Conference Agenda

The chansons of Gilles Binchois reveal previously unrecognized formal, melodic, and contrapuntal symmetries, traits shared with anonymous contemporaries in the Burgundian court manuscript E-E MS V.III.24 (Escorial A), copied ca. 1430–45. First among these is the presence of rondeaux with the same number of pitches on either side of signa congruentiae indicating their poetic and musical center. Usually found in the tenor voice, in some chansons this formal and numerical symmetry extends to all three voices. Second is the presence of extended pitch passages that form consonant counterpoint against their retrograde, retrograde-inversion, or both in combination. In Binchois’s Lamy de ma dame, the tenor is divided at its mid-line rhyme into two sections that are consonant against their retrograde-inversion. In Triste plaisir, the 38 pitches of its tenor are consonant against their retrograde-inversion, while half of its 76-pitch cantus is consonant against its retrograde. The tenor of De plus en plus has 25 pitches on either side of its poetic center, 25 of which are consonant against their retrograde. In the anonymous Helas, je n’ose descouvrir, the entire 36-pitch tenor voice is consonant against its retrograde-inversion, with a geometric midpoint and outer apses.

Melodic transformations (retrograde, inversion, and retrograde-inversion) and chiastic structures have long fascinated scholars of 15th-century music, including Todd (1978), Newes (1990), Zayaruznaya (2012), Schiltz (2015), and Gilbert (2023). But these passages in songs by Binchois and his contemporaries invite new approaches to comparative analysis. To consider their role in the compositional process, this paper enlists studies of geometric tiling as both structure and ornament in Burgundian churches (Kavaler, 2000) and evolving terminology (commensuratio, proportio, dispositio, and symmetria) in 15th-century art and architecture (De Jonge, 2014 and Hubert, 2020). I adopt Nicolas Cusanus’s concept of arts as expressions of number (De coniecturis, 1442–43), external senses as bridges to imagination and intellect (De quarendo Deum, 1445), and “geometric theology” outlined in Heymericus de Campo’s 1450 Centheologicon. These contemporary sources provide visual tools and vocabulary for understanding how composers conceived and crafted these remarkable aural and visual symmetries that simultaneously reflect structural ornament and ornamental structure.

Heinrich Biber’s so-called Rosary Sonatas for violin and basso continuo, probably composed or compiled around 1680 in Salzburg, comprise a cycle of fifteen multi-movement works based on the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, with a concluding Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin. The collection’s title page is presumed lost, and, in place of individual titles, each work begins with a small copperplate engraving of a Rosary image, alongside a musical incipit containing unique scordatura (non-standard tuning) instructions.

Following the manuscript’s late 19th-century musicological rediscovery, most early scholarship on the cycle dismissed Biber’s scordatura as more virtuosic gimmick than likely vehicle for essential content. Recent investigations by Glüxam, Giles, Edgar, Chafe, and Brewer, however, have helpfully revised and nuanced these earlier understandings of Biber’s scordatura practices in and beyond the Rosary Sonatas. Clements, meanwhile, demonstrates that Biber’s Latin dedications to these and other works exhibit considerable skill in the linguistic Ars rhetorica, which bespeaks Biber’s likely Jesuit education. This perhaps deepens questions about his musical-rhetorical techniques and Jesuit influence therein, particularly relative to Lutheran Figurenlehre practices so prevalent in Germanic lands during his lifetime.

By probing these intersecting compositional dimensions—scordatura and rhetoric––this paper reveals ways in which Biber’s Rosary Sonatas engage violinist and audience in a dialogic relationship resonant with Jesuit dialectic techniques. Biber’s scordatura, in its defining rupture between notation and sonic result, generates divergent synaesthetic experiences in a single musical encounter: one for the violinist, capable of seeing the engraved Rosary images but physically tethered to the notation by the scordatura, and another for a beholder, who experiences tensions between sounding musical-rhetorical figures and the violinist’s (sometimes radically incongruous) scordatura-dictated physical gestures. This manifests most acutely in “instructive” musical figures seemingly engineered to enable visual-physical intelligibility by an observer in performance––an operation that I argue constitutes an adaptation of Figurenlehre vocabulary for Stylus phantasticus aesthetic presentation. Ultimately, this understanding of Biber’s composition destabilizes expected roles of “composer,” “instrument,” “performer,” and “audience” in the Rosary Sonatas: Biber strategically uses both violin and violinist as embodied rhetorical tools, equally deployable to affective devotional ends and capable of engaging meaningfully in Jesuit multisensory discourse.

Recent research in musical rhetoric demonstrates that Marin Mersenne and his seventeenth-century French contemporaries considered music analogous to rhetoric primarily in terms of actio (Psychoyou, 2006, 2014; Redwood, 2015). Elocutio and figures are rarely mentioned (Gibson, 2008; Gordon-Seifert, 2011). But figures do appear in eighteenth-century treatises such as Jean-Léonor Le Gallois de Grimarest’s Traité du recitatif (1707) and Michel Pignolet de Monteclair’s Principes de musique (1736). The term figure also appears in discussions of music and visual art. In 1668 André Félibien wrote that Nicolas Poussin imbued the figures in his paintings with passions of the musical modes dorien, lydien, lesbien, and ionique. And in 1740 Hubert le Blanc wrote that melody forms the figure, comparing it to the geometric lines in boxwood garden designs. Using these interpretations of figure, this paper examines melodic contours, rhythms, and harmonies in Marin Marais’s character pieces for viola da gamba as musical-rhetorical figures and figural shapes that portray actions of violence, pain, and healing.

“La Fougade” (The Land Mine) begins with the same pyrrhic tirade used in a scene from Marais’s opera Sémélé where aegypans and maenads (known in mythology for dismembering Orpheus) dance during a sacrifice in honor of Bachus. In “Le Tableau de l’Operation de la Taille” (The Tableau of the Bladder Operation) printed textual annotations describing the surgery align to musical-rhetorical figures such as gradation, hypotyposis, interrogation, circulatio, pathopoeia, exclamation, passus durisuculus, and abruptio. Marais’s tableau adheres to the classical unities of time, place, and action, blending elements of classical tragedy and painting in the style of Poussin’s tableaux. The following three-piece suite “Les Relevailles” (The Recovery) has different titles in an eighteenth-century manuscript: “Paysane” (Peasant), “Gigue” (Jig), and “Air.” Here the dance rhythms represent a joyful recovery, echoing Thoinot Arbeau’s conception of dance as “mute rhetoric.” These examples show how Marais used specific melodic contours, rhythms, and harmonies to create figures illustrating the passionate discourse of his titles and textual annotations.