He has only felt during the course of his life, and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than pleasure. David Hume.
After a turbulent childhood, and an uncompleted apprenticeship as an engraver, Rousseau dreamed of being a professional musician. He had the temerity to set up as a music teacher in Lausanne after a brief and not altogether satisfactory period of study with the organist of Annecy Cathedral, and he even allowed himself to be persuaded to compose some pieces for a local group of amateurs in Lausanne, the result being a totally illiterate concoction that proved to be altogether unperformable, to his intense chagrin and embarrassment.(1) Music none the less went on to play an important role in his life. His earliest earnings came from music copying, and his first published work -- Dissertation sur la musique moderne (Paris 1743) -- was the substance of a paper that he had delivered the previous year to the Académie des sciences on the need for a reform of musical notation; the subject was one that remained dear to his heart, his concern being that music should reach as wide a public as possible (a very real line of descent can in fact be traced from Rousseau to Curwen, and to present-day tonic sol fa notations). In 1748 he was commissioned to provide the articles on music for the great Encyclopédie -- Rameau having declined the invitation -- and these he dispatched in the space of a few months; he later regretted that he had not insisted, as other contributors had done, that he be allowed to space out his contributions over the ten years that it took to complete publication of the Encyclopédie. In 1767 he published a musical dictionary that included material, suitably revised, from the Encyclopédie.
His prize essay for l'Académie de Dijon on the theme, "Has progress in the arts and sciences contributed to an improvement of morals?" (1750) was his first work to attract widespread attention, and it marked the beginning of a major series of moral, philosophical and political writings.
His influence in many different spheres was enormous. His Contrat social (Amsterdam 1762) was of immense importance in the pre-history of the French Revolution. His romantic novel Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise went through more than seventy editions between 1761 and 1800 (the averagely successful novel would have been reprinted three or four times). His little piece for the Opéra, Le Devin du village (1752) -- a practical demonstration of the singability of the French language -- was still being performed half a century later, and when it was finally pensioned off in 1829 (Berlioz reports how a large perruque was thrown on to the stage at the last performance) it had been given more than 400 times. Even his writings on music continued to be widely read and quoted well into the nineteenth century. Within two years of its appearance, his dictionary had been published in Dutch and English version -- Fétis suggested that the absence of a German edition was due to the fact that French was so widely spoken in Germany at the time. Its contents were pillaged by later French and English scholars, including Framery, Burney (for Rees's Cyclopedia, 1801) and Castil-Blaze, who lifted and adapted no fewer than 340 articles from it for his Dictionnaire de musique (1821). That the elder Fétis could still praise it in his Biographie universelle (1862) is remarkable proof of its continuing usefulness.
Charles Burney had a particularly high regard for Rousseau, remarking that if in other respects he was eccentric, "his taste and views, particularly in dramatic music are admirable and supported with more wit, reason and refinement than by any other writer on the subject that I am able to read". Garrick produced Burney's The Cunning Man -- his translation of Le Devin du village -- at Drury Lane in 1766, and a number of times after that, with great success. Le Devin du village was even the subject of praise by Gluck, who in a letter to the Paris Mercure of February 1773 had this to say: "The language of nature is a universal language. M Rousseau has used it with the greatest success in a simple piece, Le Devin du village. It is a model that no author has yet imitated." Mme de Staël, who was a particularly influential figure in the early romantic movement in France, was a later admirer of his, publishing as her first work, Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau (1788).
Rousseau is particularly known to musicians for his aggressive denunciation of French music in the Lettre sur la musique francaise (1753).(2) The principles that led him to make this denunciation are substantially revealed in the Essai sur l'origine des langues (pub. 1764). The first sounds that primitive man used, he suggested, had the purpose of communicating feelings, and it was from these sounds that music sprang. In the earliest times, speech was music, and the two long continued a close association. The legendary power of music in ancient Greece was to be explained by its union with words, and its use was strictly controlled to ensure the maximum good to society. As Rousseau himself remarked elsewhere, "C'est la raison qui fait l'homme, c'est le sentiment qui le conduit" (It is reason that makes man, and feelings that guide him); words spoke to reason, and music to the feelings.
Rousseau was an impulsive writer, all too prone to short-sightedness when in hot pursuit of some favoured theme. In the Essai, Rousseau was less concerned with musical practicalities than with theories of social behaviour. If the music of ancient Greece was purely melodic, as all the evidence suggested, and if the power of Greek music was as great as ancient writers asserted, then logically, for the purposes of the Essai any non- melodic musical elements -- harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation, and even instrumental music -- could only distract the attention from expressive melody. Rousseau was unconcerned with appearances of self-consistency -- having composed the highly successful Le Devin du village, for instance, he was not afraid to decry the French language as unsingable, one year later. As far as his attitude to harmony was concerned, this coloured by his dislike for the high priest of harmony, Rameau, who had openly disparaged his Muses galantes before the influential La Poupliniere in 1747. In fact, Rousseau was by no means as blind to the value of both harmony and instrumental music as he is often made out to be: this is evident enough from his later admiration for Gluck; less well known perhaps is the following passage from a letter which he wrote to d'Alembert in 1754, just one year after the Lettre sur la musique francaise: "The symphony itself has learned to speak without the help of words, and often the feelings that come from the orchestra are no less lively than those come from the mouths of the actors."
