The metaphor of music as a language in the Enlightenment: Towards a cultural history of eighteenth-century music theory.

Abstract

In this dissertation I attempt to explore thoroughly the metaphor of music as a language as it was used in eighteenth-century discourse on music, and the problematic status of rhetoric within this discussion. In Part I, I trace the conditions of possibility of this discourse in the shifting metaphors of music as rhetorical discourse and music as a language as they inform definitions of genre, style, compositional process, techniques of invention, formal arrangement, and the theory of musical figures, as they appeared in the writings of Burmeister, Bernhard, Niedt, Mattheson, C. P. E. Bach, Kirnberger, and Koch. I examine briefly the increasing marginalization of rhetoric in Enlightenment thought and how the distinction between literal and figurative language was inscribed within the structure of language and, consequently by analogy, of music. In Part II, I investigate the extended implications of the music as a language metaphor and its accompanying distinction between a literal and figurative language. I uncover the ideological networks at work in the variously articulated topics of eighteenth century theory--dissonance classification, fundamental bass progression, period structure, and pedagogy in the writings of Rameau, Kirnberger, and Koch--which circumscribe the limits of meaning, the boundaries within which the categories and relationships of musical knowledge unfolded. In Part III, I explore the larger cultural forces at work in articulating and negotiating the extended ideology' of the music as a language metaphor and the fundamental distinction between literal and figurative language. I briefly sketch the changing identities of language and music during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examine how discourse on language and music followed a similar structure within their cultural horizon, and generalize as to their overall position and ideology in Enlightenment culture. In a sense, my project is to problematize and historicize the now common-sense distinction between literal and figurative language, and to examine how the metaphor of music as a language participates in this fundamental epistemological dichotomy and fits into eighteenth-century cultural history. It is also to examine how rhetoric maintained a paradoxical relationship, marginalized but necessary, with this discourse.