Abstract
ROUSSSAU’S MUSICAL THOUGHT eventually becomes as systematic as Rameau’s. Where Rameau will constantly refer every harmony and dissonance to the corps sonore and the theory of overtones, Rousseau will equally refer his admiration for the Greeks, his rejection of French music, his belief in the priority of melody, to a history of the human voice that is also a history of the human race. Against the incipient materialism of Rameau’s theories, with their vibrating string and their sound waves, Rousseau offers an account of music that is affective in character, and that denies the senses any more than a vehicular function. In its final form even more than in its early manifestations, Rousseau’s musical thought will be opposed to Rameau’s not only in the sense of contradicting its tenets (which it does almost incidentally), but also because there is no significant point of contact between the two accounts of what music is.
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Notes
See Marie-Elisabeth Duchez, ‘Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues: un brouillon inédit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau sur l’origine de la mélodie’, Revue de musicologie, 60 (1974), 33–86, and
Robert Wokler, ‘Rameau, Rousseau and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, SVEC, 117 (1974), 179–238; see also Corrigenda in SVEC, 132 (1975), 112. Wokler comments on the significance of the discovery for Rousseau criticism in ‘L’Essai sur l’origine des langues en tant que fragment du Discours sur l’inégalité: Rousseau et ses “mauvais” interpètes’ in Rousseau et Voltaire en 1978. Actes du colloque international de Nice (juin 1978) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 145–169. A further important commentary is provided by the first modern editor of the Essai, Charles Porset, in his article ‘L’“inquiétante étrangeté” de l’Essai sur l’origine des langues: Rousseau et ses exégètes’, SVEC, 154 (1976), 1715–1758. In Robert Wokler’s work Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language, the fourth chapter, entitled ‘The Controversy With Rameau and the Genesis of the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, gives the fullest treatment that I know of Rousseau’s musical writings from the time of the Encyclopédie articles onwards and of the controversy with Rameau. There is a particularly valuable emphasis in Dr Wokler’s chapter on the relations between the musical writings and Rousseau’s political thought. I place greater emphasis than Dr Wokler on the importance of the Encyclopédie articles as offering his first statement of several of the principles on which Rousseau’s subsequent discussion of music will be based. I also find the Encyclopédie articles more consistently hostile to Rameau than Dr Wokler suggests.
Girdlestone, 526. Girdlestone’s quotation is from Paul Láng, Music in Western Civilization (London, 1942).
The outstanding discussion of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is Marian Hobson, The Object of Art. The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Hobson distinguishes two versions of illusion in later eighteenth-century French aesthetic discourse: aletheia, in which ‘truth to nature is mediated by art which is not nature… so that art is both true and false’ (Object of Art, 80) and adequatio in which art is taken to be a transparent replica of an original. D’Alembert’s view of illusion appears to me to be closer here to aletheia. For Hobson’s discussion of this passage of the Discours préliminaire, see Object of Art, 283 (one sentence attributed to the Discours préliminaire in fact comes from the Réflexions sur la musique, a later work which may or may not be by d’Alembert).
Rousseau describes what he believes d’Alembert to have said about musical imitation as an idea that is ‘très-juste et très-neuve’. Yet in a note to Shorey’s edition and translation of The Republic I read: ‘All art is essentially imitation for Plato and Aristotle. But imitation means for them not only the portrayal or description of visible and tangible things, but more especially the communication of a mood or feeling, hence the (to a modern) paradox that music is the most imitative of the arts.’ See Plato, The Republic, edited and translated by Paul Shorey, 2 vols., (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), I, 224.
Page references are to the Duchez edition of the text in ‘Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues’ as referred to above. Deduction from ‘la nature des choses mêmes’ applies only to the earliest stages of Rousseau’s historical reconstruction. A little later he writes ‘Dès cet instant nous voici hors du païs des conjectures et nous pouvons marcher d’un pas plus ferme dans la recherche de la vérité’ (62). Towards the end he declares: ‘Tout cet historique est appuyé sur desfaits…’ (75). In the Second Discourse Rousseau writes: ‘…deux faits étant donnés comme réels à lier par une suite de faits intermédiaires, inconnus ou regardés comme tels, c’est àl’histoire, quand on l’a, de donner les faits qui les lient; c’est à la Philosophie à son défaut de determiner les faits semblables qui peuvent les lier…’ (Pléiade III, 162/163). In the First Discourse he offers two alternative modes of knowledge: ‘… soit qu’on feuillette les annales du monde, soit qu’on supplée à des chroniques incertaines par des recherches philosophiques…’ (Pléiade III, 17). On the similar distinction of philosophy and history in Diderot, see Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, second edition 1967), 357, note. See also 374 and note. Proust returns to the subject in his essay ‘De l’Encyclopedie au Neveu de Rameau’ in L’Objet et le texte: pour une poétique de la prose française du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 173. In a passage of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding from which Rousseau quotes elsewhere in the Discourse, Locke argues that moral knowledge is as capable of demonstration and certainty as mathematics. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Book 4, chapter 3, paragraph 18, 548–550, and chapter 4, paragraph 7, 565.
