The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of intense intellectual activity and exchange. The ongoing “scientific revolution,” with its emphasis on rationality, experimentation, and systematicity, and the new ways of viewing the world that came with it, affected every area of scholarly interest, including music theory. This period marks more generally the birth of aesthetics as a separate philosophical specialty, as several important aesthetic concepts, including representation and expression, begin to take their modern forms. Music loses its status as an object of mainstream scientific study to take its place as one of the newly emerging “fine arts” in the modern system of the arts. The social context of listening changes, moving from church and court toward the concert hall. The Renaissance pre-eminence of vocal music gives way to the growing importance of instrumental music, thus increasingly changing the view of music from that of a rhetorical art to that of a language in its own right, a process that would be accomplished only by the end of the period.
This chapter surveys some of the major trends in early modern philosophy of music, placing them within the context of the philosophy and aesthetics of the time.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the empirical study of sound and vibration, undertaken both for practical purposes related to tuning and for its intrinsic interest, had upset traditional musical theory. This had been a blend of myth, scholastic dogma, mysticism, and numerology (Palisca 1961). One testimony to music’s importance as an object of scientific study can be seen in the interest it held for the young and ambitious René Descartes (1596–1650). His first work was the Compendium Musicae, written in 1618 and presented to his friend and fellow scientist Isaac Beeckman. Posthumously published in 1650, an English translation appeared in 1653 and a French translation followed in 1668. Descartes’s approach in the Compendium is predominately mathematical and mechanical. He discusses a number of themes, including physical acoustics, sensory perception, mathematical proportions and structures in music, and the effect of music on listeners. Although it was published posthumously, the Compendium was discussed earlier by other mathematicians and scientists, including Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), with whom Descartes exchanged letters on a number of musical topics (Descartes 1936–63, see in particular the letters of 4 and 18 March 1631, October 1631, April 1634 and 14 August 1634). Mersenne wrote voluminously on music, both in his correspondence with other researchers and in his published works. Although he thought mathematics of key importance in understanding aspects of sound and music, he insisted on rigorous experimentation and empirical testing of hypotheses. His huge and digressive Harmonie universelle (1630) brought to the fore the conflict between mean tone tuning and equal temperament for keyboard instruments (Cohen 1984).
Descartes’s thought had a large impact on the intellectual currents taking shape over the next couple of centuries, no less in the philosophy of art and music than in other domains. His influence over the philosophy of music went in two different directions. First was his influence on the composer and music theorist Jean- Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). Rameau sought to unify Descartes’s deductive and rationalist approach with the growing body of empirical findings on pitch and tone (Katz and HaCohen 2003). With Descartes’s Discourse on the Method as his guide, Rameau attempted to rationalize and simplify the many rules that guided musical practice and composition and to reduce them to a few clear and evident axioms. Systematic reflection on music in the eighteenth century was dominated by Rameau’s work, and his theory of the corps sonore (“sonorous body”) has been identified as the most important contribution to that era’s music theory (Thomas 1995). Drawing on the empirical work of Mersenne and Joseph Sauveur, Rameau claimed (erroneously) that all vibrating bodies, whether plucked strings, keyboard instruments or woodwinds, resonate consonant overtones (Paul 1970). The corps sonore provided the fundamental axiom of musical harmony. This had tremendous importance as it allegedly supported Rameau’s view that melody is the unfolding of harmony. One practical result of Rameau’s influence on eighteenth-century Classicism was the simplification of all musical language, especially harmony (Palisca 1961). Rameau went on to extend this theory beyond music to the other arts and science. In later years he was inspired by the occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) to apply the corps sonore to religion as well. His last works may be seen as occasionalist interpretations of music (Paul 1970).
