Musikalische Rhetorik im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert

Today, contemporary music is often considered as free from any kind of linguistic structures. Consequently, understanding new music with the help of rhetoric seems obsolete. Nevertheless composers conceive their pieces as expressive and communicative forms that allow sharing experiences and content, and, in some cases, even deliver messages. In particular, music created by novel technological means requires an analytical approach based on listening, and the ability to discover meaningful patterns. At different historical moments, the term rhetoric subsumed diverse dimensions of musical organisation. Thus a »rhetorical« approach covers multiple labels of understanding. In 20th century’s music, in analogy to ancient theory, three basic fields of rhetorical imprint can be defined: 1. the level of details (intervals, motifs and gestures) corresponding to inventio; 2. the level of form (genres, narrative and dramatic structures, discourse) corresponding to dispositio; 3. the level of performance (articulation, expression, tone, character) corresponding with elocutio. From this perspective, rhetoric is not an accidental means of creation, but an immanent musical principle which allows taking into account music’s communicative potential. Taking the broad sense of the term »rhetoric« as starting point, this paper aims at demonstrating how 20th century music is to be understood as a communicative form. By providing a selection of various examples, it does not present definite research results, but rather points out to desiderata of future analytical research.