In the Essai Rousseau is ultimately concerned with moral issues, and like Barthélemy he examines the question of music's function as a moral agent. If, he argues, music is merely a sensual, pleasurable art, how is it that a savage could be totally unmoved by a piece of music that a Frenchman might find deeply affecting? Clearly, our reaction to music is not purely a matter of physical response. So it was that after arguing that passions, not needs, generated the first articulated sounds, and that these sounds were both words and music, having outlined the way in which he believed the southern and northern languages had taken shape, and having discussed the relationship of music to words (see below, chs. 12-19) Rousseau took as the title of his final and culminating chapter, "The relationship of language to government".
Rousseau's opinions on music were later to be subject to much hostile comment (much of it, indeed, wilfully misguided). No critic was more outspoken than G. A. Villoteau, whose extensive Recherches sur l'analogie de la musique avec les arts qui ont pour objet l'imitation du langage (Paris 1807) contains a detailed commentary on chapters 13-14 of the Essai. Villoteau published Rousseau's original text, adding extensive footnotes to it, and italicising the particular passages to which he took exception; these two chapters are given here with Villoteau's annotation.
Guillaume André Villoteau (1759-1839) sang in the choir at Notre-Dame while a student at the Sorbonne. In 1792 he joined the chorus at the Opéra. He is principally remembered for his work as a member of the Institut de l'Egypte which between 1809 and 1826 published twenty folio volumes on every aspect of Egyptian civilisation; the sections on ancient and modern Egyptian music in these volumes are by him. The first of his two books on musical aesthetics was the result of a paper which he read to the Société libre des sciences et des arts entitled, Mémoire sur la possibilité et l'utilité d'une théorie exacte des principes naturels de la musique (Paris 1807). The second, the Recherches, was a mammoth, two-volume work which was greatly decried by Fétis. It is a prolix and wayward work, but of interest in reflecting the way in which eighteenth-century doctrines involving the principle of the imitation of nature were then being challenged.
For further reading:
A translation of Rousseau's Essai in its entirety, coupled to Johann Gottfried Herder's essay on the same topic are in On the Origin of Language, tr. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York 1966). Rousseau's relationship to Rameau is discussed in Eve Kisch, "Rameau and Rousseau", Music & Letters, vol. 22 (1947), p. 97. A useful survey is provided by H. V. F. Somerset, "Rousseau as a Musician", Music & Letters, vol. 17 (1936), p. 37.
See also articles on Rousseau in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, VI, and Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart; and Lionel Gossman, "Time and History in Rousseau", Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 30 (1964), p. 311, and especially pp. 319-33 for a fascinating comparison of Rousseau and Rameau as representative of "two completely different ways of understanding the world".
As the voice developed, the differing passions generated the first articulations or sounds. Anger gives rise to threatening cries which are articulated by the tongue and the palate; tenderness is expressed in softer tones which are modified by the glottis. The sounds become utterances and are formed by accents and inflections of varying frequency, emphasis and pitch, according to the feelings that are to be conveyed. In this way sounds, inflections and syllables are formed. Feelings make the organs of speech spring to life, imparting to the voice all their vibrancy. Thus poetry, song and speech have a common origin. Those first exchanges I spoke of were the first song. Poetry, music and language sprang alike from the regular and periodic nature of rhythm, and from the melodious rise and fall that goes with accentuation: or rather, all this was language in those happy climes and times when spontaneous desire was the only motivation for seeking the cooperation of others.
The first stories, the first speeches, the first laws were in verse. Poetry preceded prose. That had to be, since the passions were in evidence before reason was. As far as music was concerned, it was necessarily the same. There was at first no other music than melody not other melody than the varied sounds of speech; accents combined to form the tune, quantities formed its rhythms, and people spoke as much by means of natural sounds and rhythms as by articulations and words. According to Strabo, singing and speaking were one and the same thing in earlier times, and he argues from this that poetry is the source of eloquence. He ought to have said that poetry and eloquence sprang from the same source, and at first were one and the same thing. In view of the way in which primitive societies were bound together it is hardly surprising that the first stories were told in verse and that the first laws were sung. It is no wonder that the first grammarians subordinated their art to music and were teachers of both.
A language which has only articulations and vocalisations has only half of its potential richness. It conveys ideas, certainly, but to express feelings and impressions (images) it needs rhythm and sound (sons), that is to say, melody, something that the Greek language had and which ours lacks.
We are constantly astonished by the prodigious effects that eloquence, poetry and music had on the Greeks. We can never envisage them because we have never experienced such things. The best that we can do, seeing that these effects have been so well authenticated, is to pretend a belief in them, out of deference to our scholars. When Burette had to the best of his ability transcribed certain bits of Greek music, he rather naively had then performed at the Académie des belles-lettres, and the academicians had the patience to listen to them. I admire such enterprise in a country whose native music is unintelligible abroad. Ask any foreign musicians you may choose to perform a monologue from a French opera, and I defy you to recognise any of it. And these are the selfsame Frenchmen who presume to judge the melody of an ode of Pindar set to music 2,000 years ago!
