STUDIA UBB MUSICA, LXVII, Special Issue 2, 2022 (p.

7 – 19)
(RECOMMENDED CITATION)
DOI: 10.24193/subbmusica.2022.spiss2.01

THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN

MUSICAL THINKING

OLEG GARAZ1

SUMMARY. Essentially, the emergence of the concept of style in European

musical thinking is the consequence of the shift produced at the end of the
Renaissance. The trend towards the simplification of language and musical
expression and the subordination of both to the notional-poetic discourse
determines the unimaginable: the hegemony of rhetoric and, implicitly, of
style as a rhetorical sub-category having the function of organizing and
controlling musical suggestiveness – the taxonomy of musically expressible
emotions. It is also during the period of the musical Baroque that the practical
insertion of the concept of style begins by cohabiting with the idea of genre
in all its three forms: as a specific habitat for the performance of the musical
act, as a composition coefficient and equally as a type of ethos. This
confusion will persist for the entire period of use of the concept of style, which
gradually fades as the insertion of postmodernism gathers momentum. As a
tool for functional and semantic dislocation, style also acts in relation to the
term canon, the only value reference until the shift from the mathematical-
cosmic quadrivium to the discursive-philological trivium (the Del Bene moment,
1586). Apart from taking over the attributions from the concept of genre, style
also claims the function of canon as the exclusive value reference. Starting
with the Baroque, we already speak of the stylistic canon. The complete
absorption of the canonical function by style takes place during the Viennese
Classicism, when style becomes a personalizing-biological reference, attached
to the musical thinking of a prominent personality (Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven
et ses trois styles, 1855). Musical Romanticism raises the understanding
of style to the level of an almost absolute exclusivity, on a par with the
transcendentalism displayed by the genius-musician (the Liszt-Wagner
paradigm). The dissipation of Romanticism determines the return to the
identification through ethos: verism, expressionism, impressionism-symbolism
and naturalism, so that it is only during the first musical modernism (1900-1914)
that we witness the return to the purely technical Renaissance acceptance: the

1 Associate professor dr. habil., “Gh. Dimaˮ National Academy of Music, Cluj-Napoca, I.C.
Brătianu street 25. E-mail: [email protected]

©2022 Studia UBB MUSICA. Published by Babeş-Bolyai University.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License 7
 OLEG GARAZ

atonal style, during the second modernism (1918-1939) – the dodecaphonic

style, the serial style, and further, during the third modernism (1946-1968) –
the style of stochastic music, the style of aleatoric music, the minimalist style
etc. The uselessness of the concept of style as a procedure of identification
through differentiation (Boris Asafiev) and obviously as a meta-narrative is
already revealed in musical postmodernism, with all the three anti-metanarrative
“ideologies” of postmodernism: the ideology of distrust, the ideology of the
fragment and the ideology of recovery.

Keywords: history of style, stylistic canon, style as a genre, style as a

metanarrative, liberation from style

By virtue of its extensive historical use that has long become tradition,
the phrase ‘musical style’ is taken as a given of an indisputable scientific
value. In other words, musical style is regarded as a fundamentally strong
concept, also acting as a generative epicentre for a distinct field of
musicological research, namely musical stylistics.

1. Four “styles” of formulating the relationship between style and

music

The ways in which the concept of style is understood in European

musical thinking and practice are spectacularly diverse in terms of typology:
individual Beethovenian or Bachian style, the style of the vocal or
instrumental, symphonic, oratorio or chamber genres, style as an aesthetic-
periodizing term ‒ Romantic, Baroque or Renaissance, performing or
compositional style, style as an aesthetic-technical term ‒ serial, stochastic,
aleatoric or minimalist, the style of German, French or Italian music, group
style ‒ Le Six or The Mighty Handful etc.
Hence the diversity, but also an obvious “blurriness” of the definitions
which, quite relevantly, are structured more like borrowings from literary
analysis. To simplify things, only a few titles of some important monographs
should be invoked, which conjointly could provide a useful mini genealogy
for understanding the phenomenon of style over the course of its semantic
evolution in relation to its parent field, which is musical thinking. American
musicologist Leonard B. Meyer’s monograph titled Style and Music: Theory,
History, and Ideology 2 will serve as a starting point. Both terms used in the
title are placed in a relationship of equidistant neutrality guaranteed by the
particle ‘and’, with no possibility of semantic interference.

