The rhetoric of musical ideas in Johann Sebastian Bach’s two part Inventions. A formal model

Abstract

The article develops a formal model for the corpus of the two-part Inventions (BWV 772-786)
rooted in the art of rhetoric. Of primary importance is the phrase, the organization of which is
subjected to a detailed analysis for the entire body of works under consideration. The study
demonstrates that form in these works embodies the temporal modes of beginning, middle, and
end, which may be associated with analogous entities of the rhetorical discourse: exordium,
medium, and finis (as taken from the 1563 treatise of Gallus Dressler, Praecepta musicae
poetica). These three temporal modes, like their corresponding rhetorical functions, operate at
two levels: at the local level, that of the segments that constitute each phrase, and at a more
abstracted level, that of the phrases that make up each work.