Estimable Rhetoric: How one cross-disciplinary approach can revolutionize music performance
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Date
2021-04
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Abstract
Hundreds of years ago, before music history became a discipline in the West, it was performers who used the books that now collect dust on library shelves. One especially cobwebbed corner of history holds explosive potential for the next generation of musicians: a practical, hands-on, cross-disciplinary method known as musical rhetoric.
Musical rhetoric, the adaptation of oratory and acting techniques to music performance, is a radical departure from how most of us learned music. It is a toolkit of specific artistic choices that singers and players can make to realize the dramatic potential of a musical score, tell its story, and sway their listeners' emotions. No such tools are taught today. Emotion is addressed in music lessons and classes, to be sure, but often over-boiled to "swell to a high point and play less strictly," and rarely specifically studied at all. Graduates of such education bore thousands of listeners a year at their concerts, convincing generations that "art music" belongs to a sniffy patriarchy intent on protecting their marble treasures from the lesser-educated — code for lesser-privileged. Audiences, all audiences, deserve their music back.
Musical rhetoric techniques from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can turn this tide in the twenty-first. In the Baroque era, music was made to move listeners rather than to humble them, and musicians took their cues not from "great composers" but from the operatic stage and from the public speeches of ancient Greece and Rome. The methodology is being revived today, and authorities Baroque and modern reveal musical rhetoric's immense promise. They show, too, the easy application of research to practicality, of the library to the stage. My research has spanned readings, interviews, rehearsals, performances, and students from ages sixteen to sixty; has involved adapting exercises directly from historical sources and (more commonly) creating entirely new ones on history's model; has required me to apply tools from one performance area, such as violin bowing, to another, such as a singer's tone of voice; and, altogether, has shown me that the tools of musical rhetoric can turn ashes to fire in the hands of any moderately-skilled musician working in nearly any style.
Musical rhetoric draws not only from music history but from the deeper well of the entire humanities. It requires analysis of color, shading, and gravity of specific moments in music as if in a painting, of the balance of power between phrases as if lines in a poem, and of the feeling of entire musical structures as if they were architecture. Rhetorical practice illuminates the "dramatic character," or affect, of moments in a piece of music, and endows performers with great agency to convey it, demanding only a liberal-arts insight, an actor's verve, and a certain amount of risk-taking in return.
In presenting my research, I will discuss the method's fundamental concepts, demonstrate practical exercises musicians can use to retool their own craft, and survey sources for those interested in learning more. By showing musical rhetoric at work, rather than just telling its history, I hope to prove its worth by giving witness to its magic.
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The Arts: 2nd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)