2 Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago and London, 1989.

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 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN MUSICAL THINKING

A second step is suggested by the title of Russian musicologist Mihail

Mihailov’s monograph ‒ Стиль в музыке 3 (Style in Music). Here we already
have an active semiotic relationship between signifier and signified, suggesting
the possibility of adaptively embedding the concept of style into the pool of
musical thinking as a conceptual dominant and a signifier of style, respectively.
Both terms still retain their identity as nouns, as strong forms of semantic
individuation.
A third option along this line could be Stilurile muzicii (Styles of Music),
in which, even despite the genitival relationship of possession, we are still
dealing with two nouns, which stand in a distant relationship guaranteed by the
middle particle. The succession of these particles suggests a gradual closeness
between the terms in the title ‒ and, in, of ‒, as well as a passive, instrumental
relationship between style and music as host concept. A final surprising aspect
suggests a “coup d’état”, successfully carried out as a result of a plot. This is
the most widely used form of relationship between the two terms, as illustrated
by Richard L. Crocker’s monograph titled A History of Musical Styles 4.
By turning the noun music into an adjective, acting as an attribute and
an identifier for the noun ‘style’, the semiotic relationship is inverted. In the
new variant, the concept of style becomes a signifier and host for the entire
heretofore autonomous field, and at the same time acts as a filter or sieve
through which the meanings of music must be “sifted” to be understood
according to their stylistic value. This last title concludes the process of
ingraining music into the concept of style, although apparently things could
be understood in the exact opposite way. This representation emerges from the
very relationship between two concepts of different status: style ‒ understood
as a suggestive manner of discourse, serving as a secondary accompaniment
to the dominant concept of rhetoric and discursive-linguistic in substance, ‒
and music ‒ an autonomous and exclusively sonorous type of artistic thinking
and practice, generated in the pool of religious thinking and practice as a
mystical-mathematical analogy of the universal order. The simple adjoining
of these two terms reveals nothing but absolute heterogeneity and the
impossibility of establishing even the faintest communication.
However, musicology now operates with the phrase ‘musical style’ as
a legitimate analytical operator. The logical conclusion of the first three titles
of integration of style into music, should have been ‘stylistic music’ (as opposed
to ‘canonical music’) and not ‘musical style’, although as the reality of historical

3 Mihailov, Mihail - музыке, Стиль в. Muzîka, Leningrad, 1981, and also Этюды о стиле в
музыке [Studies on Style in Music], Muzîka, Leningrad, 1990.
4 Crocker, Richard L. A History of Musical Styles. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, reprint
1986.

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 OLEG GARAZ

evolution has shown, both variants are equivalent conceptual emulations

serving to demonstrate a shift that had already occurred in European musical
thinking around the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century.

