Rhetoric and Fugue: An Analytical Application

Abstract

The article begins by critiquing traditional understandings of musical rhetoric, offering in their place a conception of rhetoric rooted in the classical model of rhetoric as persuasive discourse. Fugue in general is studied in light of its affinity to this model. The fugue to Bach's Toccata, S. 915, is then closely analyzed as rhetorical discourse. The notion of rhetorical status, or issue, is brought to bear upon the subject of the fugue, which exposes the compositional problems that the fugue addresses with specific “arguments.” The article concludes with additional observations on the nature of musical rhetoric.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.