Musical Communication in the Aspect of Rhetorical Canon

Abstract

Within the focus of the authors’ scholarly interest is the rhetorical canon, which was
absorbed within the specific features of intercultural interaction of the “transmitter” of the artistic
information and its “recipient” carried out within the art of music. Expressing their solidarity with
the position according to which the rhetorical art presents a form of human communication, the
authors presume that it is particularly the rhetorical canon in the triunity of Ethos, Logos and
Pathos shall make it possible to study in all completeness the process of musical communication,
stipulating the acquisition of personal meaning by the actors engaging in cooperation with the
composer. Since every artistic discourse in reality tends rather to reflect the speech activity of
its creator, corresponding to that national picture of the world to which it belongs, rather than
to reality, it must be acknowledged: such a text initially presents itself as rhetorically organized.
Such an approach turns out to be true in all circumstances, even when the creator expresses doubt
concerning what he had thought previously about the rules of the rhetorical art at the moment
of creation of his work. Noting the importance, in the conditions of musical communication of
the musical text, by means of which the composer’s speech utterance is the transmitter and with
which subsequently the participants of the communicative act interact, it becomes important to
supplement the triad of “composer – performer – listener” with yet another link – the musical text.
This results in the succession of: composer → text1 ↔ performer → text2 ↔ listener → text3.
It is emphasized that in the resulting scheme of: text1, text2 and text3 – it remains all the same
musical text, which differs from the original, first of all, by the type of speech (in the case of the
composer it involves written “speech,” in the case of the performer it is oral, and in the case of the
listener it may be perceived also as visual “speech,” acquiring the status of a written utterance and
actualized oral or written verbal speech, as well as speech cognized on the level of the plasticity of
the human body, etc.); and, second, by tints of meaning, which, being a subjective phenomenon,
acquires an intersubjective character during the process of communication.

Keywords: musical communication, rhetorical canon, composer – performer – listener