Journal Article

LA REINVENZIONE DELLA MUSICA ANTICA NEL RINASCIMENTO

Boccadoro, Brenno

2019

Overview

The main expression of humanism in 16th-century music was the idea that acting on the affections meant to translate the words in sounding images, in order to bring them «before the eyes of imagination» of the listener. Oddly, few musicologists explained clearly the reasons underlying the cultural background of such techniques. One of them was a precise doctrine about the way in which imaginatio reacted to forms through the musical equivalent of rhetorical ekphrasis. Moreover, not all the sounding images were rhetorical figures. Most of the ‘episodic’ figures conceived by Franco-Flemish composers at the beginning of the century were mainly ‘symbols’, as products of Neo-Platonic metaphysics. In the last decades of the 16th century, Aristotelianism could counter the richness of Neo-Platonic symbolism only with the idea of imitation as techne, and of the figure as a conventional sign lacking its metaphysical and magic density. Musicians still translated words into music but the golden age of symbols was over, and their word painting became a rhetoric of figures inspired by mere linguistic models.

• Publisher: Accademia Editoriale
• Subject: MUSICA E STORIA CULTURALE NELLA PRIMA ETÀ MODERNA: IDEE, PRATICHE, EMOZIONI