade de São Paulo), whose doctoral research is investigating the teaching of improvisation, spoke on ‘Music Improvisation and Oratory: The Case of Franz Liszt’. Historically, nineteenth-century central Europe marvelled at the improvising poets of southern Italy; Wilhelm Müller, for example, author of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, wrote about them with awe (Müller, Rom, Römer und Römerinnen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1820), 143ff). In Chopin's or Liszt's improvisations, echoes of elocution handbooks that circulated widely at the time seem to have been perceptible, if we trust the testimony of some of their contemporary listeners.
The last day's session bore the title ‘Integral Analysis, including Temporal, Rhetorical, or Narrative Aspects’. Doctoral student Ramón Sobrino Cortizo (Universidad de Oviedo) analysed the 1954 organ work Tríptico del Buen Pastor (Good Shepherd Triptych) by the Basque Spanish composer Jesús Guridi (1886–1961). The work was designated a ‘symphonic poem for the organ’, so some narrative or even dramatic aspects might be expected. There are even programmatic indications that reminded the analyst of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, as well as Gospel references such as ‘ambiente campestre y pastoril’ (a countryside, pastoral atmosphere), ‘el rebaño regresa al redil’ (the flock goes back to the sheepfold), ‘tempestuoso’ (stormy), ‘se oye el balido de las ovejas’ (we hear the bleating of the sheep) or ‘la oveja perdida’ (the lost sheep).
‘El estilo poético de Blasco de Nebra: figuras retóricas, tópicos y narratividad’ (The Poetic Style of Blasco de Nebra: Rhetorical Figures, Topics and Narrativity) was presented by Águeda Pedrero Encabo (Universidad de Valladolid). Following in the wake of Padre Antonio Soler and Domenico Scarlatti, the Seville-based Manuel Blasco de Nebra, despite his short life (1750–1784), is one of the major figures of Spanish keyboard music (especially for organ) in the eighteenth century. Using harmonic, topical and rhetorical analysis, Pedrero revealed a rhetorical strategy behind the Adagio of Nebra's Sonata in A major, from a manuscript collection in the library of Montserrat.
Next to speak was Pantelís Kogiamis (Universität der Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), who looked for tempo clues in prosodic patterns, a resource that might have pleased Beethoven himself. His title was ‘Approaching Enigmatic Metronome Marks in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony through Metrical Prosodic Verse Pattern Analysis’. Some of those metronomic indications, in particular in the alla marcia from the finale, appear indeed to be puzzling to the performer, and so prosodic traces provide a valuable lead. Beyond that, Kogiamis was able to use topical analysis – for instance, a reference to the gigue – to justify his interpretation and his suggested tempos. Prosodic analysis, particularly of instrumental melodies, remains a minority option today, despite the historical evidence that composers such as Beethoven attached great importance to it. (Harry Goldschmidt dedicated a lot of effort to these questions; see, for example, Die Erscheinung Beethoven (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1974) and Das Wort in Beethovens Instrumentalbegleitung, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999). See also Joan Grimalt, ‘Traces of Metre and Prosody in Instrumental Music’, Res facta nova 24 (33) (2023).)
Sara Tabuenca Agramonte (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), who is writing her PhD on Schubert's late sonatas, presented a compelling analysis of ‘sonata form as narrative discourse’ in the first movement of Schubert's Sonata d959. Her hermeneutic approach was based on harmonic and formal aspects, as well as some biographical, philosophical and literary elements. In the discussion after the paper, the spectre of organicism was raised, with the usual doubts about whether this might not in fact be a twentieth-century search for unity or rather part of romantic thought, starting with Goethe's Urpflanze. Last but not least, Carlos Villar-Taboada (Universidad de Valladolid) read the paper ‘Rhetoric of an Invented Memory: José Luis Turina's “Fantasía sobre una fantasía de Alonso Mudarra”’. Turina (born 1952) establishes a dialogue with music of the past, with elements of ironic distance. His ‘Fantasy on a Fantasy’ takes as its starting-point a work by Renaissance composer Alonso Mudarra (c1510–1580), but there is also an intertwined homage to a harpist called Ludovico, to whom Mudarra was paying tribute in his Fantasía. Ludovico also appears in Turina's piece, via various subtle references. The rich textures of Turina's orchestra and the equally rich tissue of references made this reporter wish for an occasion to listen to the whole piece, to grasp better Villar's insightful analysis.
All in all, the conference was a successful, and indeed pleasant event. The remarkable interest that the call for papers awoke on the topic of rhetorical gestures beyond the familiar field of baroque rhetorical figures seems to confirm that it is a hot spot within the field of musical signification, and musical hermeneutics in general, even if the methodologies and the starting-points are so heterogeneous. Precisely this heterogeneity in the different approaches made the lack of space for a spontaneous dialogue more acute. From a hermeneutic perspective, rather than debating or convincing the other, it is the listening to each other that stands in first place, and the readiness to contribute to a common, shared knowledge, knowing that one's own position is not necessarily the best one.
A collected volume based on the conference and edited by me will be published in 2026 by Brepols in the Speculum Musicae series, issued by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini.
