Better known for his critiques of the project of the Enlightenment and for the rhetorical barbs he aimed at the philosophes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is not normally considered to be a defender of civilization or a champion of the arts and sciences. In his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), written in response to the Academy of Dijon’s question, “If the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the purification of manners and morals,” Rousseau answers with a resounding “no,” citing the corrupting effects of the arts and sciences on human nature. According to Rousseau, it is the arts and sciences that have led throughout history to the division of labor, increasing social dependence, the downfall of the ancient democratic republics, and the lack of satisfaction generally in public life. Nonetheless, Rousseau wrote articles and essays on music, copied musical manuscripts, composed an opera, gave music lessons, and worked as a performer and as a tuner. For nearly the entirety of his life, from roughly 1719 until close to his death in 1778, he engaged with music in a variety of forms. How can we to reconcile the contradiction between Rousseau’s philosophical positions and his musical corpus? One thing remains consistent throughout Rousseau’s thought: an insistence on originality, authenticity, and self-expression uncorrupted by social pressures and constraints, alongside of a championing of greater social and political equality and justice. This insistence on originality, authenticity, and self-expression is evident in works as diverse as his treatise on education, Emile, or Education (1762), his novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), and his Confessions (1781), but also informs his writing on music.
In order to understand the relationship between Rousseau’s social and political philosophy and his work on music, it is important to understand not only the main currents of his thought but also the prevailing opinions of his day on musical questions. Born in Geneva to an artisan father, Rousseau studied music in a cathedral school in Annecy, studied with private music teachers, learned to play the flute and violin, performed in small chamber groups in private homes, and was exposed to Italian music while living in Venice. Rousseau was an autodidact who, according to his Confessions, studied the great composer and theoretician Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony Reduced to its Natural Principles (1722) to educate himself further in the field of music (Rousseau 1959: vol. I, 184). Like many people in eighteenth-century Europe, in addition to viewing music as a form of entertainment after dinner, Rousseau valued the study of music as an academic discipline that bridged the arts and sciences. According to Enlightenment thought, music is an art because of its mimetic abilities – its ability to imitate nature, in particular – but it is also very close to the sciences because of the mathematical ratios that explain acoustical properties and harmonic relations. Studying music as both an art and a science, and valuing the study of music as an academic enterprise worthy of reflection alongside other philosophical questions, contextualizes Rousseau’s engagement with music as typical for his day. When he decided to leave the countryside of Chambéry to seek his fame in Paris, he set out with a work entitled Project Concerning New Signs for Music, which he presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1742. Rousseau sought to simplify the musical notation system to make music easier to learn to read and more affordable, by eliminating the staff lines in favor of sequences of numbers separated by commas. The democratic undertones of his later thought are already apparent in the Project, which urges wider accessibility through the use of a more transparent and self-evident form of notation. According to Rousseau, students using his system of notation will learn to sing more quickly and easily. Music will become more affordable due to the savings in space and paper, ultimately producing a broadening of the music-reading public (Simon 2005a). The Academy of Sciences did not view Rousseau’s new notation system favorably, criticizing the difficulty of quickly glimpsing ascending or descending lines without the spatial display of notes on the staff. Undeterred, Rousseau published his Dissertation on Modern Music (1743), a direct appeal to the public aimed at building support for a simplified system of musical notation. In this work, he goes to great pains to explain the advantages of his notation as well as aspects of harmonic systems to the non-specialist.
