Pathopoeia

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The pathopoeia or pathopoiia (Greek: affect representation , also causing suffering ) is a musical-rhetorical figure , defined as the enforcement of music with non-key chromatic tones, which is supposed to express affects of sadness, suffering and pain.

In rhetoric , pathopoeia is less of a specific figure than the term for the arousal of affects, i.e. an umbrella term for the strategies that serve the demand to move emotionally ( movere ).

As a musical-rhetorical figure, the pathopoeia first appears in Joachim Burmeister , according to whose remarks "the text is expressed by semitones in such a way that no one remains unaffected by the effect produced". There is no limitation of the affects in Burmeister; Christoph Bernhard differentiates the musical definition without specifying the content: "It [the pathopoeia ] happens when semitones are inserted into the composition that belong neither to the mode nor to the genus of the composition" in other words, on tones foreign to the ladder. Thuringus, on the other hand, restricts himself to a description of the affects, which, however, remains very general: «[ Pathopoeia ] happens when the (musical) sentence is caused by affects of pain, joy, fear, laughter, grief, pity, jubilation , terror and similar affects [...] is endowed [...]. » Thuringus is thus still very close to the purely rhetorical and thus more general meaning of pathopoeia .

In modern research, Dietrich Bartel limits the affects caused by pathopoeia to suffering, pain and grief. The important musical lexicons of the present also certify that the figure arouses negative affects, which can be explained by the tonal shape of a chromatic passage. Hartmut Krones alone refers to the earlier, more general meaning of the figure by assigning it the expression "malicious laugh".

The classification of pathopoeia is ambiguous ; On the one hand, it can be used as an umbrella term for figures using chromatics such as B. Saltus duriusculus or Passus duriusculus , Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht emphasizes their functional divergence from these figures: While the Passus and Saltus duriusculus underline the meaning of the text musically, "point" at it and thus belong to the category of teaching ( docere ), " create »the pathopoeia affects independently of a pointing function and thus serve the requirement of the category of movere .

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