[the final para. of ch. 12 omitted]
Nobody denies that man is swayed by his senses, but we confuse the causes for want of distinguishing the effects. We place far too little weight on the function of the senses; we do not see that they affect us, not only as sensations but as signs or images, and that they have moral effects that spring from moral causes. Just as the feelings that painting excites in us do not come from colour, no more does music's power over us simply derive from sounds.(3) Beautiful and well-graded colours please the sight, but the pleasure is purely one of sensation. It is the drawing, the representation that gives life and soul to these colours. We are moved and affected by the feelings that are expressed, and the objects that are represented. Interest and feeling do not depend on colour. The features of a striking picture would still touch us if the work were a print: take away these features from the picture, and the colours have no value.
Melody is the musical equivalent of design in painting; it is melody that delineates the features and forms, harmonies and timbres being only the colours. But, you may say, melody is only a succession of sounds. No doubt. And similarly, design is only an arrangement of colours. Merely because a speaker uses ink, though, to write out his speech, can the ink be said to be a very eloquent liquid?(4)
Let us imagine a country where the idea of drawing was unknown, and where many men spent their lives combining, mixing and blending colours, believing themselves to excel in painting. These people would argue about our painting just as we do about Greek music. When they were told about the emotions that we experience from a fine picture, and about the delight that we take in a pathetic subject, their scholars would launch into a ponderous investigation; they would compare their colours to ours,(5) asking whether our green was more tender, or our red more exciting. They would strive to discover what combination of colours could bring tears to the eyes and which others could give rise to anger.(6) The Burettes of that country would gather together a few mutilated fragments of our pictures and they would ask, with some surprise, what was so marvellous about the colours.
And if a neighbouring country began to develop a kind of sketchy drawing, or rough outline, this would be taken for mere scribbling -- capricious and baroque. In order to preserve taste, people would adhere to the simple style that indeed expresses nothing,(7) but which comprises a glowing array of colours, huge slabs of colour, and extended sequences of carefully graded but totally featureless colours.
Finally perhaps, in the course of progress, they would discover the prism, and straightway some celebrated artist would found some beautiful system upon it. Gentlemen, he would say, in order to be truly philosophical we must embark upon a study of physics. Here you see the light broken down into its constituent parts. Here are the primary colours; this is how they relate to each other; these are their proportions. Here are the true principles that underlie the pleasure which painting gives you.(8) All those mysterious words about design, representation and figure are the delusions of French painters who seek to arouse I know not what movements of the soul by their imitations, though as we know, only sensation is involved. They talk to you about the marvels of their pictures, but look at my range of colours.
French painters, he would continue, have possibly noticed the rainbow, and they may perhaps have been able to get some feeling for colour and some sensitivity to shading, from nature. But I have shown you the great and true principles of art, of all the arts, gentlemen, and of all the sciences. An analysis of colour and a calculation of prismatic refractions will give you the only exact relationships that are to be found in nature; these give you the rules that govern all relationships.(9) The universe is nothing but such interrelationships. One therefore knows everything when one knows how to paint. One knows everything when one knows how to arrange colours.
What would we say of the painter who had so little feeling and taste that he could reason in such an absurd manner, limiting our pleasure in painting to matters of physics?(10) What would we say of the musician who, full of prejudice, thought he saw in harmony alone the source of music's power? We would send the first fellow off to paint a bit of wood, and the other should be sentenced to composing French operas.(11)
Since, then, painting is not the art of combining colours in an agreeable manner, neither is music the art of combining sounds in an agreeable manner.(12) If there were nothing more to it than this, both would belong to the natural sciences,(13) rather than to the fine arts. Imitation alone raises them to this place. Now in what way is painting also an art of imitation? It is through design. And in what way is music also an art of imitation? It is through melody.(14)
The beauty of sound is natural and the effect purely physical. It derives from the diverse particles of air that are set in motion by the sonorous body and its aliquots -- possibly to infinity. The total effect is pleasing. Everyone takes pleasure in listening to beautiful sounds, but if the experience is not animated by melodious and familiar inflections it will in no way be delightful or sensually pleasing.(15) The most beautiful songs will only make a slight impression on an ear that is not accustomed to them. A dictionary is needed to comprehend the language.(16)
Harmony in its strictest sense is even less favourably placed. Since its beauties derive only from convention, it gives no pleasure to the ear that is unaccustomed to it. Considerable experience is needed if a taste and feeling for it are to be developed. Our consonances are but noise to the uncultured ear. When natural proportions are impaired it is hardly surprising that natural pleasures can no longer be derived from them.(17)
One note carries with it all its associated harmonics, which together in their relative strengths and pitches give the note the most perfectly harmonious sound. Add to that the third, the fifth or some other consonance, and you are not adding but merely doubling. You are leaving the intervals unchanged but simply altering the strengths relative to one another. In reinforcing one consonance and not the others you are destroying the proportions of the sound. In seeking to improve nature you are spoiling her. Your ear and your taste are impaired by an art that is misunderstood. In nature there is no other harmony than the unison.(18)
M. Rameau believes that a simple treble line will naturally suggest its own bass, and that an untrained person with a good ear will instinctively sing that bass. This is a musician's assumption that is altogether contradicted by experience. The person who has never heard a bass or a harmony will find neither, unaided, and if he were made to listen to them, he would find them displeasing and would prefer the simple unison. Though one were to calculate for a thousand years the relationship between sounds and the laws of harmony, how could that possibly result in the conclusion that music is an art of imitation?(19) Upon what principle is this supposed imitation based? What does harmony signify? And can chords have anything in common with our emotions?