Following on the heels of this entrée onto the Parisian intellectual scene, Rousseau was invited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, editors of the Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, to author virtually all of the articles pertaining to music. Over the course of several years, Rousseau penned about 375 articles for the quintessential Enlightenment project. His contributions sparked criticism quickly, from none other than the composer Rameau, who had turned down Diderot and d’Alembert’s offer to author the articles himself. In a published pamphlet entitled “Errors on Music in the Encyclopedia,” Rameau was especially critical of Rousseau’s accounts in “accompaniment,” “chord,” “dissonance,” and later in “enharmonic.” The criticisms from Rameau already indicate the seeds of what will become a major point of contention between the two: whether one privileges harmony over melody (Rameau) or melody over harmony (Rousseau) in music. While there are technical disputes that demonstrate Rousseau’s insight into weaknesses in Rameau’s harmonic system – for example, Rousseau’s perceptive insight that Rameau cannot derive the minor third from his theory of the fundamental bass (an overtone series) (O’Dea 1995: 17–18) – much of the dispute rehearses what will become full blown in the Querelle des Bouffons: a difference in taste between French and Italian style music.
In August 1752, a troupe of Italian musicians came to Paris to perform Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, touching off a dispute among intellectuals that came to be known as the Querelle des Bouffons (named after the Italian buf-foni or comic actors who performed the comic opera). Pergolesi’s highly melodic comic intermezzo contrasted sharply with traditional French opera, especially that of Rameau, that offered tragic material often in mythological or historical contexts. Two camps formed, one on the side of “French” opera and the other defending “Italian” opera, at times necessitating the appearance of armed guards to keep the peace at the opera. Rousseau’s participation in the quarrel, the Letter on French Music (1753), went so far as to conclude that “the French have no music and cannot have any, or if they ever do have any, it will be too bad for them” (1995: vol. V, 328). Solidly on the “Italian” side, Rousseau links the weaknesses of French opera to the French language. He critiques French opera for its bad use of recitatives, its tedious declamation style constrained by French prosody, and an overly academic adherence to harmonic development. He even goes so far as to engage Rameau directly in a counter-reading of an aria from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide (1686), disagreeing with Rameau’s assessment of the perfect expression of sentiment in its chromatic development. Rousseau found the aria dull and flat compared to the expressiveness of Italian opera, insulting not only Rameau, but also the composer who most embodied the glory of French opera in the seventeenth century, Lully. The Querelle des Bouffons provoked the major thinkers of the day to enter into a dispute whose implications went far beyond the musical questions at hand to engage major ideological questions pertaining to taste, aesthetics, epistemology, politics, and even religion (Johnson 1986).
Never one to shy away from self-contradiction, Rousseau, in spite of his statements in the Letter on French Music, composed his own opera: Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer, 1752). The opera, with a libretto in French also penned by Rousseau, offers the simple story of two peasants, Colin and Colette, who suspect one another of infidelity, only to be reconciled by the village divine. The naïve simplicity of the plot is matched by music that resembles the vaudeville airs, folk songs, and French dance music popular at the time (Heartz 1997). Rousseau reports in the Confessions that even Louis XV could sing Colette’s opening air, “J’ai perdu mon Serviteur” (“I lost my servant”) (1964: vol. III, 380). The opera was enormously successful throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, judging by the 350 performances over the next fifty years (Kaufman 1998). Using the pastoral mode and the musical genre of romance, Rousseau revived traditions that were well worn in France at the time, creating a taste for a “new” style of music that emphasized melodic line over the intricacies of harmonic counterpoint and polyphony.
In a text composed in 1761, the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau develops the thesis that music and language share a common source in human beings’ need to communicate feeling. Rousseau argues that while our physical needs may be communicated by simple gestures, our feelings and passion must have originally motivated the development of spoken language and music (Rousseau 1995: vol. V, 380). Rousseau imagines a common origin for language and music, with the two forms being slowly differentiated over time. While language, according to Rousseau, progressively loses its ability to communicate feeling and passion (largely due to the influence of writing), music maintains the potential to access emotion, given proper forms of expression. The Essay contains an argument concerning the privileging of melody over harmony that dovetails with the positions that were already evident in the Letter on French Music and in the compositional choices in Rousseau’s opera. Rousseau argues that while harmony produces an agreeable sensation, melody imitates “the inflections of the voice express[ing] complaints, cries of pain and joy, threats, wails” (1995: vol. V, 415–16). In this respect, he argues, melody “speaks and its inarticulate but energetic, lively, ardent, passionate language has one hundred times more energy than speech itself” (1995: vol. V, 416). It is this potential to communicate great emotion that draws Rousseau to emphasize melodic line in music.