Descartes’s second important influence on philosophy of music was through his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649). In it, Descartes departed from tradition by proposing to treat the passions clinically, with the goal of understanding rather than judging them. The effect of the passions is mental but their cause is physical. Passions arise from the movement of “animal spirits” throughout the living body; Descartes offers detailed mechanistic explanations of the arousal of the different passions. Each of the passions is an expression or combination of one or more of the six different “primitive” passions – wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. Descartes’s conception of the passions influenced thinking about both the visual arts and music, the latter through the doctrine of the Affektenlehre. This was the idea that a musical work should represent abstract affections – one affect per work – by utilizing stereotyped musical figures. Descartes’s theory of the passions provided a rationalist foundation for the Affektenlehre and helped broaden it beyond its origins in the theory of rhetoric (Neubauer 1986). Although the Affektenlehre had dominated Baroque composition, its influence gradually declined throughout the eighteenth century (Maniates 1969). It persisted among philosophers, especially those in France and Britain, longer than among composers (Schueller 1948)
On the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–72) is an allegorical engraving illustrating the order and arrangement of the sciences, arts, and trades; it is revealing of eighteenth-century attitudes to music (Rex 1981). It depicts Music as sitting together with the imitative arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; yet she is slightly apart and situated behind them, gazing down modestly; her figure is partially obscured by the three other imitative arts. The imitative arts sit below larger figures that symbolize the different forms of poetry, with pride of place given to Epic Poetry. Music, depicted between the imitative arts (which appeal to the senses) and poetry (which appeals to the imagination), presumably appeals to both. However while Music is clearly allied with the imitative arts, she is nonetheless overshadowed by them. Her primary role is as their imitator. Music’s status as an imitative and dependent art had been assumed in Abbé du Bos’s (1670–1742) widely read “Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture” (1981). Du Bos was one of the first French writers to discuss the relationship between music and emotion (Maniates 1969). Just as painters imitate the forms and colors of nature, so too do musicians imitate the sounds that are natural signs of the passions. Art, whether poetry, painting, or music, will move an audience only if it is imitative.
A recurring theme in eighteenth-century French aesthetics was the hope of establishing an underlying unity for the fine arts (Maniates 1969). Aristotle’s principle of imitation was expected to provide such a unity. The first systematic formulation of this hope was the widely read and frequently translated Les beaux arts reduits à un meme principe by Charles Batteux (1713–80). All of the arts imitate “beautiful” nature; music portrays the passions. The “natural” sounds associated with emotions are in music regulated, intensified, and polished. Batteux’s account of musical imitation is more suggestive than clear or coherent. While some music is said to be similar to landscape painting, other music may express animate sounds which correspond to feelings, and is more like portrait painting. As he writes: “The heart has its intelligence independent of words, and when it is touched it has understood everything” (Batteux 1986: 266). Although Batteux’s work was thoroughly criticized and seen to fall short of its target, his central conception of art as imitation became the received opinion (Neubauer 1986).
Several central themes of French Enlightenment thought on music are evident in the work of Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) who, as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, may be seen as a touchstone for the age. First is the centrality of the idea that music imitates the passions, a conviction shared by nearly every contemporary writer on music. In the “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie (1995), he insists that music is a “kind of discourse” which expresses the passions. Composers may also imitate objects by imitating those passions that the objects typically arouse, although those of “vulgar senses” may not always grasp the imitation. Famously, d’Alembert claims that music which does not portray something is only noise. Second, is the attitude toward instrumental music, which was seen as decidedly inferior to vocal music. D’Alembert found little of distinction in the non-programmatic instrumental music of his day (Rex 1981) and he rejected the very idea of composing a flute sonata, since the flute properly expresses only sadness and tenderness (Oliver 1966). These ideas were echoed by the anonymous author of the article “Instrumentale” (possibly d’Alembert himself), who argues that musical instruments are to be classed as good or bad, depending on how closely they resemble the tonal qualities of the human voice (Oliver 1966). Finally, d’Alembert was typical of his age in his grappling with the influence of Rameau. D’Alembert simplified and popularized Rameau’s theories in his Elémens de musique théorique et pratique suivant les principes de M. Rameau, thereby helping to disseminate Rameau’s ideas throughout Europe (Christensen 1989). While Rameau was initially appreciative of the younger man’s efforts on his behalf, the relations between him and the Encyclopedists deteriorated with the Querelle des Bouffons – the famous controversy that concerned the relative merits of French and Italian opera.