If similar questions are asked in respect of melody the answers are self-evident; they are already present in the mind of the reader. By imitating the inflections of the voice, melody can express cries of grief, complaints, threats and groans. It is concerned with all the vocal expressions of passion.(20) It imitates the accents of language and the turns of phrase that reflect every movement of the soul. Not only does it imitate but it speaks, and its language, though inarticulate, is lively, ardent and passionate, and it has a hundred times more energy than the word itself. This is the source of the power of musical imitation; this is the mainspring of the power that song has over sensitive hearts.(21)
In certain systems harmony can be an integrating force, binding together successions of sounds by certain laws of modulation. It can improve intonation, it can provide the ear with definite evidence of that exactness; in the case of suspensions and consonant intervals it can bring together and determine the subtlest of inflections. But in fettering melody, harmony saps it of its energy and expression. It substitutes for the passionate accent the harmonic interval; it binds within two scale-formations melodies that should have as many notes as there are intonations in speech. It eliminates and destroys a multitude of sounds and intervals that lie outside its system. In a word, it so separates song from speech that the two languages conflict, and take from each other their essential truth, it being impossible to conjoin them in the expression of a pathetic subject without a feeling of absurdity. That is why people always find the expression of deep and sincere passions in song so ridiculous, for they know that there are no musical inflections for these passions in our language, and that the inhabitants of the northern climes do not die singing, any more than do swans.(22)
Harmony is certainly inadequate of itself to express the many things that seem wholly to depend on it. Thunder, the murmur of running waters, winds, storms, all these are badly portrayed by simple harmonies. Whatever is done, the noise alone will say nothing to the mind.(23) Objects must speak if they are to be heard; imitation always calls for a kind of discourse that supplies what is lacking in the voice of nature. The musician who seeks to portray noise by noise deceives himself. He knows neither the strengths nor weaknesses of his art. He judges without taste or understanding.
Tell him that he must portray noise by song: that is he wishes to portray the croaking of frogs he must make them sing. For it is not enough that he should imitate: he must touch and please. Otherwise his dull imitation is worthless, and since it will interest no one it will make no impression.
As long as sounds are only considered as having effect on the nerves, the true principles of music will be no more understood than the power that music has over our hearts. The sounds of a melody do not only act on us as sounds but as signs of our affections and feelings. Thus do sounds excite in us the emotions that they express and which we recognise. Something of the moral effect of sounds is even discernible in animal behaviour. A dog barks, and in doing so attracts another. If I imitate the miaowing of my cat the animal straightway is alert, anxious and agitated. Having discovered that I am imitating one of its fellow creatures it sits down again and relaxes. How can this be accounted for? There was no difference in the way that the nerves were excited since the cat was at first deceived.
If it is correct that our sensations have nothing to do with moral causes why is it that we are so sensitive to impressions that mean nothing to a barbarian? Why is it that a West Indian finds our most moving music nothing but meaningless sound? Are his nerves of a different make-up to ours? Why are they not excited as ours are? Why do the same vibrations affect one person so much and another so little?
[paras. 3 and 4 omitted]
I know of only one sense that remains unaffected by moral considerations: taste. Gluttony is the vice of men who are totally insensitive.
Anyone, then, who wishes to play the philosopher and to examine the power of our sensations, must begin by distinguishing purely sensual impressions from those intellectual and moral impressions that we receive through the senses, but which are but rarely caused by them. Let him then avoid the trap of attributing to objective phenomena powers that they do not possess, or which they only derive from the affections of the soul that they symbolise. Colours and sounds can be very effective as signs and symbols, but they can do little simply as objects of the senses. I may be amused for a while by particular successions of notes or chords, but something more is needed than sounds and chords if I am to be moved and charmed, something that will effectively move me, in spite of myself. Even songs will lose their interest if they merely give pleasure and say nothing, for it is not so much that the ear gives pleasure to the heart, but rather the reverse. In developing these ideas we have spared ourselves those absurd arguments that involve ancient music. This is an age that seeks to prove that the workings of the soul spring from material causes, and that there is no morality in human feelings: if I am not very much mistaken, the new philosophy will prove as disastrous for good taste as it will for virtue.
There is no sort of absurdity that has not been put forward during discussions about the physical causes which relate to the Fine Arts. Parallels have been found between sound and light, and these have instantly been seized upon, without reference to experience or reason. The search for a system has bedevilled everything. When we are unable to paint with the ears we decide to sing with the eyes. I have seen that famous keyboard on which they claim to make music with colours. Failure to recognise that colours owe their effect to permanence and sounds to successiveness shows a total misunderstanding of the workings of nature.
The whole richness of colour is spread before us at a single moment. Everything can be seen at a first glance. But the more we look, the more we are delighted; all that we have to do is endlessly to admire and to contemplate.
It is not so with sound. Nature does not analyse harmonies, and in no way does she separate them out. On the contrary, she hides them under cover of the unison. Now if at times she does separate them, as in human song and the warblings of certain birds, she does so successively, one sound after another. She inspires songs, not chords; she dictates melodies, not harmonies. Colours adorn inanimate things; all matter is coloured. Sounds, however, imply movement; the voice announces the presence of a living being, and only animate bodies sing. The flute is not played by an automaton but by the mechanic [i.e. God] who tempered the winds and gave movement to the fingers.