The emphasis on the communication of emotion through music may be related to Rousseau’s philosophical positions concerning human sociability and political formations in the texts for which he is best known. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men (1754), Rousseau answered another question posed by the Academy of Dijon: “What is the origin of inequality among men and if it is authorized by natural right?” In a response that did not garner a prize as his earlier Discourse on the Arts and Sciences had, Rousseau laid out a philosophical position concerning the development and spread of inequality through the growth and development of human social institutions. In answering the question, Rousseau maintains that it is necessary to posit a hypothetical “state of nature” in order to understand man as he truly is, that is to say, before the changes wrought by civilization. Underlying this philosophical inquiry is the critical and potentially radical position that inequality may be mitigated, minimized, or even eliminated through appropriate social and political reform.
The hypothetical state of nature, as Rousseau conceives it, includes natural inequalities of age, size, sex, physical force, etc. (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 131). Because natural man lives in isolation from other humans, these inequalities remain largely inconsequential. As Rousseau traces the development of social life out of the state of nature, human beings slowly and progressively lose their more animalistic characteristics to become socially oriented beings. While this development brings about many positive changes – cognitive development, language, friendship, conjugal love, and family – it also sets in motion a number of changes that will institutionalize inequality.
Rousseau is often misunderstood as promoting a “return to the state of nature” or for romanticizing the concept of the “noble savage.” In reality, man in the Rousseauian state of nature lives a limited existence bounded by his needs and physical capacities. Rousseau imagines natural man as a being with limited cognitive abilities, no language, no sense of temporality, and only limited self-consciousness, but one who is free and responds empathetically to the suffering of others. Without the development of language or cognitive ability, and without a shared social existence, the isolated natural man sleeps under trees, gathers food to eat, and dwells in the present moment (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 140, 160). In spite of his social, psychological, and cognitive limitations, natural man does possess what Rousseau calls natural pity. Although not a social being, natural man has the capacity to feel empathy for other suffering beings when he encounters them (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 154–5). The feeling of pity will enable socialized man to develop moral relations with his fellow humanity, but even in the state of nature, pity provides a mechanism for man’s identification with suffering beings.
Contact with other humans will set in motion a series of changes in natural man’s mode of living that will bring civilization into being. Human beings first form loose associations to aid each other in hunting and other endeavors necessary for survival, dissolving these temporary forms of society as soon as the goal at hand is met (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 166–7).
The gradual development of social life entails the appearance of small family groups housed in huts, meeting their basic survival needs with simple tools (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 168). Rousseau places great emphasis on the expansion of the human heart in this phase of social development, stressing the appearance of language within the family setting. Eventually, the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy will produce a revolution in early social life, necessitating the division of labor and increasing social dependence (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 171–2). Rousseau’s account of the development of complex social relations dialectically argues that each new social innovation, although designed to free man to enjoy life, paradoxically leads to the further enslavement of man both to others and to material objects. Ultimately, the account of the development of social life in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality describes the emergence of an illegitimate social contract that ties the weak to the strong, increasing social and political inequality to the point that the nascent society pulls apart at the seams. Extreme inequality leads back to the beginning: human beings revert to a new “state of nature,” this time as a result of extreme corruption and political despotism (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 191).
The critique of the institutionalization of inequality as illegitimate provides a window onto an alternative social existence in which human beings retain a greater degree of freedom and independence by meeting their basic needs within the confines of small social groups. This idealized portrait of an earlier phase of social existence includes an account of music. Consistent with the dialectical argument that subtends the account of the emergence of social life in the Second Discourse, music produces happiness and joy, but also leads to comparisons, and eventually vices, as people begin to compete for public recognition:
They became accustomed to assembling in front of the huts or around a great tree: song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or the occupation of idle men and women gathered together. Each one began to look at the others and wanted to be well-regarded; public esteem had a price. He or she who sang or danced the best, the most beautiful, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most considered, and that was the first step toward inequality.
(Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 169)
While Rousseau emphasizes the advent of inequality in his account of these early scenes of joy and spontaneous celebration, he also asserts that they were among the happiest times in man’s entire existence. Communal life in this idealized form entails the sharing of celebrations and feelings through song and dance, a theme echoed in the account of the rise of language in the Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau 1995: vol. V, 405–6).
Building on the critique of institutionalized inequality and alienated social relations in the Second Discourse, the Social Contract (1762) provides a theoretical foundation for a form of political association that will “defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and goods of each associate, and by which each individual uniting with all the others obeys only himself and remains as free as before” (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 360). Rousseau imagines a social contract in which the individuals assemble to form a social group governed by the “general will.” This general will expresses the common good or general interest of the community (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 361). In Rousseau’s version of the social contract, the people remains sovereign, retaining the right to dissolve the government when it no longer instantiates the general will or, in other words, works in the common interest (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 362–3, 434–9). Legitimate forms of government entail that each citizen, as a member of the sovereign body, agrees to follow the laws, because as a citizen s/he has made the laws. Moral or political freedom for Rousseau means adherence to the self-prescribed law (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 365). Although Rousseau does not mention music specifically in the Social Contract, he does suggest that civic celebrations will help foster the bond of community in Considerations on the Government of Poland (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 962–3) and encourages the types of public festivals that occurred in Sparta in the Letter to d’Alembert (Rousseau 1995: vol. V, 123–4).
Together, the Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality provide a portrait of an idealized form of social and political existence that minimizes social and political inequality by fostering simpler forms of community than existed in eighteenth-century France. Eighteenth-century France was officially divided into three estates – the Church, the nobility, and the Third Estate (everyone else) – each with corresponding privileges and distinctions. The reality was that 98 percent of the population (the Third Estate) was politically and socially disenfranchised and subject to cycles of poverty and famine. Rousseau’s alternative vision of social and political life favors small homogeneous communities in which civic celebrations (with song and dance) help citizens bond with one another. Natural pity from the state of nature develops into a moral bond that ties members of the community together. Rather than seek to exploit and destroy one another, Rousseau envisions a community tied together through common interest and genuine feelings of affection for one another. He holds that the legitimate community will work together for the common cause and, in that way, each individual will also help him or herself, all the while retaining and protecting individual freedom and autonomy (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 373).
If Rousseau critiques the social and political inequality of his day, he also feels that humans are responsible for their own present predicament (Berger 2007: 142–58). Following from the arguments laid out in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, human beings have no one but themselves to blame for their current state of dependence on one another and enslavement to the social hierarchy. Social and political reform may be achieved through a return to values characteristic of simpler modes of existence, specifically, agrarian forms of social organization. In order to achieve the goal of greater social and political equality, it will be necessary to free men from the fetters of highly differentiated social structures that include intricate divisions of labor. It will also be necessary to forego the corrupting forms of power and prestige characteristic of contemporary society in favor of egalitarian self-sufficiency. This will require not only a social and political reorganization, but also a moral reform as well. In the Social Contract, as well as in the Project of Constitution for Corsica (1765) and the Considerations on the Government of Poland, Rousseau recommends eschewing luxury, commerce, wealth, and especially dependence on other nations, in favor of a return to agrarian values and social structures in which everyone knows everyone else. In the Social Contract, he recommends keeping a check on manners and morals through public opinion and a censorship tribunal (Rousseau 1964: vol. III, 458). The watchful gaze of fellow citizens keeps the conduct of the members of the community in check, both policing private conduct and limiting the disparities of wealth that would lead to greater social and political inequality.
