Doctrine of the affections Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
A theory that arose during the Baroque period of music (c. 1600 - 1750) that correlated certain musical methods and figures with individual emotions. For example, happiness would be aroused through the use of faster notes and major keys, sadness through minor keys and slower movement, anger through loudness and harsh discordant harmonies, etc.The Doctrine of the Affections was first promulgated at the end of the Renaissance when a group of Florentine academics attempted to restore what they perceived to be the pure word-to-music relationships advocated by classical Greek philosophers such as Plato. The doctrine revealed itself in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a presupposition that the motivic germ of a composition, its "inventio", was more than mere representation, but a tangible embodiment of Affekt: an emotional state of being. It was believed, for example, that a lamento bass was the palpable expression of sadness, while a rapidly rising sequence of thirds was the opposite--euphoria. This "doctrine" is clearly spelled out in numerous theoretical tomes of the eighteenth century, not the least of which are treatises by Bach's own cousin, Walther, and other contemporaries such as Heinichen and Mattheson.
When Giulio Cesare Monteverdi coined the term "seconda prattica" in the preface to his brother Claudio's Scherzi musicali of 1607, he not only defended his brother's new style of composition, he also articulated two ideals that would be shared by composers for the next century and a half. If the first compositional "practice" -- the practice of the Renaissance -- had been to strive for contrapuntal perfection as defined by the balancing of consonance and dissonance, the second "practice," ("baroque," as it came to be known) advocated two more ideals: that the musical motive ought to represent emotional states of being (Doctrine of Affections), and that all parts must be subservient to a fundamental bass line.
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