Thus, each sense occupies its own particular field. Music moves in time, whilst painting occupies space. To build up simultaneous sounds or to develop colours, one after the other is to change their disposition. It is to put the eye in place of the ear and the ear in place of the eye.
But, you may say, just as each colour is determined by the refractive angle of light, so each sound is determined by the frequency with which the sonorous body vibrates. Now there is an evident analogy here, as the relationships between the angles and numbers is similar. This is indeed so, but the analogy is made on rational rather than empirical grounds; and reason has no place here. To begin with, the angle of refraction can be experienced and is measurable, whilst the frequency of the vibrations can not. Sonorous bodies are subject to the action of the air, and continuously change their dimensions and pitch. Colours are durable, sounds are evanescent, and there can never be any certainty that the next sound will be the same as that which preceded it. Each colour, moreover, is absolute and independent. Each sound, on the other hand, is related to others, and can only be identified by a process of comparison. In itself no sound has an absolute character of its own; it is low or high, soft or loud in relation to others. Of itself it has no such properties. In a harmonic system a single sound is nothing either, naturally; it is neither tonic, nor dominant, harmonic nor fundamental, because all these qualities are nothing but relationships. Because the whole system can vary widely in pitch each sound will change its order and place according to how the system itself changes. The properties of colours, on the other hand, in no way depend on such relationships. Yellow is yellow, without reference to red or blue. It is everywhere identifiable as such, and once its angle of refraction has been determined, that particular yellow can be produced at will.
Colour derives, not from the coloured object, but from the light, for if the object is to be visible it must be well lit. Sounds, though, have need of movement, and in order that they may exist, sonorous bodies must be set in motion. Sight thus has this further advantage that the stars furnish it with a perpetual source of stimulation, whereas unaided nature gives rise to few sounds. Indeed, if we discount the theory of the harmony of the spheres, sound can only come from living beings.
It thus follows that painting is closer to nature, and that music is a more human art. The one is felt to be of more interest than the other because it brings men more closely together, and affords them endless insights into their fellow beings. Painting is often dead and inanimate. It can transport the viewer to the midst of a desert, but the existence of a fellow human being is instantly recognised when a voice is heard. The voice is, so to speak, the organ of the soul, and if voices were to portray solitude they would none the less say that we were not alone. The birds chirrup but man alone sings. We can hear neither song nor symphony without being immediately aware of the existence of another intelligent being.
It is one of the musician's particular advantages that he can represent things that could never be understood, whilst the painter can never depict things that cannot be seen. The most staggering thing about an art that only acts through movement is that it can even manage to portray repose. Sleep, nocturnal peace, solitude, silence itself, all these can be illustrated in music. Certainly, noise can convey the effect of silence, and silence the effect of noise; if one falls asleep, for instance, during the course of a monotonously delivered lecture, one awakes immediately it is over. Music tends to act inwardly upon us, awakening through one sense feelings that are similar to those which can be awakened by another. Painting cannot imitate music in the way that music can imitate painting; only when the impression that results from such imitation is a strong one can the relationship be felt, and painting lacks this power. Were the whole of nature to sleep, the man who contemplated her would yet be awake. The musician's art consists in substituting for the lifeless image of an object such impressions as the object excites in the heart of the beholder. It will whip up the sea, fan the inferno, make the rivulets flow, rains fall, and floods swell; it will moreover paint the horrors of a frightening desert, darken the walls of a subterranean prison, subdue the tempest, bring tranquillity and serenity, and impart from the orchestra new fragrance to the groves. The art of music does not directly represent such things but it excites in the soul feelings such as those one experiences on seeing them.
You see that we return, time and again, to the moral effects of which I have spoken. How far removed those musicians are from a true understanding of the power of their art who think of music merely as movements of the air and excitements of the nerves! The more interested they become in purely physical causes the further removed they are from its origins and the more they deprive it of its basic energy. As music becomes increasingly concerned with harmony at the expense of vocal inflection it is rougher on the ear, and less pleasing to the heart. Already it has ceased speaking; soon it will cease to sing, and then, for all its consonance and all its harmony, it will make absolutely no impression on us.
How is it that this has come about? By a natural change in the quality of language. Our harmony is a Gothic invention. Those who claim that our system is based on that of the Greeks are making fun of us. The Greek system had absolutely no harmonic quality about it, in our sense of the word, other than that which was needed to tune instruments to perfect consonances. Those peoples who play stringed instruments are obliged to tune them by consonances. Those who do not have such instruments make use of melodic inflections that seem false to us because they do not lie within our own system, and because therefore we are unable to note them down. The songs of the American natives are a case in point. Many Greek intervals must similarly have been foreign to our system, a fact that might emerge if only this music could be studied with less bias towards our own.
The Greeks divided their system into tetrachords as we divide our keyboard into octaves, and they repeated these divisions exactly as we do our octave. Such an extension would not have been possible, nor could it even have been envisaged within the unit of the harmonic mode. As the voice makes use of smaller pitch intervals when speaking than when singing the Greeks naturally repeated tetrachords in their sung speech (mélodie orale) as we repeat octaves in our harmonic melody (mélodie harmonique).
