''Musica poetica'' was a term commonly applied to the art of composing music in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German schools and universities. Its first known use was in the ''Rudimenta Musicae Planae'' (Wittenberg: 1533) of . Previously, music had been divided into '' musica theoretica'' and '' musica practica'', which were categorised with the

quadrivium From the time of Plato through the Middle Ages, the ''quadrivium'' (plural: quadrivia) was a grouping of four subjects or arts—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—that formed a second curricular stage following preparatory work in the ...

and

trivium The trivium is the lower division of the seven liberal arts and comprises grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The trivium is implicit in ''De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii'' ("On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury") by Martianus Capella, but the ...

, respectively. Since music of the time primarily meant vocal music, it was natural for theorists to make analogies between the composition of music and the composition of oratory or poetry. Hence, the term ''musica poetica''. Analogies between music and the rhetorical arts were made on several levels. Gallus Dressler (1563) suggested to liken the structure of a musical composition with that of a speech, as outlined in classical sources, dividing it into such sections as exordium,

medium Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation *Medium bomber, a class of war plane * Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium of ...

, and finis (literally, "beginning", "middle", and "end"). Another kind of analogy was to liken the rules or

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...

of composition with those of speech, as illustrated by

Joachim Burmeister Joachim Burmeister (1564 in Lüneburg – 5 May 1629 in Rostock) was a north German composer and music theorist. He was the oldest of five children born to a beadworker and townsman of Lüneburg. His brother Anton (d. 1634) became the cantor of St ...

's use of ''tautoëpia'' to label consecutive fifths and

octave In music, an octave ( la, octavus: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been refer ...

s (which were generally regarded as illegal except in special circumstances). Most significantly, though, special melodic, harmonic, or technical devices in music began to be associated with the figures of classical oratory: for example, a rising or falling

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is calle ...

in music was usually called climax in the literature of ''musica poetica''. However, it must be pointed out that such analogies were not always direct: terms used in ''musica poetica'' do not always correspond equivalently to their rhetorical counterparts (for example, in oratory, ''anaphora'' means a straightforward repetition of a word, but in music it can denote various kinds of repetitive device, such as the development of a subject through imitation (

fugue In music, a fugue () is a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (a musical theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and which recurs frequently in the c ...

); also, the presence of a rhetorical figure in the text being set to music did not imply an automatic application of that figure's musical equivalent (that is, it was never mandatory for composers to respond to such verbal ideas as "going up" with rising musical phrases (known as ''anabasis'' or ''ascensus'' in ''musica poetica''). A knowledge of both classical rhetoric and ''musica poetica'' can greatly enhance the listener's understanding and appreciation of works composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially by such figures as

Heinrich Schütz Heinrich Schütz (; 6 November 1672) was a German early Baroque composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as one of the most important composers of the 17th century. He ...

and

Giacomo Carissimi (Gian) Giacomo Carissimi (; baptized 18 April 160512 January 1674) was an Italian composer and music teacher. He is one of the most celebrated masters of the early Baroque or, more accurately, the Roman School of music. Carissimi established the ...

. However, it is also important not to seek examples of musical figures on every page; while rhetoric and musical theory were strongly associated, the nature of this association was complex and variable.

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