Canons of Rhetoric

Rhetoric was part of the 'standard' education in the middle ages - although whether the 'standard' medieval minstrel would have received such an education is not so clear (maybe material for another post in future). Nevertheless, the ideas would have been in the air, and perhaps familiar in some way to all those associated, even intermittently, with noble courts, universities and the ecclesiastical.

The classical canons of rhetoric, from Aristotle and Cicero, are:

• Invention
• Arrangement
• Style
• Memory
• Delivery

Although rhetoric is technically about how to make speeches, to persuade an audience of some particular case, or in more general terms, about communication of ideas, it seems clear this is also a useful categorisation, or set of guidelines, for a musician to consider when approaching performance. Indeed, poetry and song were not such distinct categories in the middle ages, so the musical was more closely linked to the verbal.

Note that 'invention' here does not necessarily correspond to  'composition' in the sense of coming up with something completely new, but is more about how to select your material, or vary it. Similarly 'arrangement' is both about the most effective order of presentation, but also ways to make an effect through alteration of the order. But over the next few posts I'll try to go through each 'canon' to give examples of the ideas they encompassed in classical and medieval thought, and how these might apply to instrumental music performance in particular.

As always with these posts, this will be mostly a matter of setting myself a task to research an idea, and passing along what I find out in terms that I hope some other contemporary 'medieval musicians' might find useful...