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The Rousseauian Mind

Eve Grace, Christopher Kelly

Rousseau on music

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Jacqueline Waeber
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27
ROUSSEAU ON MUSIC
A case of nature vs. nurture
Jacqueline Waeber

No study on Rousseau and music would fail to remind us that his championing of Italian music
was built on the opposition French music vs. Italian music: to the latter he attributed authen-
ticity in expression and melodiousness and to the former, exceeding harmonic complexity
compensating for its absence of melody. Rousseau’s belief in the superiority of Italian music was
grounded on his claim that Italian language had kept a trace of its original, melodious accent.
Revamping a view popularized since Montesquieu’s climate theory, Rousseau’s Essay on the
origin of languages argued that the idioms of Southern people had retained the musicality of their
first languages dictated by the accents of passions. Instead, having discovered the use of language
because of their needs, Northern people had consonantal, unmelodious languages, devoid of any
musical accent: the case, so says Rousseau, of French.
The composer and music theoretician Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), who dominated
musical life in France during the ancien régime, embodied for Rousseau the flaws of French
music. What Rousseau condemned as Rameau’s excessive reliance on harmony epitomized the
fact that, in his view, French music was completely devoid of melody – for Rousseau, the very
negation of music. Italian music of his time, however, was no less complex than the French, and
the hegemony of its vocal and instrumental virtuosi was felt all over Europe. Yet scholarship
has never addressed this glaring contradiction between Rousseau’s idealization of Italian music
and the historical reality of his time. Rousseau’s binary, French vs. Italian music, obfuscates an
in-between area in which lies another conception of music that needs to be considered in the
light of his own faulty musical education, which in turn shaped his understanding of this art.
Haunted by his incapacity to attain fluency in musical performance, Rousseau identified his
difficulties in learning music as arising from a tension between nature and nurture. Convinced
of the musicality of the first languages, Rousseau also believed in an original, natural state of
music, which he opposed to modern music. He viewed the latter as a product of progress and
civilization and he identified, in the harmonic mastery of Rameau’s music, the supplement that
palliated the absence of melody and the loss of language’s musical accent.
This essay revisits Rousseau’s musical binary as the expression of a tension between nature
and nurture that fuels two mutually exclusive understandings of music. Rousseau’s passion for
music can only be fulfilled as an experience during performance that should reflect the very
moment of its creation, which he signified with the expression ‘di prima intenzione.’ We can
better understand Rousseau’s first major foray into music theory, his 1742 project proposing

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a new system of musical notation. Predating the watershed of 1752–1753, during which
he composed his opera Le Devin du village and rejected French music in his Letter on French
music, his new system of notation not only inaugurated his intellectual, or rather, theoretical
involvement with music but also exposed issues that he would continue to explore in his later
writings.
It is well known that Rousseau, an autodidact musician, never mastered the mechanical skills
required for musical performance. During the eighteenth century, sight-reading and improvis-
ing on given harmonic schemes or realizing extempore the figured bass of a continuo (i.e. the
musical accompaniment frequently performed on a keyboard) constituted the basic musical
abilities expected from any accomplished musician. Rousseau made no secret that such tasks
were beyond his capabilities: he recalled in the Confessions how in 1730 he had recklessly exag-
gerated his musical talents during his brief endeavours as a song teacher ‘without knowing how
to sight-read an air’ and as a composer ‘without even being able to compose a vaudeville’ (C, OC
1: 148). His well-documented slowness and poor memory prevented him from quickly learning
a piece of music (C, OC 1: 118); assimilating Rameau’s harmonic theory cost him many sleep-
less nights and even bouts of fever.
This does not mean that Rousseau did not understand music: he could read a score and
compose music; he just lacked ease and facility in performance.Yet he persisted and composed
works, among which the opera-ballet Les Muses galantes (1744–1745), and many romances and
songs. His opera Le Devin du village gained paradigmatic importance for the development of
French opéra-comique during the second half of the eighteenth century. But it is mostly for his
in-depth knowledge of music theory that Rousseau stands out as a musician. His Dictionary of
music (1768), the very first of its kind, displays a wide-ranging erudition about music theory
unmatched for his time: even Rameau did not possess such a historical grasp of the field.

