ROUSSEAU–ENEMY OR REFORMER OF THE ARTS?
THE CASE OF MUSIC
Rousseau’s music background:
The young Rousseau
taught himself music while holding various posts as a music teacher, and
performing at home (a common practice). “I certainly must have been born for
this art [of music], for I began to love it in my childhood, and it is the only
one I have loved constantly throughout my life” (Confs. V, 175).[1]
At Les Charmettes he avidly read Rameau’s Traité
de l’harmonie while convalescing from an illness (Confs. V, O.C. I, 184).[2]
Rousseau devoted himself to music
appreciation in opera houses and churches during his stay in
Rousseau’s cultivation
of this and other arts and sciences (e.g. chemistry and botany) may cause us to
wonder if his Discourse on the Sciences
and the Arts is hypocritical. Rousseau
himself argued throughout his works that one way of life suits a morally pure
people, e.g. the Spartans, while another suits decadent peoples, e.g. the
French. He could therefore maintain that
music, the product of leisure, luxury and vanity, can nevertheless serve a
useful moral and political function in decadent societies. His advocacy of Italian music (see below)
exemplifies this view.
Reformer of Musical
Notation:
1742: Rousseau’s Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la
musique and Dissertation sur la
Musique moderne presented a novel scheme of musical notation, with the hope
of reforming a difficult and imperfect system (O.C. V, 167).[3]
The great naturalist
Réaumur introduced Rousseau and his scheme to the Royal Academy of Sciences:
“The paper was a success, and brought me compliments that surprised me as much
as they flattered me, for I hardly imagined that in the eyes of an Academy,
anyone who was not a member would appear to possess even common sense…. But not
one of them knew enough about music to be capable of judging my scheme” (Confs. VII, 267). According to D’Alembert, the reluctance to
adopt Rousseau’s notation system was the result of a “prejudice in favor of the
older one” (PD, 133).[4]
The Opera Composer,
Critic and Bouffon:
1745: Rousseau’s
operatic ballet, Les Muses Galantes:
Jean-Phillippe Rameau
(1683-1764), criticized the work as too good to have been composed by an
amateur; Rameau, a composer and music theorist of renown, is especially
well-known for his harmonic theory, the basis for music theory to this day.
(Rameau is the uncle in Diderot’s novel, Rameau’s Nephew.)
The Querelle des bouffons [war of the opera
fans]:
1752: Rousseau becomes
the leader of the “Bouffons,” fans of Italian opera (opera buffa, e.g. Don Giovanni, the Barber of Seville), who ranged
themselves against the fans of French opera, in the Querelle des bouffons. This was no merely diverting artistic controversy,
however; under Rousseau’s influence, it took on distinct moral and political
implications. French opera was formal,
rule-bound and traditional; it exemplified Cartesian principles of mathematical
precision, unity and order. French opera
reflected the taste of the Court for portrayals of heroic themes, while Italian
opera was less rigidly structured, more melodic, less conventional and
portrayed common people and their ordinary predicaments. Italian opera was
therefore an opera of the people – a democratic opera – while French opera was
Court opera. In Italian opera Rousseau
saw the potential to conjure up feeling (“sentiment”) through music, to express
the principles of virtue nature has engraved on the human heart (see end of
first Discours).
Prominent
Encyclopedists sided with Rousseau in seeing Italian opera as representative of
political and moral progress. D’Alembert argued that “freedom in music implies
freedom to feel, and freedom to feel implies freedom to act, and freedom to act
meant the ruin of states…let us put a brake on singing if we do not wish to
have liberty in speaking to follow soon afterwards.”[5]
This is not to say that they felt
compelled to reject Rameau and his harmonic theory (see below).
1752/3: Le Devin du Village [The Village
Soothsayer]:
A comic opera in the
Italian style, but in the French language, it was a huge success. It told the story
of two peasant lovers split apart by an aristocratic interloper, but later
reunited. Despite its Italian style, it
was performed before the King and Court at Fontainbleau, and later at the Paris
Opéra. According to Rousseau’s contact at Court, the King could not “stop
singing in the vilest voice in his whole Kingdom: ‘I have lost my serving man;
all my joy has gone from me’” (Confs.
VIII, 355). Audiences praised the
opera’s simplicity and charm. Rousseau claimed the opera “was in an absolutely
new style, to which people’s ears were unaccustomed.” Its novelty lay in the relationship of the
music to the words: “The part to which I had paid the greatest attention, and
in which I had made the greatest departure form the beaten track, was the
recitative. Mine was stressed in an entirely new way, and timed to the speaking
of the words” (Confs. VIII, 350).
1753: Lettre sur la musique françoise [Letter on
French Music]
In this polemic
Rousseau criticized French music, writing in the opening paragraph: “before
speaking of the excellence of our [i.e. French] Music, it would perhaps be good
to assure ourselves of its existence, and to examine first, not whether it is
[made] of gold, but whether we have one [at all]” (O.C. V, 291). Such words
were not music to the ears of Rameau, who bestowed his undying enmity on the
Genevan upstart who dared to take French music to task as “our Music.”