2. Giulio del Bene and the stylistic “invasion” in music

In terms of origin and identity, the concept of style is an attributive

constituent of rhetoric as a discipline and art of persuasion, and linguistic-
philological in substance. In other words, style refers to the suggestive quality
of a spoken or written notional discourse. This strictly linguistic nature of style
is validated by identifying style, as subordinate to rhetoric, as an element of
the philological trivium as conceived by Martianus Capella (active around 400
A. D.) in his treatise De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii.
This differentiation of style as a constituent of rhetoric, a fundamentally
secondary and conceptually weak element, in the trivium, and of music in the
quadrivium of the cosmic-mathematical disciplines is a normative imperative
only to the extent that the two constituent groups of the Septem artes
liberales are subdivided into two ontologies or, more precisely, into one
ontology (quadrivium) and a set of technical means with applied instrumental
value, entirely non-autonomous and therefore weak in comparison with the
autonomy and power of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy as
strong conceptions, of direct knowledge and representation of reality.
The sciences of articulate language ‒ rhetoric, grammar, and logic (or
dialectics) ‒ hold the well-deserved second place as discursive emulations of a
causal precursory reference. This division faithfully reflects both the qualitative
power ‒ the number in opposition to the concept, discourse and interpretation ‒,
and the quantitative one ‒ four mathematical-cosmological sciences as opposed
to three philological ones, the perfect imaginary order in the distribution of
attributions, functions, meanings and generative potential. This order of
things persisted as a norm throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
until 1586, when an upheaval occurred with dramatic consequences both in
the collective imaginary and, logically, in the subsequent historical evolution
of artistic thinking. In that year, Giulio del Bene, a member of the Accademia
degli Alterati, proposed transferring music from the quadrivium to the trivium,
as described by Daniel KL Chua in his monograph Absolute Music and
Constructing of Meaning:

Giulio del Bene said as much in 1586 when he gave a speech to

another Camerata in Florence, the Accademia degli Alterati, proposing
that music should be transferred from the quadrivium to the trivium,
that is, from the immutable structure of the medieval cosmos to the

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 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN MUSICAL THINKING

linguistic relativity of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectics. In the trivium,

music becomes human and can be made infinitely malleable by the
power or rhetorical persuasion. This shift allows man to bend music
according to his linguistic will, twisting and distorting its intervals to
vocalise his passional self. Monody deliberately breaks the harmonic
laws of the cosmos to legitimise humanity as the new sovereign who
creates his own laws out of his own being. This new style (our
emphasis) of singing, by ‘transgressing through several forbidden
intervals’ as Caccini puts it, articulates the heretical ego of the new
humanity. [...] The shift from the quadrivium to the trivium signals a
modern ontology 5.

Thus, the positions of power are first reversed quantitatively ‒ the

original trivium turns into a new quadrivium ‒, philology takes over from
ontology as a conceptual dominant, and the acoustic (Pythagorean)
mathematical essence of music is replaced by the narrative-discursive one.
Thus, an apparently formal proposal to mechanically transfer music from one
place to another later reveals its function as a “leverage” whereby Del Bene
practically reinvents the meaning of music, while also determining a reversal
of the direction and content of the evolution of European culture for at least
three centuries. This reformulation had a weakening effect, even though in
the period immediately following the (musical) Baroque it was precisely this
apparent “liberation” of music from the shackles of mathematical ontology
that produced that playful and wild “orgy” of the invention of musical style.
Music is taught to narrate in perfect harmony and obedience to the
morphology and logic of the notional text, under the strictest constraints of
rhetoric. In other words, music will have to learn to narrate with style.

3. Causes: from the fetishization of Antiquity to Giordano

Bruno’s pyre

One of the major causes of this shift was the predominantly

philological quality of the Renaissance, given that at the core of Renaissance
humanism was above all the discovery and research of the texts of Greek
and Latin Antiquity. This preoccupation with the ancient texts gained great
momentum during the Renaissance as the stage of accumulation,
assimilation through transcription and translation, storage and conservation
had already been achieved in the monasteries of the Middle Ages.

5 Chua, Daniel K. L. Absolute Music and Constructing of Meaning, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge / New York / Port Melbourne, 1999, p. 34-35.

