Performative Rhetoric and Rhetoric as Validation

This paper explores parallels and differences between the status of verbal and musical texts with respect to content, grammar, and rhetoric. It considers the role that memory and personal apprenticeship played in the performance of unwritten or incompletely notated music, which was not necessarily ‘improvised’. Now we have only the notated texts, which has often obscured how composed music, written or not, was then inseparable from its now unrecoverable performative rhetoric, or actio. Fifteenth-century manuals not only on music but on painting and dance were self-consciously modelled on rhetorical treatises to establish their status as liberal arts.