On this point and on every question relating to language and music, Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines is a source whose importance cannot be over-emphasized. See in particular the first section of Part II, ‘De l’origine et des progrès du langage’, where one reads (for example): ‘Dans l’origine des langues, la manière de prononcer admettoit donc des inflexions de voix si distinctes, qu’un musicien eût pu la noter, en ne faisant que de légers changemens; ainsi je dirai qu’elle participoit du chant’ (64); on the effect of the barbarian invasions: ‘Voilà d’où nous vient le défaut d’accent que nous regardons comme la principale beauté de notre prononciation: cette origine ne prévient pas en sa faveur’ (77), and even ‘…si nos spectacles sont si différens de ceux des Grecs et des Romains, c’est un effet naturel des changemens arrivés dans la prosodie.’ Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, emphasizes Condillac’s importance; Charles Porset, editor of the Essai, suggests relevant analogues in his notes to that text. See also Hans Aarsleff’s important essay, ‘The Tradition of Condillac: The Problem of the Origin of Language in the Eighteenth Century and the Debate in the Berlin Mademy before Herder’ in his From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 146–209. Relations between Rousseau, on the one hand, and Condillac and Buffon on the other are acutely presented in Victor Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique (Paris: Vrin, second edition 1983).
Pagination of the quotations from Condillac just given refers to Condillac, Œuvres philosophiques, edited by Georges Le Roy, 2 vols, (Paris: PUF, 1947), vol I.
For Rousseau persuader is always opposed to convaincre as the affective to the rational. On this topic see Christopher Kelly, “‘To Persuade Without Convincing”: The Language of Rousseau’s Legislator’, American Journal of Political Science, 31 (1987), 321–335.
Rousseau is here overturning d’Alembert’s ranking of music in the Discours préliminaire as the third of the imitative arts. However, it is clear that d’Alembert intended to open the way to such a change. In his argument Rousseau draws once again on his understanding of d’Alembert’s suggested new areas for musical imitation, presenting them as realities rather than aspirations. The general transvaluation of music in eighteenth-century thought, taking it from a lower to a higher rank than painting, is treated by a number of authors. See Hobson, The Object of Art and
Kevin Barry, Language, Music and the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Mme d’Epinay’s ‘Rene’ in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant shows an equally precise concern for issues of illusion in painting: ‘Il disait que la peinture, les tapisseries, etc., étant un art d’imitation, il lui semblait absurde de mettre des personnages en tapisserie dont les pieds posaient sur les lambris. «A la bonne heure, dit-il, quelques petites figurines dans le lointain d’un paysage; la perspective étant bien observée peut m’entraîner et me faire illusion. —Quoi! lui dis-je, vous ne pardonnerez pas même à Poussin d’avoir placé le déluge universel dans l’espace de quatre pieds en carré? —C’est précisément celui-là qui me désespère, me dit-il, et le premier tableau qui m’ait fait faire cette réfiexion.’ See Mme d’Epinay, Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, critical edition by Georges Roth, 3 vols, (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), II, 403.
See André Wyss, ‘“L’Accent ment moins que la parole”’ in Rousseau secondo Jean-Jacques. Atti del Convegno tenutosi in Roma il 5 e 6 maggio 1978 per iniziativa dell’Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana e della Facoltà di Lettere dell’Università di Ginevra (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia ltaliana, 1979), 97–105. In his elegant and stimulating article Wyss writes: ‘Le premier langage parlé n’est en effet qu’un accent, c’est-à-dire la présence totale d’un être comme unique référé à l’intérieur même du message. Trouvant sa source dans les passions, le langage n’est alors qu’une pure maniére d’être et de se signaler soi-même à l’autre’ (99). I would emphasize more strongly the affective character of all accented language. By the same author see also Jean-Jacques Rousseau. L’accent de l’écriture (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1988).
The best modern explorer of those tensions is of course Jacques Derrida. Although Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s musical writings seems to me to be more rigorous and exact than Paul de Man’s, the fundamental question that de Man raises in his response to Derrida remains: can one accept that Rousseau is unaware of the implications of his own texts, as Derrida consistently claims? I share de Man’s view on this. When Rousseau speaks of accens and institutions in the same sentence (Essai, 125) is there not implicit acknowledgement that the tension between accent and articulation is inherent and cannot be completely resolved? See Derrida, De la grammatologie, Part II, chapters 2 and 3 (on the contradiction between what Rousseau declares and what he describes, see for example 310/311) and Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) chapter VII.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Walter Lowrie(New York: Doubleday, 1954), 54.
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O’Dea, M. (1995). Music, Imitation and Illusion. In: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23930-6_3
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