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 OLEG GARAZ

This preoccupation was amplified by the influx of Greek scholars in

early fifteenth-century Italy, because of the ever-increasing Turkish pressure
on Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453. Regarding music, this
preoccupation with the text and especially with the clarity of the text in a
musical work serves as an important argument in the debates of the Council
of Trent, concluded in 1563, and Palestrina’s Missa papae Marcelli is an
exemplary model for resolving the dialectics between text and music in
favour of the text, even at the cost of simplifying the polyphonic style. This
case serves as an argument for understanding the tendency that led to del
Bene’s decision in both senses:
1. the option to treat music as a discourse and
2. the imperative need for semantic and suggestive-expressive
accessibility, while the musical would have to be conceived based on the
model of poetic suggestibility, which technically speaking determines
3. the emergence of homophony both as a departure from the
complexity of contrapuntal writing, moving beyond the esotericism of
religious expression and of certain doctrinal-symbolic contents, and as the
emergence of opera as a genre and of the tonal functional harmonic style.
A second major aspect was the shift from the theocentric imaginary
to the anthropocentric world-view, which, in general terms, would translate
not only as the humanization of the divine faces in Renaissance paintings
but also as the need for a different type of expression (than the dogmatic-
conventional one) and for the expression of something else (than the narrow
range of states determined by the Christic drama), of real human emotions
that can be represented in a poetic-textual form as opposed to the biblical-
textual or evangelical one.
The third aspect is the dichotomy between the irrational (mystical-
Christian) and the rational (philosophical and intellectual), while the joining
of two seemingly different facts – del Bene’s proposal (the disenchantment
of music) and Giordano Bruno’s pyre (the disenchantment of the European
imaginary) – reveals the same idea of demystification of thought and the break
with both the religious mysticism and the dangerous esotericism of magical
practices. This mutual weakening between the religious and the magical is a
major step forward towards a rationalist-philosophical secularization. In fact, all
these three elements ‒ the preoccupation with philology and intellectualism,
the option for the world of human experiences and emotions and the
departure from mysticism through the exclusive focus on rationality ‒ can be
viewed as a solid causal argument for del Bene’s idea to qualify as a
milestone in the European artistic thought and as a starting point for a second
cultural cycle in European history.

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 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN MUSICAL THINKING

4. The realignment of music: from the quadrivium to the trivium,

from the canonical tradition to the free play of stylistic canons

In the large pool of musical artistic practices, it is already relevant to

join the del Bene moment ‒ 1586 ‒ and the activities of the Florentine Camerata,
started by Giovanni de’ Bardi as early as in 1573. The shift from polyphonic
thinking to the principle of accompanied monody (homophony) and the
development of a new technique ‒ stile recitativo in accordance with the afettata
manner of expression ‒ could only be imagined as a consensus between the
two intellectual actions unfolding in the same Florentine space.
The emergence of this orientation is predetermined by the dispute
between Vincenzo Galilei and Gioseffo Zarlino and later amplified by the
controversy between Claudio Monteverdi and Zarlino’s student ‒ Giovanni
Artusi. Del Bene’s proposal can in turn be considered as the effect of an
implacable convergence of several determining factors, related to which the
shift of music from the quadrivium to the trivium was the only compromise
solution made under the immense pressure of a general process of
paradigmatic change. In other words, all the cultural accumulations acquired
until 1586 propelled the collective imaginary as well as the nature of social
demand (even as a need manifested in a small circle of the Florentine
intellectual elite) to a new level of the evolutionary spiral, while the nature of
the qualitative changes of mentalities revealed that religious and magical
thinking, and in the particular case of music ‒ contrapuntal polyphony ‒, were
already anachronistic (ancient) and consequently useless for the purpose of
a cultural qualitative leap. Only thus can one understand del Bene’s preference
for a (modern) conceptual configuration offering real evolutionary potential,
albeit at the price of a considerable weakening determined by the abandonment
of ontological approaches in favour of the linguistic hermeneutic-speculative
ones.
Giordano Bruno’s pyre (February 17, 1600) is set aflame in the same
year that Giulio Caccini publishes the manuscript of his opera Eurydice, both
events coming as mediated/immediate responses to del Bene’s idea. A third
direct logical consequence would be the entire musical Baroque, a period which,
even on a brief analysis, reveals the drama of a situation of an indecisive break
with the religious-dogmatic and vocal contrapuntal past and of enthusiastic
testing of an utterly unusual secularity through homophony, harmonic thinking,
the opera and orchestral-instrumental genres and, perhaps, the most
important consequence of del Bene’s “revolution” ‒ through the generalized
implementation of the concept of style in music. In this regard, the moment
of transfer of music to the old trivium can be viewed as one that separates a
first properly stylistic artistic era ‒ the musical Baroque ‒ from a non-stylistic

