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Showing results for tags 'rethorics'.
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I'd like to show you my next project. I'm open to any ideas.... First, a few words about my background: I'm not a musician, it's not my occupation. In fact, I am a physician (hematologist) and I deal with leukemia, lymphoma, bone marrow transplant, cellular therapy, etc.... But since I was a child, a had a Humanist spirit and I always knew I would not only do one thing in life. So, I have studied many things, in depth. I love music, and once I had my life on track, I retook my love for music seriously. I studied harmony, counterpoint, reharmonization, orchestration, etc... Partly as a self-taught, partly attending official courses. I started a blog (in Spanish) because I noticed there were almost no information about many techniques. And more, many things were explained or simply exposed in a theoretical way. I focused on how to use tools for composing. I tell you this to put one issue on the table: I have little time to compose music in large formats because the remaining time my occupation lefts, I use it in this "pedagogical" projects. Perhaps, some day, I'll stop learning myself and showing others what I discover, and begin to write what I like. My natural style is contemporary, but I believe a composer must know how music worked in the renaissance, baroque, classicism, romanticism, whatever. In my journey, I have discovered that the biggest pillar or music is to convey emotions. The Baroque era was a peak when we think of it. They took a lot of elements from the past, and the legacy is currently seen in music. Baroque musicians (or any artist) based their music on the theory of affects, or emotion, which is constructed by: a) Musical patterns that wanted to express something (many many years later called Schemata) b) Musical rhetorics. Rhetoric in the simplest sense is the art or the craft of persuasion or discourse. It began even before the Greeks. In the Middle Ages (cantus firmus) it was incorporated to the music - text to influence the people. When music took other direction, baroque composers translated many thetoric figures of speech into music, trying to give music an expressive side. Well, I have worked a lot in schemata, and wrote a lot of examples in my blog. Now I am diving in musical rhetoric. As you can guess, there is not much information about it (even in English). There are many references to many many many books and treatises written in the 18th century explaining this. But today, it is difficult to understand them. The examples were taken from modal and ancient music. Besides, rethoric figures can be understood in many ways. How would you use ephiphora, chiasmus, polysindeton, etc.... in music? That's what I'm triying to answer. .... To be continued in the next message (this is too long).