They only recognised those consonances that we call "perfect", rejecting thirds and sixths. Why so? It was because the interval of the minor tone [semitone] was unknown to them or at least forbidden in practice. Since their consonances were not tempered, all the major thirds would have been sharp by the span of a comma, and their minor thirds flat. Their major and minor sixths would also have been too wide or too narrow as a result of this. We may imagine then what concepts they could have of harmony, and what harmonic modes they could establish, discounting as they did the consonances of the third and sixth. As for those consonances that they did recognise, had they thought of them in terms of harmony they would at least have made implicit use of them beneath their melodies, and the term consonance would have been applied to the diatonic steps of the fundamental progressions.(24) Far from having fewer consonances than us they would have had more, so that, for instance, stemming from their interest in the interval of a fifth it would follow that the interval of a second would have been described as a consonance.
But, you may say, why did they have diatonic steps? The spoken language being so well inflected and tuneful, they made an instinctive choice of the most convenient intervals. For the voice finds a middle course between the over-large movements that the glottis has to make to span the wider consonances, and the smallest intervals, the intonation of which is difficult to regulate. It therefore adopts intervals that are smaller than those of the consonances, but simpler than those of the comma, whilst at the same time not ruling out the use of the smaller intervals in the more pathetic genres.
As language perfected itself, melody weighed itself down with new rules and imperceptibly lost its ancient power, finesse of inflection being sacrificed to the calculation of intervals. Thus, for instance, the enharmonic genre gradually fell into disuse. When the theatres had taken on a regular form, only certain prescribed modes were used, and the more the rules of imitation multiplied, the less effective was the imitative language.
In perfecting grammar, the study of philosophy and logic took away from language that lively and passionate accent that had at first made it so songlike. From the time of Menalippides and Philoxenus, the musicians who had formerly been in the service of the poets and who were so to speak under their direction, became independent of them. This is the license of which Music complained so bitterly in a comedy of Pherecrates, a passage from which has been preserved for us by Plutarch. thus, whilst melody had begun by being closely modelled on speech, it gradually took on a separate existence, and music became increasingly independent of words. So it was that those marvels gradually disappeared that music had achieved when it had been no more than the accent and harmony of poetry. No longer did it give poetry power over the passions, and words only had an effect on reason. Thus, although Greece was full of sophists and philosophers, there were no longer poets or famous musicians. In cultivating the art of persuasion, men lost the art of arousing the emotions. Plato himself, jealous of Homer and Euripides, decried the one and was unable to imitate the other.
Servitude soon came to influence philosophy. The Greek people, now in chains, no longer possessed the fire that only warms free spirits, and they could not find the voice to praise their tyrants that they had used to sing their heroes. Roman influence still further weakened what remained of the language of harmony and accent. Latin, being a heavier and less musical language, did violence to music in adopting it. The melodies that were used in the capital gradually modified those that were sung in the provinces. The Roman theatres harmed those of Athens. When Nero carried off the prize, the Greeks were no longer worthy of it, and the same melody, shared between two languages, suited neither.
Finally came that catastrophe which disrupted the progress of the human spirit without removing those defects which were the product of progress. Europe, invaded by the barbarians and enslaved by ignorant peoples, lost at the same time its sciences, its arts, and that universal instrument of both, namely perfected, harmonious language. Those coarse men from the north gradually accustomed everyone to the roughness of their speech; their hard and expressionless voices sounded rough, and lacked sonority. The Emperor Julian compared Gallic speech to the croaking of frogs. Since their articulation was as harsh as their voices, being nasal and heavy, they were only able to give one sort of character to their song, accenting the vowels in order to cover the roughness of the innumerable consonants.
This harsh song, along with the vocal monotony, obliged these newly arrived peoples and their subjects, who imitated them, to slow down their speech in order to make themselves intelligible. Laboured articulation and heavy accentuation combined to drive all feeling for rhythm and phrasing from melody. As the transition from one sound to another was always the hardest thing to pronounce they had no alternative but to stop on each sound as much as possible, to expand on it and to make it as distinct as they could. Song soon came to be nothing more than a slow and tedious succession of forced and drawn-out sounds, lacking sweetness, shape and grace. And although some scholars said that "longs" and "breves" in Latin chant should be respected, people certainly sang verse as if it had no poetic feet, poetic rhythm or any kind of measure.
Thus deprived of melody, song consisted solely of volume and duration of sound, and as such it must at last have suggested ways, with the help of consonance, in which more sonority could be achieved. Groups of voices at the unison, dragging out sounds of endless duration, found by accident concords which seemed to them to be agreeable, since they added to the total sound. Thus began the practice of descant and counterpoint.
I cannot say how many centuries passed during which they worried over fruitless questions bearing upon the known effect of a principle that they had forgotten. The most indefatigable reader would not stand the verbiage that Jean de Muris put into eight or ten chapters over the question of whether the fourth or the fifth should be the lower of two intervals within the octave. Four hundred years later we find Bontempi enumerating -- no less tediously -- all the basses that can carry the sixth above them instead of the fifth. However, harmony insensibly took the path that analysis had prescribed for it, until finally the invention of the minor scale and dissonance, introduced an arbitrariness of which it is full, and which prejudice alone prevents us from admitting.
Melody being forgotten, all attention being directed at harmony, everything gradually centred on this novelty. The genres, the scales, the modes were all given a new look. Part writing was controlled by harmonic progression. This development having usurped the name of melody, it was in fact impossible to recognise in the new melody, the features of its mother. Our musical system has thus by steps become purely harmonic. It is hardly surprising then that it has lost its verbal accentuation and almost all its energy.
