Climax (music)

The climax (Greek: "stairs, ladder, step") means in music the repetition of a unit of meaning in an intensified form. It is often used to amplify text passages and is also a very powerful stylistic device in instrumental music.

The mentioned increase should be carried out upwards. It is common to dissolve the unit of meaning in a cadence . A climax can, however, also be an accumulation of cadences, which increase increasingly. In each case, the same rhythmic structure is retained in the melody.

Whether the climax should actually be seen as an increase has been understood differently by several theorists and sometimes equated with rhetorical-musical figures such as gradatio or auxesis . The theorists Joachim Burmeister , Thuringus and Johannes Nucius understood the climax to be more of a gradual progression. In Athanasius Kircher's work , the climax is seen as an increase for the first time and is treated as such by later theorists.

example

At the beginning of Heinrich Schütz Herr's work, if only I have you from the Musical Exequien Opus 7, such a climax can be seen. Here the beginning of the sentence ("Lord, if only I ...") is sequenced, and the melody is increased to a dissolving cadence.

literature

• Dietrich Bartel: Handbook of musical figures. Laaber 1985