Rousseau held up
Italian music as the model. His reasoning is complex: the differences among
national styles of music are founded in the melody, more particularly in the
“prosody” of the language (O.C. V,
294), while harmony is the same for all nations (O.C. V, 292). Italian is the
language most suited to music, as it is “sweet, sonorous, harmonious and
accented more than any other, and these four qualities are precisely those most
suitable to song” (O.C. V, 297). French is a guttural language ill-suited to melody.
Rousseau details a series of remarkable experiments
he claims to have performed to determine which language “contains the best form
of music in itself” (O.C. V, 299). He observed an Armenian with no prior
experience of music listening to examples of Italian and French song; the
French song evoked surprise rather than pleasure, while the Italian song
brought a response of enchantment.
The Lettre launched a controversy that
overshadowed the dissolution of the parlements:
“Whoever reads that this pamphlet probably prevented a revolution in
1753/4: L’Origine de la Mélodie [The Origin
of Melody] (first published in 1974)
This the
“epistemological pivot” of Rousseau’s musical theory (editor’s introduction; O.C. V, cclxxiv). In it Rousseau argues that music and language
have a common origin, more specifically, that melody is the essence of a music
based in nature: “Melody or song, the pure work of nature, owes its origin…not
to harmony, work and production of art….” Melody is composed of accent and
rhythm; it alone transmits sentiments (O.C.
V, 337). Melody is born with language;
the poverty of early languages enriched melody, in that song took on greater
expressiveness in lieu of words (O.C.
V, 333). Thus, “…speech is the art of
transmitting ideas, melody is that of transmitting sentiments….” (O.C. V, 337). Music that does not express human feelings is
but a sterile, mathematical exercise.
1754? (date
uncertain): Essai sur l’origine des
langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitaion musicale [Essay on the
origin of languages, in which melody and musical imitation are discussed]
This work was originally planned as part of the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité,
but Rousseau considered it too long and out of place to be included in that
work. The Essai expands significantly
on the argument that the formation of language marks a crucial juncture in
human history. Passions, not needs, form the basis for language: “We begin not by
reasoning but by feeling. People
maintain that men invented language to express their needs; this opinion seems
to me indefensible” (V, 380; cf. Basic
Writings, 62). Rousseau’s position
has been summarized with this word play on Descartes’s cogito: “Je sens, donc
je suis [I feel, therefore I am].” Rousseau dismisses the argument that human
language has a physiological basis; even though animals have organs of speech, they
do not speak “the language of convention” as do humans. Human language is possible due to a particular
faculty unique to our species.
At the end of the Essai
Rousseau turns to the relevance of his argument for political philosophy. In Antiquity language was the medium of
communication between the leaders and the assembled people of a free city (
Popular languages have become to
us as perfectly useless as eloquence.
Societies have taken their final form; nothing will be changed except
with the cannon and with ecus [money], as there is nothing more to say to the
people except, give money, it is said
with placards on the street corners or with soldiers [quartered] in houses; it
is not necessary to assemble anyone for that: on the contrary, it is necessary
to keep the subjects apart; this is the first maxim of modern politics.
There
are languages favorable to liberty; these are sonorous, prosodic,
harmonious….Ours are made for whispering at Divans [the couches of absolute
rulers]. Our preachers torment
themselves, work themselves into a sweat in the temples, without knowing
anything about what they say (O.C. V,
428).
1749: Articles on music in the Encyclopédie (390 in all) (see PD,
133):
In expressing his views on such matters as melody and
harmony, Rousseau angered the great Rameau, who attacked Rousseau in Erreurs sur la Musique dans l’ Encyclopédie.
D’Alembert, author of some articles on music, along with Diderot and other philosophes, rose to Rousseau’s defense.
The dispute largely resulted from Rameau’s rage at Rousseau’s polemic of 1753,
for the Encyclopédie actually
supported Rameau’s theories in large part.
1768: Dictionnaire
de musique (composed 1749-1764):
Lengthy work of exposition, clarification and
criticism (O.C. V, 605-1154): “Music
is, of all the beaux Arts, that which
has the most extensive Vocabulary, and … as a result, the most useful [one]”
(O.C. V, 605). It is based on the Encyclopédie articles, but much
reworked: “they [the Encyclopédie’s
editors] gave me only three months to [write the articles], and three years
would have been required for me merely to read, extract compare and compile the
Authors I needed: but the zeal of friendship blinded me to the impossibility of
success” (O.C. V, 605). “Wounded by
the imperfection of my articles…I resolved to recast the whole…and to make a
separate treatise at my leisure with more care” (O.C. V, 606).
Postscript:
Rousseau left a significant body of work on music
philosophy and theory. He was involved
in the most heated musical debates of his day, and composed an opera that
expressed his theoretical position, albeit in French lyrics. This opera is available on CD and is still
performed from time to time, e.g. in
Rousseau worked as a music copyist to earn his living
until near the end of his life.