UT dialectica musica: Artificial and natural category structures in musical treatises of the German Renaissance

This study investigates the conceptual organization of the domain of music as found in 16th-century German music books (both elementary textbooks and advanced treatises). A number of distinct categorization strategies are identified and contrasted: some are direct applications of artificial dialectic methodologies, while others yield complex natural category structures familiar to modern Cognitive Science from the functional domains of everyday language.;Among the dialectically guided treatises we find adherents to Ramism (Beurhaus), Philippism (M. Agricola, Faber, Lossio, and the rest of the Lutheran textbooks produced in Wittenberg), "Mixt" Philippo-Ramism (Blistenius), and neo-Aristotelianism proper (Burmeister). The deep "methodized" Ramist divisions are ultimately traced to a dialectic methodology presented in jest in Plato's Sophist. By contrast, the topical dialectic of Philipp Melanchthon yields shallow functional categories, akin to folk-biological taxonomies. Of great import for cognitive and historical musicology are those classifications that operate at the intersection of their author's own practical experience and historically prior categorization schemas. Semantic analysis conducted on the musical and linguistic data of Burmeister's innovative treatise Musica Poetica reveals covert natural category structures superimposed on his historically grounded overt classifications. Among them, the chain category "compositional ornament or figure" encompasses two main sub-clusters: one radial, organized around the central prototype of fuga realis, the other functional, owing its coherence to a blend of information-rich schemata.;The cognitive strategies and resulting semantic category structures examined here are manifestations of a large scale rhetorico-dialectic Weltanschauung that was found to proceed holistically from the "top-down," rendering the polyphonic gestalt epistemically prior to single-voice phenomena. The paradigm shift from the Aristotelian logos-centric conception of Music towards the Cartesian geometric vision of the early modern era is painstakingly documented through the diachronic study of both music-theoretic categories and melodic categories (the latter harvested from compositions by Orlando di Lasso and J. S. Bach).