Elegance as a Concept in Sixteenth-Century Music Criticism

Abstract

”… et vere sciunt cantilenas ornare, in ipsis omnes omnium affectus exprimere, et quod in Musico summum est, et elegantissimum vident … “Adrian Coclico, Compendium musices (1552)The notion of music as a form of speech is a commonplace. Without arguing the difficult questions whether music is patterned after speech or itself constitutes its own language, it should be remembered that the main vocabulary for describing the structure and content of music has been drawn from the artes dicendi. The present report deals with a small, but significant part of this vocabulary: the term elegance along with various synonyms and antonyms borrowed from grammar and rhetoric and applied to music, in a number of writings, from classical times onwards.

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