Rousseau does not mention a role for the arts in achieving these social and political goals. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences blames “advances” in the arts and sciences for corrupting human nature. In the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), Rousseau argues that the theatre has a tendency to reinforce the values and often negative attributes of a community and therefore cannot be used as a vehicle for positive change (Rousseau 1995: vol. V, 18). Arguing against Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, Rousseau believes that theatre only augments self-interest and stirs the passions, encouraging people to become more adept at hiding their vices from others. Furthermore, the desire to see and be seen turns the theatre into a kind of public spectacle that exacerbates social inequality, privilege, and distinction. Finally, Rousseau believes that audience members experience plays in silent isolation from one another: “We believe that we gather together in the theatre, and it’s there that each one is isolated, it’s there that one goes to forget one’s friends, one’s neighbors, one’s relatives, to take an interest in fable, to cry over the misfortunes of the dead or to laugh at the expense of the living” (1995: vol. V, 16). Rousseau sees the theatre as a corrupting rather than a corrective or purifying force within a democratic republican community, one that only heightens self-interest to the detriment of the bonds of community.
His assessment of the effects of novel reading on the public is most succinctly summarized in the preface to his own novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (1762), in which he proclaimed: “Theatre is necessary in great cities as are novels for corrupt peoples,” and “a chaste young woman never read a novel” (1964: vol. II, 5, 6). While his preface emphatically asserts the corrupting effects of novels, the fan mail that he received in response to the novel documents the existence of an eighteenth- century public that fiercely identified with the emotional lives of the characters (Darnton 1985; Paige 2008). The fan mail suggests that readers felt that the sentiments expressed in Julie were “true,” in the sense that they were authentic, emanating from the novel’s author, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paige 2008). In this respect, the historical reception of the novel provides a model for aesthetic reception that underscores the importance of emotional response, although in an individualized way, one reader at a time. Thus, novels elicit an emotional and moral response, but individually, and the theatre corrupts an audience by isolating its members and emphasizing self-interest.
Turning to Rousseau’s writing about music, the potential to elicit a strong emotional response in a group of listeners at the same time makes musical performance a possible vehicle for promoting the ties of social, moral, and political community. According to Rousseau, music has the ability to tap the emotions of listeners through a kind of mimesis. In both the Essay on the Origin of Languages and the entry “imitation” in the Music Dictionary (1767–68), he asserts that the power of music to stir emotion lies in imitation:
[T]he art of the musician consists in substituting for the imperceptible image of the object the movements that its presence excites in the heart of the one who contemplates. Not only will he agitate the sea, animate the flame of fire, make the streams run, the rain fall and the torrents swell; but he will paint the horror of an awful desert, darken the walls of an underground prison, calm the tempest, make the air tranquil and serene and will spread a new freshness over the groves from the orchestra. He will not directly represent these things, but he will excite in the soul the same movements that one feels in seeing them.
(1995: vol. V, 861)
The musician does not directly imitate the sounds of nature, but rather makes the listener feel the same feelings as if s/he were before nature. In other words, the art of the musician lies in moving the passions. Rousseau claims that this is accomplished through a number of features in music, but especially by accent and melody. By accent, Rousseau means “any modification of the speaking voice, in its duration or in the tone of the syllables and the words of which the discourse is composed” asserting that there exists “a very precise relationship between the two uses of Accents and the two parts of melody, namely rhythm and intonation” (1995: vol. V, 613). In other words, tonal variation as well as rhythm produce accent in music and language. The most expressive type of music is one in which accent in language aligns with accent in music in such a way as to communicate feeling and emotion to the audience through song.
Melodic line also contributes to the communication of emotion for Rousseau. He argues that “[s]ounds in melody not only act on us as sounds, but also as signs of our affections, of our sentiments; it is in this way that they excite in us the movements that they express” (1995: vol. V, 417). When we are moved by melody, it is not only because the music is pleasing, but also because the movement is communicated to the heart, stressing the moral component of the experience. Like pity in the state of nature, music enables human beings to identify with one another as they communicate emotion.
