Implizite Theorie

The selection and evaluation of historical theoretical sources depend considerably on our interests and expectations. The importance of basso continuo remains underestimated today, while sources which seem to pave the way for chord-inversion, fundamental bass and “modern” harmony systems are often overrepresented. This article attempts to show that many didactic writings from the 16th to the 18th century contain an implicit theory, which can be highly useful today for practical exercises as well as for analysis. This implicit theory is built upon general concepts orientated towards the surface of composition and not towards hidden structural strata. The metaphor of a musical surface as contrasting to depth and height is derived from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and used as a global interpretation of the history of music theories. “Musical surface” here designates the intervallic design of multi-part structures, above all the design of the outer voices, demonstrated prototypically by examples from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The art of designing the musical surface serves as the main criterion of a composer’s craftsmanship in numerous treatises. The “theory” documented in these treatises has to be reconstructed today, as it is often not entirely verbalized. The most common didactic tool in these implicit theories is the exemplum. The practical use of exempla helps to transform an implicit into an explicit theory and as a result might also help to reconstruct historic teaching methods. This is exemplified by the discussion of passages from treatises by Christopher Simpson (A Compendium of Practical Musick, 1667) and Giovanni Paisiello (Regole per bene accompagnare il partimento, 1782). This practically oriented approach makes today’s didactics of historical musical styles similar to experimental archeology.