Denis Diderot (1713–84), d’Alembert’s co-editor of the Encyclopédie, and their collaborator Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) also contributed to the era’s music theory. Although they shared some basic presuppositions about music with d’Alembert and with their contemporaries, each succeeded in being more than an outlet for received views. Diderot did not produce a systematic aesthetic theory, but he tried to resolve some of the tensions in the prevailing neo-Classical views (Verba 1993). In his Lettre sur les sourds et muets Diderot assumes that music is imitative; yet he offers the intriguing suggestion that an artist’s conception of nature can be a more important source of beauty than natural phenomena (Rex 1981). Although his early Memoires is very close to Rameau, in Le neveau de Rameau he allies himself with the views of Rousseau, against Rameau. While the 1771 Leçons is an explicit rejection of Rameau, especially the latter’s Cartesian rationalism, Diderot ultimately re-asserted the values of reason and reflection even in music (Verba 1993). Like the work of Diderot, much of Rousseau’s writing on music contends with the thought of Rameau. While Rameau’s theory of the corps sonore implied that harmony was primary and natural, Rousseau defends the view that melody is primary, and that both harmony and melody are intrinsically linked to custom and convention (Thomas 1995). Rousseau was also typical of his age in accepting that instrumental music was inferior to vocal, and that music imitates the passions and objects that arouse passions. While Rousseau’s debates with Rameau can be seen as part of an overall attack on Cartesian rationalism (Katz and HaCohen 2003), it is worth remembering that many of these debates took place within larger areas of agreement (Verba 1993).
By the final decades of the century, the idea that music is imitative was no longer accepted without question. Boyé (dates unknown) and Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730–92) were two forceful advocates of sensualism in music who rejected both imitation and expression in music. In his 1779 pamphlet “Musical Expression Relegated to the Ranks of Chimeras,” Boyé denied that music could express emotion (Boyé 1986). He argued that music was more properly seen as a pleasure of the senses, not of intelligence. His work was known to and influenced the nineteenth-century formalist critic Eduard Hanslick (Maniates 1969), and through him, many later thinkers. Chabanon also denies that music is an imitative art, and seems to be the first to recognize fully the possibility of instrumental, non-programmatic music (Chabanon 1986; see also Neubauer 1986).
A few differences between early modern French and British philosophy of music are important and deserve note. Unlike the French (or the Germans), British writers on aesthetics were preoccupied by the project of finding similarities among the fine arts as a step in the search for a unified theory. A great number of pamphlets, essays, and treatises appeared that compared music with architecture, painting, and poetry. This search for correspondences among the arts contributed to the decrease in importance, in aesthetic theory, of imitation and the resultant increased importance of the concept of expression (Schueller 1953). Fewer of the participants in the debates over music in Britain were musicians or involved in practical problems of tuning and harmony. Most were men of letters interested in academic issues, and they tended to think in literary terms (Schueller 1948, 1950). This may have contributed to the durability of the idea, in Britain, that vocal music was clearly superior to instrumental. Finally, British aestheticians were influenced by the work of empiricist philosophers – specifically the doctrine of the association of ideas in John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76), and in the latter’s doctrine of sympathy.
Locke’s conception of the mind and its powers clearly influenced Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), and this is apparent in his An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design. Although the work is concerned primarily with the visual arts, it does contain a discussion of beauty and the sources of pleasure in music. Just as we appreciate visual beauty by means of an internal sense of beauty, we appreciate harmony (the beautiful in music) by means of an internal “good ear.” A person may see or hear well enough, yet be deficient with respect to the natural internal sense that allows one to take pleasure in the beautiful. Beauty in music may be “original,” that is, it may refer to nothing but itself. The beauty of harmony is an example. Comparative or “relative” beauty in music arises from the musical imitation of the passions, which in turn causes the same passion is listeners, through a sort of sympathy or contagion. Hutcheson’s ideas provide a backdrop against which many later writers form their own theories about music.
