The principle of Werktreue, or fidelity to the musical work, has long been performers' most important ethical imperative. Yet, the rigid work concept may not be the best way to think about the fluid arts of performance during the 17th century. I propose instead to approach this music through the lens of rhetorical memory. Using historical music theory, I can explore the flexibility of the musical work through analysis and improvisation: by breaking down a given piece into its
component musical patterns and framework, these patterns can be varied and re-deployed within the same framework, creating a variant of the original work. By performing these variant works for a broad public, and in consultation with cultural and philosophical studies of memory and media, I hope to discover new, more ambiguous boundaries between the work and its performance, and ultimately, a new ethics for the performance of 17th-century music.