On February 13, 2012, the oboist Rafael Palacios
defended his PhDiss. La pronuntiatio musicale: une interprétation
rhétorique au service de Handel, Monteclair, C. P. E. Bach et
Telemann, at the Université Paris Sorbonne. The jury was formed by
the musicologists Raphaëlle Legrand (Sorbonne) and Catherine Massip (Sorbonne),
the Canadian fortepianist
Tom Beghin (McGill University) and Rubén López Cano
(ESMuC).
In my opinion, the thesis makes a fundamental
contribution to the development of performative
musicology: the musicological research on, from or through the musical
instrument, with the aim of informing musical performance and, in this case
seeks models directly affect the interpretation of early music we have today.
But on the other hand, work directly affects also
within the scope of the tradition of research and application of rhetoric to
music. By this I mean of course the historical body of theory developed
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and known by the generic name
of Musica poetica. But the
thesis makes a significant contribution also to musical semiotics.
The substantial element of work, I think, is his
attempt to build a whole musical pronuntatio
designed to conceptualize, analyze and theorize about some elements of the
process of interpretation. The pronuntatio
is the key area of rhetoric aimed to regulate some aspects of the orator’s performance. This
field was not taken by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century with
the same intensity and care that other areas of rhetoric as the inventio (heuristic processes to
generate ideas and arguments for the discourse), the dispositio (the distribution of arguments in strategic areas
to discursive argumentation) or elocutio
(putting into words the speech, particularly the application of rhetorical
figures or deviations that could contribute to the elegance of language,
discourse’s pregnance and to call to listener's attention and persuade him/her).
The work of Palacios repeat the transdisciplinar exercise
performed for the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth. He takes the
concepts, categories and meta-language of classical rhetoric to shape a theory
of musical eloquence. In this case, the author achieves a successful
battery of well-conceptualized terms of the musical interpretation phenomena. This
qualifies as either a vice or rhetorical license.
The proposed concepts such as prothesis, paragoge, diacrèsis, ecstasy, synaloephê, syncope, barbirolexis or amphibolia, are analytical categories that could become conceptualizations
of a qualitative dimension and humanistic values. This is all an
alternative to existing analytical studies of musical performance, dominated by
the English literature and developed primarily through quantitative
methodologies.
I think the work done, for example, by the Research Centre for the History and Analysis
of Recorded Music by respected musicologists as Nicholas Cook and John
Rink. They have developed software to quantify in detail aspects of
musical performance and tempi changes. However, the categories proposed by
Palacios are qualitative, are immeasurable and open the possibility of a
musical analysis of the interpretation, rhetoric and hermeneutically founded. Make
room for the humanities to enter again into musical studies. This looks
like one of the most important contributions of the thesis. This is a
substantial proposal, very necessary and useful. Is the return of
Burmeister and Mattheson to the theory of music. The return of Cicero and
Quintilliano to study music. I think this thesis is one of the greatest
contributions of the studies of musical rhetoric in the last thirty years.
Today it is as if Gaudi's Sagrada Familia had been
finally concluded. One of the most fascinating projects in music theory of
all time that began in the early seventeenth century in Rostock by Joachim
Burmeister (1566 - 1629), finally ended its theoretical program yesterday in
Paris, thanks to Palacios.
Este obra de Rubén López Cano está bajo una licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported.
