Rhetoric and quotation in 20th-century music

Abstract

The paper first stresses some problems of the application of rhetoric to the music of the 20th
century, when the composers, more preoccupied with the “will of the sound” than with the
expectations of the listeners, turn away from it. It then shows that rhetoric analysis remains
possible, even necessary, on the one hand because the 20th-century repertory does not
categorically reject the discursive logic, on the other hand in order to make good for a lack of
analysis of perceptive reactions. It questions the phenomenon of quotation as a rhetoric means.