One last concept from Rousseau’s Music Dictionary provides insight into how music realizes its potential to stir the emotions in a moral way. Rousseau defines “unity of melody” as “a successive Unity that relates to the subject and through which all the well-linked parts form a single whole, of which we perceive the ensemble and all the relations” (1995: vol. V, 1143). He claims that he composed Le Devin du village according to this principle, which he first articulated in his Letter on French Music (Rousseau 1995: vol. V, 1146; Waeber 2009). Rousseau maintains that unity of melody enables us to hear a piece composed of multiple parts as a whole, rather than be distracted by polyphonic lines or harmonically driven counterpoint. Rousseau imagines an audience of listeners, such as those who first heard his opera, being moved by the music because of the emotions expressed through the accent of passion and the uncluttered melodic lines. This audience – unlike the theatre audience – would feel the emotion together, as a group, and therefore bond in recognition of their common moral feeling.
Such a vision of aesthetic reception overcomes the alienation that Rousseau diagnosed in theatre audiences by using aesthetic form to shape reception. Unity of melody and accent elicit emotions in the listeners without enabling them to become distracted or self-interested. Rather, music penetrates their ears and they feel the emotions communicated by the composer and musicians. Ideally, the strong pull of moral emotion reinforces the bonds of community that exist. Rousseau argues that we are interested in music because it announces the presence of another human being: “Birds whistle, only man sings, and one cannot hear song or a symphony without immediately saying: another sentient being is here” (1995: vol. V, 421). Like the pull of natural pity, the sound of music taps the natural emotions that originally motivated humans to communicate with one another. Through musical expression, Rousseau seems to suggest that the bonds of community might be strengthened. Strengthening the moral bonds of community ultimately works in the service of the social and political reforms that he proposes in his most famous texts on social and political theory. Music, in the service of shared human moral expression, Rousseau intimates, could help to reinforce our most positive qualities, enabling the overcoming of self-interest in favor of justice and equality for all human beings.
While Rousseau’s Social Contract poses the modern question of political legitimacy and his Confessions usher in a representation of the modern self, his emphasis on the redemptive role music might play in countering the alienation and self-interest of modern life prefigures developments in German Romanticism, modernism, and the theorists of the Frankfurt School. His writings on music link concerns of his social and political thought with a possible remedy in artistic expression (Simon 2005b). In a parallel development, his comparative explorations of the musical expression of non-Western peoples introduce European thought to the field of ethnomusicology. Finally, Rousseau’s compositional emphasis on melody heralds the decline of counterpoint in favor of the strong melodic lines of Hayden, Beethoven, and Schubert.
See also The early modern period (Chapter 25), Music and language (Chapter 10), Music and politics (Chapter 50), and Rhythm, melody, and harmony (Chapter 3).
Berger, K. (2007) Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Darnton, R. (1985) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Vintage Books.
Heartz, D. (1997) “Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau’s Le Devin du village,” in M.-C. Mussat, J. Mongrédien, and J.-M. Nectoux (eds) Echos de France et d’Italie: liber amicorum Yves Gérard, Paris: Buchet/Chastel Société française de musicologie, pp. 31–46. Johnson, J.H. (1986) “The Encyclopedists and the Querelle des Bouffons: Reason and the Enlightenment of Sentiment,” Eighteenth-Century Life 10: 12–27.
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O’Dea, M. (1995) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion and Desire, New York: St. Martin’s.
Paige, N. (2008) “Rousseau’s Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloïse,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42: 131–54.
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Simon, J. (2005a) “Singing Democracy: Music and Politics in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66: 433–54.
—— (2005b) “Rousseau and Aesthetic Modernity: Music’s Power of Redemption,” Eighteenth- Century Music 2: 41–56.
Waeber, J. (2009) “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘unité de mélodie,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62: 79–144.
Scott, J.T. (ed.) (1998) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 7, Hanover: University Press of New England.