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past ‒ the musical thinking of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Russian
researcher Marina Trubeţkaia offers a series of clarifications of this situation
in her doctoral thesis on the concept of canon in music 6.
A first idea refers to the closeness between the canonical version of
Eastern Christianity and myth and the transformation of the Western Christian
canon into style. A second idea highlights the fact that the Renaissance mass
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represents a last page of the Western
compositional canon as a musical accomplishment of a cosmogonic model seen
as an uninterrupted tradition in the evolution of European musical thinking from
Antiquity to the Renaissance. Thus, the “literaturizing” transformation of the
myth in the Renaissance artistic consciousness determines the rethinking of
the function of the canon in terms of a playful approach, while the increasingly
pronounced revelation of the subjective subtext in the reading of the sacred
text determines the emergence of the first signs of the concept of individual
style. From this moment on, it will only be about the concept of stylistic canon
or, for short, about style.

5. The beginnings of the Baroque: the new world of stylistic

disorder

Viewed from the perspective of the new placement of music in the

linguistic-philological trivium, the entire musical Baroque appears as an era
deliberately focused on aligning music with the figures of a poetic-notional
rhetoric. A relevant parallelism could be drawn between the enthusiastic
practice of the concept of canon by the ancient Greeks and the overwhelming
enthusiasm of playing with the rhetoric of affects and especially with style in
the musical Baroque. As Russian researcher Marina Lobanova states:

The very theory of style in music is an achievement of the age of

Baroque. In the sixteenth century, a distinction was made between
different types of counterpoint, and not styles. In the seventeenth
century, numerous style classifications appeared. They were extremely
diverse and sometimes rather odd. There was no unity between criteria,
because they had not been formulated and therefore such unity could
not appear during that time. The concept of “style” is the product of
the Baroque culture, but under these conditions it does not receive

6 Trubeţkaia, Marina. Канон в музыкальной культуре: к проблеме единства традици

(The Canon in Musical Culture: on the Problem of Unity of Tradition), (culturology
candidate’s thesis), Saratov, 2006.

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 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN MUSICAL THINKING

precise definitions. Originally, its meaning was extremely unstable. It

was felt intuitively that a new musical dimension had been discovered,
but the laws had not yet been formulated 7.

And although Lobanova offers no causal arguments (the del Bene

moment) and has a per abrupto approach to the invention of style in musical
Baroque as a self-evident fact and a simple consequence of the evolutionary
shifts in musical thinking, she continues with the presentation of an impressive
panoply of stylistic variants of the musical Baroque: In the Baroque age, the
traditional schemes were maintained – for example, the rhetorical division into
high, middle and low styles, but at the same time new, individual and sometimes
even surprising formulations were developed.

Thus, Monteverdi distinguishes between the “agitated” (concitato),

“soft” (molle) and “tempered” (temperato) style, and, in his Madrigali
guerrieri, et amorosi, libro ottavo – the warlike, amorous, and
representative (rappresentativo) style. In Heinrich Schütz-Christoph
Bernhard’s theory, there is constant reference to “stilus gravis
(antiquus)” ‒ “the solemn (old) style”, in which “the music is superior
to the text” (“Harmonia Orationis Domina”) and “stylus luxurians” in
two variants: the “the common luxuriant style” (“stylus luxurians
communis”), in which “word and music are of equal importance”
(“Sowohl Oratio als Harmonia Domina”) and the “comic luxuriant
style” (“stylus luxurians comicus”), where “the text has absolute
dominance over music” (“Oratio Harmoniae Domina absolutissima”).
Marco Scacchi distinguished between the church, chamber and
theatrical styles. Kircher mentions the “church”, “canonical”, “motet”,
“madrigal”, “melismatic”, “symphonic”, “fantasy”, “theatrical” and
“hyporchematic” styles 8.

