Some observations of the contemporary musical and rhetoric analytics

When considering the research of the musical rhetoric in the Russian musicology the leading significance of the intonation-semantic aspect should be highlighted, as well as active elaboration of the musical language and its communicative possibilities, but at the same time we should pay attention to fixation of the unidirectional concept of really board and heterogeneous range of Baroque musical and rhetoric figures. The early 1980s - 1990s and 2000s was the period of intensive studies of the musical language elements as meaning-forming building blocks of a work of arts as a total. In the 21st century the vector of the musical and rhetoric analysis has shifted only slightly. During the past 10 years a 'musical-rhetorical figure' has been defined through such notions as 'symbol', 'a sound phrase (motive)', 'formula', 'sign, emblem', 'stable, semantically intense element', 'image-meaning unit, compositional sound idiom', 'leitmotif of affect', 'intonation pattern', 'intonation-symbol'. Apart from concentrating on the symbolic aspect of musical figures, the research of the 21st century sometimes substitutes the Baroque conceptual construct of theoretical treatise of the 17th - the first half of the 18th centuries for the ' contemporary' ones, which started in the 20th century within the context of J.S. Bach studies (research of A. Schweizer, B.L. Javorsky, M.S. Druskin, J.S. Druskin and other). For some contemporary scholars it was not the theoretical texts of the Baroque period that served as sources of information on musical and rhetoric figures. Instead, A. Schweizer's works were such a source. However, A. Schweizer knew nothing of the lists of musical and rhetoric figures in the treatise of J.S. Bach's contemporaries and predecessors. In many cases searches for the newly invented 'symbolism of the rhetoric figures', 'intonation formulas' and 'motive-symbols' become the favorite hermeneutic method involving a scarce number of figures by the Baroque theorists (anabasis, cataba-sis, circulatio and other) filtered by the musical analytics according to the criteria of the intonation semantics and potential symbolism. We also observe insufficient awareness of the musical and theoretical aspect, use of the outdated notions (on the set of all concepts as on a system of musical figures Baroque) and information (on the number of the musical figures given by the theorists). The author draws the conclusion that the 'broad fame' of the musical and rhetoric figures is so well-known that it sometimes has little to do with the authentic phenomenon of the musica poetica Baroque. At the current stage of development of the Russian musicology the author sees it necessary to consolidate the approaches to understanding of the musical heritage of this epoch from the point of view of the historical analytics.

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