Doctrine of the Affections: The Key to a Major Era in Music

The doctrine of the affections was an aesthetic theory of music in the Baroque period (c. 1600-c. 1750). It had a profound practical influence on the music composed during that time, including the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. To understand the essence of the Baroque style, students, scholars, performers, and listeners should know something about the doctrine of the affections.

The Baroque period consisted of a variety of styles in all the arts, including different styles within music itself. However, the one feature that united all the arts and all the styles was a new emphasis on expressing feelings. Compared with the preceding period (the Renaissance), the Baroque produced more intense and more varied emotions in the arts.

In music, this new emphasis was overtly stated and generalized in the doctrine of the affections. The doctrine arose under the influence of classical (ancient Greek and Roman) rhetoric, which focused on the art of using language to persuade listeners to a specific point of view or emotional response.

Baroque theorists and composers held that music, too, could arouse a variety of specific emotions in listeners. By employing a proper musical procedure or device, a composer could produce a particular involuntary emotional response in audience members.

The range of such emotions was wide, including anger, excitement, wonder, heroism, contemplation, and even mystic exaltation. Such states were known as affections, which were regarded at that time not as just emotions but actually as states of the soul.

Therefore, these affections were portrayed by composers not as personal feelings but as generic representations of the feelings as objective realities, thus symbolizing such feelings for the entire human community.

The visual Baroque arts-architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts-achieved emotional intensity by distorting natural images in various ways to represent various feelings.

Composers evoked such emotions by breaking old rules of consonance and dissonance and of regular rhythmic flow. Unlike the visual arts, music was free to express emotions without having the extra burden of representing natural objects or fulfilling material functions. This freedom stimulated an even greater development of music's emotional power.

The doctrine of the affections was codified most thoroughly late in the Baroque era by the German composer and theorist Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) in his book Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739). In German, the doctrine was called Affektenlehre.

Mattheson regarded music as a Klangrede ("oration in tones"). He taught music through methods modeled on verbal rhetoric.

In his book, he lists more than 20 affections and describes how they should be expressed in music. Sorrow, for example, should be portrayed with a slow-moving, listless melody frequently broken with musical "sighs." (Several Baroque theorists made systematic lists of the specific affections created by specific scales and musical patterns, but musicians never reached a general agreement about such lists.)

One of Mattheson's basic principles is that each composition, or movement in a composite work, should embody only one affection.

That principle had, in fact, already long been in practice by composers. By the end of the 17th century, individual pieces (or movements) were customarily organized around a single emotion.

By following that procedure, composers created the emotional intensity that they sought. However, such works also tended to lack strong contrast and to have repetitive rhythms.

When the Baroque era ran its course, one of the main goals of composers in the next major era, the Classical (after a variously termed transitional period), was to build compositions based on dramatic internal contrasts.
________________________

Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004 (CD-ROM).

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 2001.