This is how song has by degrees become wholly separated from words, its source of origin. This is how the harmonics of sound have led us to forget vocal inflection and how, finally, its effect being limited to the purely physical concurrence of vibrations, music has found itself shorn of those moral effects that it had produced when it was in two senses the voice of nature.
Notes
(1)
The whole acutely uncomfortable episode is vividly recounted
in the autobiography: see The Confessions of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, tr. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth 1953).
(2)
Source Readings in the History of Music, selected by Oliver
Strunk (New York 1950), p. 636.
(3)
This comparison straightway annuls Jean-Jacques's definition
of music, for if music's power over us does not derive from
sounds, it is pointless to combine them in order to make them
pleasing. But there is no parallel between sounds and colours
in this comparison, and the conclusion that Rousseau draws can
only be true in a relative and particular sense. It is false
when applied in a general and absolute sense, for there are
sounds that are in themselves disagreeable, and others that
make a pleasing impression on the senses. No one has such a
poor ear that he cannot distinguish between the two. On the
other hand it is a very different matter with colours, which
in themselves are not found to be relatively more or less
pleasing than others.
(4)
Jean-Jacques well knows how to turn an argument round when he
senses a fault in the principle that he has proposed! He is
very careful to avoid the same mode of comparison that he used
earlier on, for it would have brought him up with a jerk. Had
he said that "an orator makes persuasive use of a range of
vocal timbres during the course of his speech", is that not to
say that the sounds of his voice "are most eloquent"? The
logical outcome would then have been quite different.
(5)
Had their scholars gone into the matter more deeply they would
have found out; but if they had done as Jean-Jacques suggested
they would merely have skimmed the surface of the subject.
(6)
As yet this has not been done with music; if it had, the art
would have been fully mastered. Experience shows that sounds
are sad, touching, violent and so on; this alone negates what
Jean-Jacques has said.
(7)
Was it necessary for Jean-Jacques to equate simple beauty with
total and grievous poverty, in this context?
(8)
Jean-Jacques is obviously referring to Rameau's system of
harmony, but he consistently mishandles comparisons. The
argument here is totally false when it is applied to music. It
is true that musical expression depends on the choice and
ordering of sounds just as expression in painting depends on
the selection and arrangement of colours. But in painting the
truth of expression does not wholly depend on this, in the way
that music depends on sounds. For whatever colours the painter
may use for the forms that he seeks to represent, the
resemblance will still be easily recognisable if he has
correctly captured the outlines and contours, and the effects
of lighting. It is not so, however, with musical sounds. Their
individual qualities and interrelationships are so irrevocably
determined by nature that the slightest misjudgement of
dynamics, or the smallest miscalculation of range will be
enough to transform the expression. When a song is sung in a
different, though analogous key, it will always sound quite
different.
(9)
If there do exist such fundamental and precisely determined
natural relationships between colours, these have so far
escaped notice and investigation, and will doubtless continue
to do so. For whether we study the flowers, the plumage of
birds or any other coloured object we can distinguish no such
fixed and invariable order that can be related to all material
objects. It is not so with sounds. These have a constant and
invariable relationship to the size of the body, the rapidity
of its movement, and the density of the air that carries the
sounds. Vocal sounds similarly have a constant relationship to
the feelings and passions that they represent.
(10)
Jean-Jacques here pronounces sentence upon himself in
associating the musician with all the absurdities that he has
condemned in the painter.
(11)
In this connection, Jean-Jacques has had more success than he
can have expected, from his Le Devin du village.
(12)
I came to this conclusion before discovering that Jean-Jacques
had beaten me to it. I am delighted to find myself in
agreement with him on this point.
(13)
In effect the Ancients accorded music this status, although
they numbered it among the fine arts, together with
philosophy, and so on.
(14)
This argument ceases to be valid when applied in a specific
and absolute manner: it is too general to be applied to melody
and too restricted to be applied to music.
(15)
This is true. I became convinced of this when I was in Egypt.
This does not in any way disprove, however, the expressive and
imitative principles of melody; for as long as the melody
remains simple and as long as its naturally expressive accents
are recognisable, its inflections will be familiar to all
peoples.
(16)
A veritable dictionary of music's language would be required
to list the musical equivalents of all the natural accents of
expression. These accents were known to the Greeks and Romans
but they were not written down, as the musical notation that
they used was inadequate. It was the "Phonasques" or "Masters
of Song and Declamation" who taught by practical example how
to link together the musical words that make up the natural
accents of expression. Such knowledge could only be the fruit
of long study, enquiry and experience of natural and imitative
expression. The contemporary musician who has familiarised
himself with the words of the language of music, and who knows
how to make proper use of them will have reached his goal,
namely that perfection which once again is allied to nature,
though in a way which is the precise opposite of that which
pertained in its first infancy. Without this knowledge musical
expression will never recover its truly original and emotive
character. Otherwise it will be coloured, not only by the
peculiar customs, tastes and habits or each people, but it
will also be affected by all those incidental factors that are
born of caprice, fashion and bad taste. It is these that make
expression unrecognisable, so that those who are not familiar
with it cannot savour it.