A Discourse on Music, Poetry, and Painting (1783) by James Harris (1709– 80) is typical of its time in its arrangement of the arts in a hierarchy of value (with music occupying the lowest rung), its assumption that music is an imitative art, and its exclusive focus on music accompanying a text. Also typical is the assumption that music arouses affections in listeners. These affections in turn, through the power of association, raise ideas, which may themselves also raise affections. Although poetry is superior to music, poetry accompanied by music is more powerful that either of these arts can be on its own. A musical setting prepares the mind for the poetry that is sung and helps reinforce the affections and thus the ideas raised by poetry.
In Britain as in France, the idea that imitation provided the underlying unity among the fine arts began to be challenged in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the idea of expression came to replace that of imitation in thinking about music. The doctrine of expression emerged from the doctrine of imitation yet differed from it. It was both a response to considerations of contemporary musical practice and a justification of those practices (Schueller 1948). Composer Charles Avison (1709–70), while generally approving of Harris’s Discourse, argued in his very influential “An Essay on Musical Expression” (2004) that the concept of expression (by which he meant the arousal of affections) should replace imitation in thinking and writing about music. Avison’s discussion continues the trend of discussing music that accompanies a text, rather than instrumental music. Composers should aim to express a poem’s “general drift” and music is most powerful in the service of poetry when it does not draw attention to itself. It is worth noting that the “expression” promoted by Avison and his contemporaries was not private or individual; the feelings expressed by music were limited to positive social emotions (Schueller 1948). Indeed, Avison’s work provides a foundation for the eighteenth- century evasion of violent and negative passions in music (Lippman 1992).
Daniel Webb (1719–98) similarly rejected the idea that music could express wholly painful emotions. In Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music he assumes (but does not wholly endorse) the Cartesian view of the passions and describes four ways in which music acts as a mechanism to bring about four different kinds of emotional responses in the soul (Webb 1986). When music is combined with words, the general responses become specific passions. Webb gives an important place to motion in music. Sound is not a single impression but a succession of impressions. Music can affect the passions because both have their origin in movement – the latter in the movement of animal spirits. Motion also helps explain the pleasure that we take in music. When we listen to music, pleasure arises from the succession of impressions that is created, and is augmented by the gradual transition from one kind of sound vibration to another. Webb’s work was very influential and a German translation was published in 1771 (Lippman 1992).
Webb’s interest in the sources of pleasure in music was shared by some of his contemporaries. Writers interested in this topic tended to rely heavily on the association of ideas (Schueller 1950). It was allowed that some of music’s appeal is “natural” – coming from the sounds themselves, their succession, and their combination in pleasing concords. Yet much of pleasure we take in music was thought to come from the associations it aroused in the mind. The leading psychologist David Hartley (1705–57), in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), provides an explanation of pleasure in music within the context of his more pressing interest, the association of ideas. Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), whose Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste was published in 1805, is best discussed in the context of eighteenth-century classicism. He provides a thorough defense of associationism in music, distinguishing between “sentimental” pleasures that arise from habitual associations and could be felt by anyone, and “intellectual” associations available only to the learned. This indicates a departure from associationism proper.
The essay by Adam Smith (1723–90) on imitation and the arts (from his Essays on Philosophical Subjects) deserves to be better known, both for its influence and for its intrinsic value. It provides a comprehensive, carefully worked out account of imitation in the different arts. Pleasure arises from the disparity between an imitated object and its imitative medium. With regard to music, the disparity is between musical sound and the sounds of human emotion or of voices engaged in conversation. Music can effect states of mind and arouse the passions through a kind of “correspondence” between it and mental states. In keeping with eighteenth- century taste, Smith denies that music can easily imitate unsocial passions, and finds the imitative powers of instrumental music to be limited. Yet his views on instrumental music are more forward looking than those of most of his contemporaries. A work of instrumental music can “fill up” the mind on its own, without suggesting any imitated object, and its meaning may be complete on its own without requiring any interpretation: “[Instrumental] music seldom means to tell any particular story, or to imitate any particular event, or in general to suggest any particular object, distinct from that combination of sounds of which itself is composed” (Smith 1982: 205).