The French vs. Italian myth

Italian music, particularly the genre of opera seria, dominated eighteenth-century Europe, except
in France. The French had resisted Italian music since the reign of Louis XIV; in the 1670s,
Jean-Baptiste Lully’s and his librettist Philippe Quinault’s model for French opera, the tragédie
en musique, distanced itself from its Italian counterpart. After Lully’s death (1687), the Académie
Royale de Musique, which ruled the opera houses in Paris and the provinces, continued to con-
trol the institutionalization of French opera. Following Louis XIV’s death, the more permissive
Regency encouraged sporadic incursions of Italian music, as well as its performers, onto French
soil – for example, the Italian virtuosi invited to perform at the Concert Spirituel in the Tuiler-
ies Palace. From August 1752, the Académie Royale de Musique invited the Italian company of
Felice Bambini to perform their repertoire of intermezzi comici, offering for the first time on the
stage of the Paris Opera the confrontation between French and Italian operas. This created an
outlet for the growing curiosity of Parisian audiences regarding Italian opera, which remained
largely unknown in France, and triggered the Querelle des Bouffons, a series of inflammatory
debates on the respective merits of both musical traditions.
There is an obvious disconnect between Rousseau’s praise of Italian music, which he
defended in his 1753 Letter on French music, and the reality of his time. Rousseau’s Venetian stay
(September 1743 to August 1744) exposed him directly to Italian music, but after his return, his
knowledge of its repertoire did not evolve much. The Italian composers mentioned in his Dic-
tionary of music – Pergolesi,Terradeglias, Leonardo Leo, Durante, Leonardo da Vinci – had careers
culminating during the 1730s–1740s. Jommelli and Hasse are also mentioned – they died in
1774 and 1783, respectively – but they had reached fame by the 1730s.

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Rousseau never condemned Italian music as the triumph of virtuosity that he abhorred.
Instead, he reinvented a chimeric Italian music shaped by notions of simplicity, naturalness, and
authenticity.When he observed a musician who showed facility in improvisation or sight-reading,
Rousseau searched for any sign that revealed innate talent. Hence his wonderment at the com-
poser Venture de Villeneuve, whom he met in 1730. His attempt to imitate Venture resulted in
fiasco, known in the Confessions as the ‘charivari’: Rousseau miserably failed at conducting an
ensemble performing a minuet presented as his own composition, but that he had actually learned
from Venture (C, OC 1: 148–150).
The Venetian gondoliers also fascinated Rousseau for their ability to sing barcarolles of
their own composition. These songs relate to the tradition of poetic improvisation, popular
in Italy since the Renaissance. As their vogue peaked during the 1740s–1750s, some for-
eign visitors collected these songs. Among them was Rousseau, who published in 1753 the
Canzoni da batello, Chansons italiennes, ou leçons de Musique pour les Commençans. In his entry
‘Barcarolles’ (Dictionary of music), Rousseau insists on the gondoliers’ lack of musical training.
That nature has not been altered by nurture is what makes them excellent musicians: ‘[t]hey
compose and write their songs as people who, without ignoring the subtleties of music, do
not want to alter the simple and natural genre of their barcarolles’ (OC 5: 650–651). These
claims highlight the reality that Rousseau’s inclination regarding music was much more
about a certain manner of performing music than about the music itself, and also explains
his progressive disenchantment with the music of his time. Le Devin du village put an end to
his public career as a composer: the work brought him a fame that he felt damaging due to
its unfortunate inscription within the Querelle des Bouffons, which he had himself reignited
in November 1753 with the publication of his Letter on French music. This has led scholar-
ship to perpetuate the cliché of Rousseau as a passéist in his engagement with music, and in
his disregard for the nascent Classical style. Yet his conception of music was shaped by these
new paradigms for the musical works that were emerging by the middle of the eighteenth
century, and which were affecting musical practice, the status of the musical work and its
medium, the musical score.

