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    Affects, theory of the ( Ger. Affektenlehre


    George J. Buelow

    https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.00253
    Published in print: 20 January 2001
    Published online: 2001

    In its German form, a term first employed extensively by German


    musicologists, beginning with Kretzschmar, Goldschmidt and
    Schering, to describe in Baroque music an aesthetic concept
    originally derived from Greek and Latin doctrines of rhetoric and
    oratory. Just as, according to ancient writers such as Aristotle,
    Cicero and Quintilian, orators employed the rhetorical means to
    control and direct the emotions of their audiences, so, in the
    language of classical rhetoric manuals and also Baroque music
    treatises, must the speaker (i.e. the composer) move the
    ‘affects’ (i.e. emotions) of the listener. It was from this rhetorical
    terminology that music theorists, beginning in the late 16th century,
    but especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, borrowed the
    terminology along with many other analogies between rhetoric and
    music. The affects, then, were rationalized emotional states or
    passions. After 1600 composers generally sought to express in their
    vocal music such affects as were related to the texts, for example
    sadness, anger, hate, joy, love and jealousy. During the 17th and
    early 18th centuries this meant that most compositions (or, in the
    case of longer works, individual sections or movements) expressed
    only a single affect. Composers in general sought a rational unity
    that was imposed on all the elements of a work by its affect. No
    single ‘theory’ of the affects was, however, established by the
    theorists of the Baroque period. But beginning with Mersenne and
    Kircher in the mid-17th century, many theorists, among them
    Werckmeister, Printz, Mattheson, Marpurg, Scheibe and Quantz,
    gave over large parts of their treatises to categorizing and
    describing types of affect as well as the affective connotations of
    scales, dance movements, rhythms, instruments, forms and styles.

    The so-called Figures, theory of musical was closely related to the


    compositional craft required for the establishing of affects in
    Baroque music.

    See also Rhetoric and music.

    Page 1 of 2
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    See also
    Chromatic
    Composition, §7: Works, styles and ideas
    Philosophy of music, §II, 5: Baroque thought
    Figures, theory of musical
    La Feillée, François de
    Musicology, §II, 11(i): Disciplines of musicology: Gender &
    sexual studies: Women in music
    Rhetoric and music, §I, 4: Up to 1750: Affects

    Page 2 of 2
    PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
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