When a musical entertainment was given by the officers of the Fort and the gentry of the city, the evening usually ended in a " ball for the ladies." Professional concerts were advertised with the same attraction.
Music was more a part of the social life than it is today.
He will undertake to compose, or set to music, any piece on any subject, divine or moral, either in prose or verse, and adapt the music according to the sense of the subject for the organ, harpsichord or spinnet, on application to him and a moderate satisfaction.
Musical form becomes dictated by a rhetorical focus, a relation heightened by the terms compositio, dispositio, res, verba, grandis, ornata, figura, flos, and color, which Lippius garners directly from the rhetorical texts of Cicero and Quintilian, and places liberally throughout his treatises on music and rhetoric.
This outlook is not surprising for Lippius, considering that he viewed text and music as related by Aristotelian philosophy; the body, analogous to the music of a work, and the soul, analogous to the text of a work, attest to the importance of the text in Lippius' conception of music.
Music was able to recover from the excesses of the Baroque in a much easier manner, because music was already linked to science through the mathematics of sound production, and because music was not directly attacked in the philosophical treatises of the day as rhetoric was.
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