Topos, Text, and the Parody Problem in Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Even though parody and borrowing have long been recognized as legitimate features of Bach's compositional practices, the criteria by which the composer selected appropriate material to parody remains problematic. Christoph Wolff and Güther Stiller, for example, suggest that musical elements, such as the quality of the original or its potential for further embellishment, represent possible criteria. On the other hand, textual elements such as analogous subjects, "affects," and metrical patterns between old and new texts also many have factored into Bach's criteria. In an effort to redress the imposition of these twentieth-century solutions to what is in effect an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this study undertakes a cultural/contextual examination of the Crucifixus movement from the Mass in B minor and its model, the opening chorus of Cantata 12. Indeed, a logical analysis of both texts reveals that an equivalence of topoi , or topics, represents an important criterion in the selection of an appropriate model from which to borrow. Moreover, a musical-rhetorical analysis confirms that Bach's borrowings from the opening chorus of Cantata 12 are actually musical-rhetorical figures. His application of the parody procedure thus represents the re-use of specific musical-rhetorical gestures which are suitable for the embellishment of a particular topos .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".