This quote clearly reveals two states of things. The former refers to
the understanding of style as a coefficient of the relationship between text
and music, which directly refers to the already accomplished act of placing
music among the linguistic disciplines. The latter refers more to a generalized
freedom in the elaboration of any and all interpretations of the concept of
style as a coefficient of the concept of genre – church, theatrical, symphonic,
canonical etc. This essentially philological origin of the concept of style

7 Lobanova, Marina. Музыкальный стиль и жанр: история и современность (Musical

Style and Genre: History and Modernity), Sovetski kompozitor, Moscow, 1990, p. 121.
8 Lobanova, p. 122.

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amplified by its radical novelty determines, already in the second half of the
seventeenth century, the emergence of the concept of mixed or combined
style, with the latter being imposed and advocated by musician-theoreticians
such as H. Purcell, J. J. Fux, J. Mattheson, J. J. Quantz or C. Ph. E. Bach.
This conception involved the combination of techniques corresponding
to several different styles such as the concertante and church styles, the old
(Palestrinian, contrapuntal and vocal) and the new (homophonic, instrumental,
or operatic) styles, or the combination of several national styles, hence a third
meaning of style as (national – A/N) taste. All these become possible by
virtue of the multiple identity of the musical Baroque which embraces the
ecclesiastical and the secular alike, homophony and polyphony, the harmonic
and the contrapuntal, all culminating in the “kaleidoscopic” and alternating
several national dances (styles) in a single suite, inserting stylistically
heterogeneous foreign fragments in author’s works, treating genres such as
the chorale in several styles – church or theatrical, not to mention J. S. Bach’s
Mass in b-moll which, according to Marina Lobanova, is a true anthology of
Baroque styles.
Finally, worth mentioning is the role of the two “twins”9 of the Baroque ‒
J. S. Bach and G. Fr. Handel ‒, whom Manfred Bukofzer 10 defines as the
achievers of the stylistic fusion (Bach) and of the coordination of national
styles (Händel). The end of the musical Baroque also revealed the need for
(co)ordination and fusion, for bringing a certain order to the meanings of the
concept of style and for securing it a solid position in the European musical
language and thought. In other words, Bach’s fusion and Handel’s coordination
provide a strong operational understanding of the concept of style, allowing
it to evolve towards those of Viennese classicism and Romanticism.

6. Conclusion

Essentially, the history of the so-considered stylistic period spans

approximately three centuries and eight decades – beginning with the year
1600 until the establishment of postmodernism in the eighth decade of the
twentieth century. After a first period – the musical Baroque (1600-1750) ‒ in
which music is “tamed” in its new, essentially discursive guise, the next
qualitative leap occurs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when

9 The two composers are thus represented in: François-Sappey, Brigitte. Istoria muzicii în
Europa (The History of Music in Europe), Grafoart, Braşov, 2007.
10 Bukofzer, Manfred. Music in the Baroque Era: from Monteverdi to Bach. W. W. Norton &
Company Inc., New York, 1947.

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Ludwig van Beethoven abandons the elements of musical rhetoric in favour

of an organic approach 11, used for the first time in the Third Symphony,
Eroica, in E flat major, Op. 55. At the same time, the meaning of the concept
of style is pushed to the point of identification with the musician’s personality,
as revealed in Wilhelm von Lenz’s monograph titled Beethoven et ses trois
styles (Sankt-Petersburg: Bernard, 1852).
After Bach, who fuses the national styles under the “umbrella” of the
German one, the meaning of the concept of style undergoes a “biological”
shift, suddenly acquiring the ability of ageing and evolving in accordance with
the stages of human biology.
A third element, bringing a sense of special nobility to the concept of
style, is the Romantic theory of the artist-genius, whereby style becomes the
mark of an indisputable value superiority, thus usurping the functional
prerogatives of the concept of musical canon.
We are referring here to Chapter 8: Fusion of National Styles: Bach
and Chapter 9: Coordination of National Styles: Handel, respectively.
However, with the emergence of atonal thinking at the beginning of
the last century, the so-called normative definition of style undergoes a return
to an almost baroque understanding, namely a technical one – dodecaphonic
style (Schoenberg) or serial style (Webern), bruitist style (Varèse) – or an
aesthetic one ‒ neoclassical (Prokofiev and Stravinsky) ‒, and therefore can
no longer be considered as properly stylistic. Furthermore, the attempt to
define Alfred Schnittke’s conception as polystylistic style clearly reveals the
utter inoperability of such a phrase, whereas in terms of postmodern musical
practices it marks the complete abandonment of this type of aesthetic-
periodizing identification.
However, the deforming “irradiation” of music proposed by Giulio
del Bene paved the way not only for the rhetoricization of music and
the reformulation of the strong concept of musical canon into the weak one
of stylistic canon, but also for the proliferation of a historical series of
conceptions regarded as sciences even despite a vehement polemical
resistance. The emergence of a new rhetorical conception of music is
illustrated by Johann Mattheson’s book titled Der vollkommene Capelmeister
(1739).

