RHETORICAL MENTALITIES IN CLASSICAL MUSIC. IN THE MARGINS OF BOOKS BY LEONARD RATNER AND MARK EVAN BONDS

Abstract

The last decades of the twentieth century saw a striking resurgence of interest in “old” music. Extensive documentary research, the discovery of manuscripts, and the painstaking cataloguing of such manuscripts have meant that numerous aspects of the history of music had to be rewritten. Ensembles specialising in old music and historic (baroque) instruments sprang up. All these also brought about a renewed theoretical interest in musical rhetoric. As a result, significant texts from the 1980s and 1990s also shifted our viewpoint of classical music, about which it had seemed that there was not much more to be said. Unlike Western musicology, Romanian musicology, mostly preoccupied with vernacular subjects, is situated far from such endeavours, and translations are long in coming. This article proposes to fill in the gap by providing an overview of the influences between classical music and rhetoric that late-twentieth-century research brought to light.