ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a considerable amount of research on the expression of emotions in early modern music, especially in relation to concepts of musical rhetoric and its associated ‘doctrine of the affections’.1 However, the use of music as a source of information about emotions outside its own domain remains relatively little explored. The ways in which music was understood to express emotion changed significantly throughout the period, and this is reflected in surviving music notation and in treatises and other sources about musical composition and performative practices.