11 Meyer, Leonard B. Music and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values), delivered at Stanford University, May 17 and 21, 1984. The text is available
on the Internet and can be downloaded from: http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-
toz/m/meyer85.pdf

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 OLEG GARAZ

Later, in 1750, Alexander Baumgarten publishes the Aesthetica, his

proposal for a new science of logical perceptions meant to describe the
sensations of beauty and to educate the taste for beauty.
In 1902, Hermann Kretzschmar (who first used the word Affektenlehre
related to the theory of affects in musical Baroque) publishes the text titled
Anregung zur Förderung der musikalischen Hermeneutik, thus founding the
science of “interpretation” of music, with applications in musical education, but
also in the cultural studies embraced under the banner of the New Musicology
(Joseph Kerman, Susan McClary, Lawrence Cramer, or Garry Tomlinson).
In 1867, Charles Sanders Peirce reinvents semiotics, and through the
contribution of Gino Stefani, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Mario Baroni or Eero
Tarasti, the inventor of musical narratology, all heirs of del Bene, it becomes the
science of signs and of the mechanisms of constructing meanings in music.
The attempt to understand the meaning of ontological and, implicitly, canonical
music, by restoring the meaning this type of practice and thinking had in the
original quadrivium, will, first of all, require the deconstruction and removal
of any linguistic-philological “alluviums” ( rhetoric, aesthetic, hermeneutic or
semiotic) in the attempt to restore the pre-stylistic and pre-Baroque image of
a practice whose authentic meanings could only be reached with great
difficulty.

Translated from Romanian by Marcella Magda

REFERENCES

Monographs:

Bukofzer, Manfred. Music in the Baroque Era: from Monteverdi to Bach, W. W.

Norton & Company Inc., New York, 1947.
Chua, Daniel, K. L. Chua. Absolute Music and Constructing of Meaning, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge/New York/Port Melbourne, 1999.
Crocker, Richard L. A History of Musical Styles, Dover Publications, Inc., New York,
(reprint 1986).
François-Sappey, Brigitte. Istoria muzicii în Europa (The History of Music in Europe),
Grafoart, Braşov, 2007.
Lobanova, Marina. Музыкальный стиль и жанр: история и современность
(Musical Style and Genre: History and Modernity), Sovetski kompozitor,
Moscow, 1990.
Mihailov, Mihail K. Стиль в музыке (Style in Music), Muzîka, Leningrad, 1981.

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 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF STYLE IN EUROPEAN MUSICAL THINKING

Mihailov, Mihail K. Этюды о стиле в музыке (Studies on Style in Music), Muzîka,

Leningrad, 1990.
Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989.

Doctoral theses:

Trubeţkaia, Marina. Канон в музыкальной культуре: к проблеме единства

традиции (The Canon in Musical Culture: on the Problem of Unity of
Tradition), (culturology candidate’s thesis), Saratov, 2006.

Webography:

Meyer, Leonard B. Music and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (The Tanner
Lectures on Human Values), delivered at Stanford University, May 17 and
21, 1984. The text is available on the Internet and can be downloaded from:
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/meyer85.pdf

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