Schulenberg, David, ed. The Music of J. S. Bach: Analysis and Interpretation.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Ch. 2 Dressler
- Of ultimately greater importance for the history of fugue was Dresslers application
of the rhetorical dispositio to the motet. Again he kept things simple and adopted the
most basis design of beginning (exordium), middle (medium), and end (finis). The
motet of Clemens and Gombert lacks unifying thematic material, of course, since
each point of imitation comprises both a verbal phrase and a unique musical subject
crafted to fit that phrase. Dresslers interpretation of the music-rhetorical analogy,
therefore, expected the exordium merely to get the piece off to a good and proper
start, not to introduce thematic material that would continue to be treated as the piece
progresses. In musical terms he defined the exordium as the opening point of
imitation and understood a proper start to be one that above all else presented the
mode clearly. In practical terms, therefore, if a motet began with a fugue, then the
voices of that fugue should begin in the proper modal notes of final and reciting tone,
and their melodic motion should emphasize the most important modal notes. Fugues
in the body of the piece, by contrast, could be handled more freely, with entrances on
notes other than final and reciting tone, and with greater freedom in the handling of
the imitation. At the end of the piece, the original mode should once again be clear as
the final cadence approaches.
In sum, Dressler took a flexible and creative approach to the incorporation of
rhetorical thought. On the one hand, [h]e drew an analogy with figures of speech but
chose for their musical counterparts purely musical techniques, with no attempt to
match particular verbal phenomena with particular musical ones. On the other hand,
he drew a direct parallel between the three parts of a good speech or essay and the
three parts of a good musical composition, again without trying to relate specifically
verbal techniques to musical ones. It is easy to believe that composers of the early
sixteenth century were influenced in just this way by the ideals of their literary
colleagues.
Most German writers on music in the century after Dresslers pioneering work
remained content with this sort of general analogy, but Joachim Burmeister, a teacher
of Latin grammar and composition in Rostock, did not. 9 Whereas Dressler had
enumerated three figures of music, Burmeister in the first of his three books offered
twenty-two; by the time of his third book the number of musical figures had grown to
twenty-six, most of them borrowed from rhetoric. One can scarcely conceive of
1

twenty-six fundamental techniques of musical composition comparable to Dresslers

fugue, cadences, and suspensions, and in fact Burmeister took the analogy between
figures of speech and figures of music far beyond this general model to the level of
compositional surface detail.10 Before Burmeister, theorists had largely focused their
attention on the basics of writing music: how to handle the modes; how to write
counterpoint in two, three, and four voices; how to set up suspensions; how to lay out
a point of imitation. When it came time for the student to write real music of his ownthat is, to set a text artistically with sensitivity and expression- the teacher directed
the student, usually without further guidance or comment, to the works of highly
respected composers. It was at precisely this level that Burmeister wished to offer
guidance. Burmeister preferred the word ornament to describe his figures of music,
highlighting their role in fleshing out or making more elegant the basic, skeletal
framework of a musical composition. We might think of the use of these devices as
that which separates the truly first-rate composer from the merely competent, just as
the effective use of figures of speech separates the persuasive speaker from the rest
of the pack. One could therefore make a case that Burmeisters musical ornaments
provide a better analogy to Quintilians figures of speech than do Dresslers
fundamental compositional techniques.