Komponowanie ciszy. Funkcje pauzy w muzyce baroku i klasycyzmu
Composing Silence. The Functions of Pause in the Music of the Baroque and Classical Periods

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the matter of role and significance of pause, considered as a peculiar manifestation of silence, in the music of Baroque and Classical periods. The starting point is the musical thought of the18th-century, especially that of the German Sprachraum.The main body of the text consists of three sections. The first represents an overview of two aesthetic paradigms – the Baroque and the Classicistic – as well as important transformations within the 17th and 18th-century musical thought. Rhetorical triunity of painting, poetry and music was being replaced by clarity of well-laid form and its distinct articulation; the Baroque concept of harmony as the governing musical force – by a revision of the category of rhythm; technique of ‘motivic spinning-out’ – by the Classicistic concept of periodicity.The second section outlines three syntactic functions of the pause, which refer to the articulation of musical form and are often related to the performance. The first function is ‘physiological’– the pause serves as an opportunity for singers and wind players to take a breath – this is a recurring feature in all time periods and musical styles. That the second function is related to the correct execution of harmonic (Baroque paradigm) and metro-rhythmic (Classical paradigm) patterns. The third function is related to the the concept of ‘musical punctuation’, which emerged in the 18th-century, following the rise and evolution of instrumental music. In the case of the musical-linguistic analogy behind that concept, a succesion of traditional punctuation marks corresponds to the hierarchy of musical cadences rather than that of the pauses; the latter, however, play a significant role within the art of musical punctuation.The third section describes the semantic and expressive functions of the pause. The Baroque paradigm is represented by nine musical-rhetorical figures of silence – abruptio, apocope, aposiopesis, ellipsis, homoioptoton, homoioteleuton, pausa, suspiratio, tmesis – as well as dissolutio, which is characteristic of the Italian style. In the classicistic style, however, the expressive pause functions on the principle of playing with convention – a confrontation with the listener’s expectations – through the manipulation of musical syntax. It occurs within individual periods (upsetting metric order and symmetry of periods, the suppression or deconstruction of cadences), whole pieces (false beginning, false ending), as well as within multi-movement works.

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