Like their British counterparts, German theorists of music were influenced by the French, both positively and negatively. Descartes’s rationalization of the emotions and mechanistic account of their functioning provided support for the Affektenlehre. Batteux’s Les beaux arts reduits à un meme principe, translated into German in 1751 (Lippman 1992), inspired discussions over the role and limitations of imitation in music. As in France, Rameau’s work prompted both praise and critical discussion. The earlier part of the period under discussion was marked by a defense of “galant” style – characterized by an emphasis on melody with light accompaniment only. While music and art in galant style appeared throughout Europe, its explicit philosophical defense was a German phenomenon, probably because it there co-existed with and was a contrast to the well-developed tradition of polyphonic music (Lippman 1992). In writing about music later in the eighteenth century, we find the emergence of proto-Romantic tendencies. Early modern German philosophy of music is different from that coming out of France and Britain in two important ways. First, most eighteenth-century German writers did not assume that instrumental music was inferior to vocal music (Katz and HaCohen 2003). Second, a long tradition in Germany, operative well into the nineteenth century, insisted on the ethical and religious significance of music (Lippman 1992).
Johann Mattheson (1681–1765) was an important and influential proponent of the new imported galant style. While his Der Vollkommene Capellmeister is firmly grounded in the conception of music as a rhetorical art and assumes the Cartesian psychology of the passions, its central purpose is an aesthetics of melody (Lippman 1992). Mattheson presents his own ideas in contrast to Rameau’s “inexplicable contemplations” (Mattheson 1981: 488). He insists, contra Rameau and sounding very much like Rousseau, that pure melody is “the most beautiful and most natural thing in the world” and that harmony emerges from melody, not vice versa (Mattheson 1981: 300–1). The primacy of melody contributes to Mattheson’s views on instrumental music. The human voice is natural and inborn, while musical instruments are a form of artifice. The relationship between vocal and instrumental music is like that between a mother and a daughter – the latter must try to emulate the former (Mattheson 1981: 418–19). Furthermore, an instrumental melody attempts to express without words as much as a vocal melody can express with words.
Mattheson is sometimes grouped together with Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) as the German rationalist aestheticians (Neubauer 1986). Baumgarten wrote nothing on music yet his writings on poetry influenced the emerging discussion on instrumental music. Influenced by Hutcheson, Mendelssohn continued the project of bringing the arts under a common principle, but rejected imitation as the comprehensive principle. Rather, he defined art as the sensuous expression of perfection. Mendelssohn contrasts “natural” signs, such as the human bodily movements and sounds that express the passions, with “arbitrary” signs such as words (Mendelssohn 1997: 177). Painting, sculpture, music, and dance employ natural signs; poetry and rhetoric, which appeal to the mind rather than to the senses, employ arbitrary signs. When music and poetry are combined, poetry is dominant. The expression of sentiment in music may be intense and moving, but it is indeterminate and general; the expression is individualized through words (Mendelssohn 1997: 185–7).
The final decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a marked change in the attitude to instrumental music and an interest in experiencing a broader range of expressivity in music. An aesthetics of “sentiment and yearning” with regard to music is found in novels of the period (Lippman 1992: 126). It is also evident in the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98). He claims that there are two ways of listening to music: simple absorption in sound, or a kind of spiritual activity that music generates and sustains (Wackenroder 1981). Music, unlike poetry, seems capable of leading a separate existence. Music means “both everything and nothing” and is both finer and subtler than language (Wacken-roder 1981: 250). Instrumental music’s lack of determinate propositional content is linked with its capacity to prompt spiritual reveries. These themes are taken up and elaborated in the nineteenth century. Wackenroder was influenced by Karl Philipp Moritz (1757–93), another aesthetician who wrote little on music yet whose ideas contributed to the movement from a Rationalist to a Romantic aesthetics of music. Moritz dedicated his article “On the Concept of Self-Contained Perfection” to Mendelssohn. In it he proposes separating an internal, autonomous order of art from objectivist considerations (Neubauer 1986) and in doing so opens the door to the association of music with the ineffable.
See also Arousal theories (Chapter 20), Kant (Chapter 30), Opera (Chapter 41), Resemblance theories (Chapter 21), Rhythm, melody, and harmony (Chapter 3), and Rousseau (Chapter 29).
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