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Chapter 15
(cantor), whose duties included, apart from choir directing, the teaching of
Rhetoric and Latin, was more allied with the linguistic trivium of the'seven liberal
arts. This ranking between mathematical and linguistic disciplines (quadrivium
and trivium) would eventually change during the Renaissance and give rise to the
concept of musica poetica. 20
At the emergence of the Renaissance, with the growing emphasis on human
value, the Boethian cosmological concept of music began to decline. The
medieval threefold division of music into musica mundana, musica humana, and
musica instrumentalis was redefined into a new twofold division of musical
discipline. Renaissance theorists introduced the duality of musica theoretica
(speculativa or naturalis) and musica practica (artificialis). Musica theoretica
subsumed musica mundana and musica humana, while musica practica embraced
musica instrumentalis 21 Correspondingly, the mathematical disciplines of the
quadrivium gave way to the linguistic ones of the trivium, while, in Renaissance
thought and spirit, study of the Divine nature was to be replaced by study of the
human, and sciences were `humanized' through rational and
logical justifications.
During the sixteenth century, this shift to an anthropological focus gave rise
to another facet of musical science, called by German writers musica poetica.
This emerging approach rationally explained the process and structure of a
composition, as well as the mechanism through which music affected the
listener. 22 Nicolaus Listenius (Rudimenta musicae planae, 1533; Musica, 1537)
was the first to add the term musica poetica to the bipartite division of music into
musica theoretica and musica practica. Later, Gallus Dressler, in his
compositional treatise Praecepta musicaepoeticae (1563), referred to the division
of an oration into exordium, medium, and finis, and to its application to musical
composition. 23
20 Bartel, pp. 11-12. See also Blake Wilson, George J. Buelow, and Peter A. Hoyt, `Rhetoric and
Music', in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell,
2nd edn, 29 vols (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 2001), xxi, pp. 260-75 (p. 261).
21 Bartel, p. 18.
22 Leon W. Couch III, `Musical Rhetoric in Three Praeludia of Dietrich Buxtehude', The
Diapason, 91 (March 2000), 14-19 (p. 14).
23 Wilson, Buelow, and Hoyt, pp. 261-62.