ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one area of investigation pursued by a number of specialists: the relationship between music and rhetoric, and the possibility that composers of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance may have adopted the techniques of rhetoric as basic formative principles for their compositions. Should Heinrich Isaac have had any questions about the symbolism and rhetorical material in Poliziano's text, he could easily have consulted the author. Dufay's melodic phrase for the first two lines of 'Adieu m'amour' definitely shows the use of parallel musical lines to fit the parallel text lines, yet his construction also includes elision, an element that is absent from the poetry. Joachim Burmeister presented an analysis of a motet by Orlando Lasso that was expressed in terms of rhetorical structures and figures, and proceeded to name other composers from as early as the fifteenth century whose compositions he believed could be analysed in the same terms.