Most indigenous music today is far removed from nature;
it is imbued with an arbitrary mode of expression that
completely distorts any natural qualities that may be left,
excepting only those songs that are not intended for dancing,
by the Barbras people, mountain dwellers of the Nubia, who
live above the first waterfalls on the river Nile. These
melodies represent music in its first infancy; they are of the
sweetest and most melancholy kind, and in a way are simply
long, modulated sighs, during which the voice gently ascends
and then slowly descends again by imperceptible steps of no
precise pitch, only to begin again as many times as there are
couplets to be sung. To form an idea of the quality of this
music we have only to recall the sounds that children make
before they have learned to speak, when in a sort of ecstasy
of happiness they softly rock their voices. The only
difference is that the Barbras people use the full compass of
the voice, whereas children span no more than three or four
notes.
(17)
This is indeed a fact that we have proved in Egypt. However,
there is no denying that when with practice the effects of
various chords have been determined, felt and appreciated, our
harmony definitely adds a new power and interest to melodic
expression; this is so because it can imitate and enhance the
most obscure as well as the most obvious movements, the most
secret as well as the most evident actions that concern each
animate and inanimate thing that is on the stage, where the
action referred to in the music takes place.
(18)
I am not at all of Rousseau's opinion on this matter. On the
contrary I believe that the unison is more a part of art than
nature, in which everything is harmoniously varied. Is there
not a natural harmony when the day star sinks towards the
horizon and soft breezes begin to waken nature, gently
stirring first grass, plants and shrubs, then trees and at
length the very forests; or when birds, after hopping from
branch to branch for a while and calling to one another,
suddenly take flight, making the heavens ring with their
thousand different songs; or when the doors of the stable and
the sheepfold are opened, and the sheep jostle their way out,
bleating and leaping round the shepherd who is leading them;
or when oxen, herded along by the labourers, bellow to each
other in long, drawn-out tones. And are all these sounds,
these bird songs, these cries, in unison? The error lies, as
in so many other cases, in the fact that Rousseau has confused
the basic principles of harmony with the basic principles that
relate to the use of that harmony; he has assumed in other
words that both are derived from the resonance of sonorous
bodies. As I have observed in the preceding footnote, musical
harmony is essentially the imitation of natural and concurrent
sounds such as those that I have just described. To avoid
confusion, simultaneously sounding notes are drawn from a
common generating tone, and these form harmonies. The
diversity of sounds that go to make up harmony is thus in
conformity with natural harmony, just as the sounds in a chord
relate to each other and are prescribed by laws affecting the
resonance of sonorous bodies. The harmonics that sound
together with the principal generating tone are thus only the
means and not the end of musical harmony. Musical harmony,
like other kinds of harmony, is to do with variety and not
with uniformity. The unison cannot therefore give rise to
harmony.
(19)
This is the inevitable consequence of the erroneous principle
that has been established concerning the purpose of harmony. I
have in the previous note demonstrated its falsity. If, as I
maintain, its consequences have been logically deduced, there
is no need to demonstrate the error of this statement.
(20)
Musical expression does not, then, derive wholly from melodic
design but also from the imitation of those sounds and vocal
inflections that are appropriate to the feelings and passions.
The function of music is thus by no means limited to "the
pleasurable satisfaction of the ear".
(21)
In truth, Jean-Jacques is no less adroit at changing his
opinion from moment to moment than was Proteus in changing his
form. Only a moment ago the philosopher was telling us that
the most beautiful songs would make little impression on an
ear that was unfamiliar with them if they were composed of
inflections that were foreign to it, that music was a language
for which a dictionary was essential, and that an imitative
art could never be based on harmony. But then, he argued,
melody imitates all the inflections of the voice that express
the different feelings and passions; that it does not merely
imitate but that it speaks; that its inarticulate language,
lively, ardent and passionate has, none the less, a hundred
times more energy than language itself. And now, he says, this
is the source from which song derives its power over sensitive
hearts. Where, then do Jean-Jacques's feelings come from,
after all that?
(22)
Oh! Why then do people not find music out of place in sad and
serious situations, above all at the time of death, when
scholars claim and artists prove that music is purely and
solely the art of "pleasing the ear"? It seems to me that
ordinary people are much nearer the truth than are the
philosophers and learned musicians, who set out to reconcile
expressions of the bitterest grief with an art that they
believe to have been created, or that they themselves create,
"to give pleasure to the ear".
I have already proved in many ways that music is nothing
but the art of imitating natural expression, and that it must
be aided in every way that can add to its vitality and
interest. I have also proved -- and the passage that I quoted
from Plutarch, vol. 13, p. 70, supports my point -- that music
is best suited to the expression of intense passions,
especially sorrowful ones, and that it is far less apt at
expressing affections of a moderate kind. Many authorities
have convincingly shown that song was once nothing more than
artistic expression, and that it could never have been
otherwise. There is thus no point is discussing here J. J.
Rousseau's erroneous statement.
(23)
This is one of the main objections that certain people have
against music. To them the mind is all important even in the
matter of the emotions they experience. Thus, music will
strive in vain to move them, to make them shed sweet tears or
to excite passions of the most violent and impetuous kind.
But, these gentlemen will say, music in no sense speaks to the
mind, and so it cannot paint, it cannot imitate, and it is
therefore a conventional and frivolous art. Who knows indeed
where they may lead us with their absurd conclusions?
(24)
Rousseau is referring here to the marches fondamentales, a
term that Rameau used to describe his theory of the basic
harmonic structure of chord progressions (eds.)