Musical Rhetoric: Foundations and Annotation Schemes

204 Pages·2014·4.36 MB·English

by  Patrick Saint-Dizier

W561-SaintDizier.qxp_Layout 1 13/08/2014 10:29 Page 1
COMPUTER ENGINEERING SERIES
Rhetoric is the discipline that uses any type of discourse, e.g. spoken, P
a
written, gestural, with the aim of persuading an audience to approve a t
r
i
fact, a decision or an attitude. c
k

This book explores the various roles played by music in a rhetoric S
a
discourse or in an argumentative construction. Music turns out to be a in
t
very strong, persuasive and expressive means of great interest for -D
rhetoric. Its association with a text or, more generally, with conceptual iz
i
e
or psychological content is of great interest and importance as an r

intellectual consideration, and also in a number of everyday-life aspects
such as TV news and advertising, shopping mall atmosphere and movie
music.
The author develops the computer modeling of a number of simple and
relatively commonly accepted aspects of music rhetoric. Therefore, in
addition to an analysis of musical features that are important to rhetoric,
this book introduces computational formalisms and representations
used particularly in computational linguistics which turn out to be
appropriate and sufficiently expressive for an analysis of music rhetoric.
Although the reader does require some basic familiarity with music,
musical notation and musical score reading, this book is conceived to M Musical Rhetoric
be accessible to a large audience. Some basic background in linguistics, u
language and computer science is also required, but the different s
concepts used are carefully introduced so that the subject can be i
c
accessible to a wide audience of musicians, linguists, philosophers and a
computer scientists. l

R
Foundations
h
e
t
and Annotation Schemes
o
Patrick Saint-Dizier is Head of the ILPL research group (Computational r
Linguistics and Logic Programming) in Toulouse, France. His main i
c
research areas include natural language processing, discourse syntax
and semantics, language and reasoning.
Patrick Saint-Dizier
Z(7ib8e8-CBFgBA(
www.iste.co.uk

Musical Rhetoric

FOCUS SERIES
Series Editor Jean-Charles Pomerol
Musical Rhetoric

Foundations and Annotation Schemes

Patrick Saint-Dizier
First published 2014 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced,
stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers,
or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the
CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the
undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
27-37 St George’s Road 111 River Street
London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030
UK USA
www.iste.co.uk www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2014
The rights of Patrick Saint-Dizier to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014945527

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISSN 2051-2481 (Print)
ISSN 2051-249X (Online)
ISBN 978-1-84821-561-0
Contents
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
CHAPTER 1. AN INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL
RHETORIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. A few basic definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2. The structure of rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.1. Rhetoric and communication . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.2. The structure of classical rhetoric . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.3. The invention step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.4. The arrangement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.2.5. The style or elocution step . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.6. The delivery or action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.7. The facets of rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3. Some figures of speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.2. The major figures of speech of interest
in music rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
vi Musical Rhetoric
1.4. Argumentation and explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.5. Conclusion: a few historical milestones
of traditional rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.6. A few historical references for
classical rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
CHAPTER 2. LANGUAGE, MUSIC AND THE
RHETORIC DISCOURSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1. Music and language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1.1. On the relations between language
and music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.1.2. Going into the details of music
parameters, music for rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.1.3. Music and rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.2. A few historical milestones of music rhetoric
emergence and evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.2.1. The Middle Ages and the
Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.2.2. The transition between the
Renaissance and the Baroque period . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.2.3. The Baroque period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.2.4. The Classical period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.2.5. The Romantic period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3. Main contemporary trends in
music rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Contents vii
CHAPTER 3. THE SYMBOLISM OF MUSICAL
ELEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1. Symbolic and perceptual properties of modes
and tonalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2. Perceptual and symbolic properties
of intervals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3. Musical figures and their role in rhetoric . . . . . . 67
3.4. Figures of rhythm and their roles
in rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.5. Motive alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.6. Figures of counterpoint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.7. The symbolism of numbers and proportions . . . . 83
3.8. The rhetoric contents of classical forms . . . . . . . 87
3.8.1. The perception of large forms . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.8.2. The simple bi- and tripartite forms . . . . . . . 88
3.8.3. The sonata forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.9. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
CHAPTER 4. FEATURE STRUCTURES FOR
REPRESENTING MUSICAL CONSTRUCTIONS . . . . . . . . 101
4.1. Feature structures in language . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
4.2. Representation of a melody by a
feature structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.3. From musical motives to polyphony . . . . . . . . . 109
4.4. Dealing with harmony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
viii Musical Rhetoric
4.5. A few generic operations of feature
structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
4.5.1. Transformations by augmentation
or diminution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
4.5.2. Mirror forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.5.3. Reverse forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.5.4. A few other transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.5.5. Expressive power of this formalism . . . . . . . 117
4.6. Elements of annotation of musical
structures in XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.6.1. Basic feature structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.6.2. Advanced XML annotations for
two-dimension structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
4.6.3. Figures of sound in XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.7. Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
CHAPTER 5. A RHETORIC ANALYSIS OF
MUSICAL WORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.1. Discourse theories in linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
5.1.1. The rhetorical structure theory . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.1.2. The pragma-dialectic movement . . . . . . . . . 131
5.2. The rhetoric of the stylus phantasticus . . . . . . . 132
5.3. The rhetoric and argumentation dimensions
of J.S. Bach’s C. minor Passacaglia . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
5.3.1. The global structure and the
symbolic of numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140