Musica Poetica

Originating in Martin Luther’s concept that music was as powerful a tool for preaching the Gospel as the spoken word, an entire philosophy of constructing music based on the terminology of spoken rhetoric was developed in Germany in the seventeenth century known as musica poetica. At first this discipline was most closely associated with music that had a sung text, the Cantor’s music, as cantors followed Luther’s admonition to preach the Gospel in song, but soon rhetoric became applied to instrumental music as well. Theorists like Johann Gottfried Walther borrowed language from rhetoric to describe musical form on every level. On a large scale, on the macro-level, for example, a piece could have an inspiring introductory exordium, a middle section where several themes were interwoven in confutatio, and resolve in a conclusio. At the same time, theorists also applied rhetoric to the micro-level, the level of the small musical figure that functioned like a word. Lists of these musical-rhetorical figures were published in treatises called Figurenlehre throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first Figurenlehre was published by Joachim Burmeister in 1606.

J. G. Walther and the Figura from J. S. Bach’s Time

The descriptions of figura closest in time and place to J. S. Bach are by the lexicographer Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748). In 1708, Walther wrote a treatise on composition for Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar, the second volume of which is devoted to musica poetica. In it, many of the figure discussed in his Lexicon already appear as compositional tools to be used in ornamenting consonances and dissonances in the melody. In his 1732 musical dictionary, Walther describes figure as