This site will, it is hoped, become a web resource for those interested in the phenomenon of musica poetica, that synergistic interrelationship of music, rhetoric, and oratory that flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries.

There will be reviews of performances, recordings, and books, along with commentaries on aspects of musica poetica. We invite comment and discussion that serves in furtherance of the dissemination of knowledge about and awareness of the true art and science of musica poetica.

Contributions from site visitors are welcome. We hope that this site becomes a resource for web publication of worthy articles. Submissions may be emailed to burmeister@musicapoetica.net, and must be accompanied by the author's name, address, phone number, professional association, and a sentence or two about the author's background in music, scholarship, or writing.

The era of musica poetica or, to put it another way, the era of music as a speaking art, did not end with the death of J.S. Bach or with the French Revolution, although the world view that created it had certainly lost currency by those times. Rather, the formal and figural devices of musica poetica continued to be used, transformed into the musical gestures of the common musical vocabulary, throughout the 19th century. They are still used today wherever and whenever music and words come together to embody meaningful human experience in sound.

The resources and links available here may seem at first glance quite disparate. But we have cast the net wide purposely, and hope that on closer examination, these same resources can aid the reader by revealing different points of view and the concomitant different insights into the human condition that inform our overall picture of the phenomenon of musica poetica in its larger sense.