French vs. Italian: competing conceptions of the score

In our modern definition, the score preserves the musical work as intended by its composer.
Consolidated during the eighteenth century, the systemic character of the score became fully
effective during the next century and culminated with the vogue of the Urtext in the twentieth
century, still largely perceptible nowadays. On the other hand, the Baroque, that is, pre-Classical
score is at most a guide indicating the harmonic and melodic skeleton of the work. The task
of the performer is to complete the score through performance: this state of ‘incompletion’
explains why there is much less in writing than our contemporary standards would expect. For
instance, modern editions of Baroque music frequently print a fully written accompaniment
(continuo) on two staves for the keyboard, whereas seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scores
gave it on one single staff, only indicating the figuring and the bass line.
Another essential feature was the improvisation of melodic ornamentation, which was largely
left to the freedom of the performer; the tendency to fully write ornamentation started to
appear by the middle of the eighteenth century. Consequently, the post-Baroque musician must
rely increasingly on the score, and less on his own improvisatory abilities: he does not complete
the score, since it is considered to be the definitive version of the work. Instead, the performer
must respect the musical text, and any attempt at modification would be resented as a disfigure-
ment of the composer’s original intention.

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In the eighteenth century, the situation was complicated by the fact that French musical
style was rooted in performance practices that greatly differed from those of other European
traditions – notably the German and Italian. The French conceptions of ornamentation and of
tempo (called the mouvement, i.e., maintaining the tempo with fluctuations) posed crucial issues
for performers, whether French or not. French ornamentation had been consistently codified
since the seventeenth century and ruled by a well-defined notation that had no equivalent in
Italian music. The fluctuating mouvement could not be transcribed by notation. François Coup-
erin’s treatise L’art de toucher le clavecin (1717) insisted on the French specificities of musical orna-
mentation and performance that should not be assimilated with those proper to Italian music,
especially in relation to the mouvement. In 1698, Etienne Loulié’s invention of the chronometer
attempted to clarify the issue of mouvement by establishing a universal reference for measuring
tempo. Similarly, the continuo – harmonically more complex than in Italian music – differed in
France, an aspect of French music which reached its culmination with the works of Rameau.
The progressive undermining of France’s musical autarchy since the Regency was lamented
by those who feared as a consequence the diminishing prestige of French music and its style in
the rest of Europe. Preserving the French musical tradition from its disfigurement, be it through
inadequate performance practices by foreign musicians or younger generations of French musi-
cians, became a major concern. Those who defended the specifics of French opera benefited
from the growing market in France of music engraving, which helped preserve the French
operatic repertoire beginning with Lully. These efforts culminated during the last third of the
eighteenth century with Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle’s 1775 treatise La tonotechnique,
ou l’art de noter les cylindres, which presented a new system for notating music on cylinders for
barrel organs, allowing the pins to reproduce the articulations, and dynamics, of any real key-
board player (7). Engramelle’s innovations conceived of the musical score as a repository of the
original intention of the composer. Once it was recorded on a cylinder, the unaltered genius of
past French composers would be transmitted to posterity.
This novel urge for preservation was also aligned with the democratization of music, to
which the dissemination of Rameau’s music theory, since the publication of his treatise in 1722,
had contributed. Rameau’s principle of the fundamental bass, by simplifying the chordal system,
made musical accompaniment, and thus the art of composition, accessible to (almost) everyone.
Since the 1730s, Rameau’s system had been summarized in countless publications, which caused
as a side effect the multiplication of ‘petits maîtres’ and other poor composers – much to the dis-
may of Rousseau, Diderot, and their contemporaries.
Developments in instrumental and vocal technique required new standards for the score and
its notation, which were now invested with an aura of exhaustiveness and exactness. Rameau’s
operas required from the musicians of the Paris Opera seemingly impossible technical chal-
lenges. Exceedingly difficult for the strings, the instrumental earthquake in the ‘Entrée des
Incas’ of Rameau’s opera-ballet Les Indes galantes (1735) could not be played during the first
performances. Similarly, the Trio des Parques in his opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) posed so
many issues for the singers and the orchestra during rehearsals that it had to be expurgated
for the performances, much to Rameau’s chagrin. In his treatise Génération harmonique (1737),
Rameau justified having maintained this trio in the printed score to satisfy the curiosity of the
reader. Here the score goes beyond its duty of guide for the performance: it mirrors the work
not as performance, but in its ideal physiognomy, even if said score never reflected any of its
contemporary performances.
Unlike the French, Italians continued to view the score as prescribing performance with-
out any of the ‘systemic’ value it was gaining in France. Operas were rarely printed in Italy:
music engraving was much less developed, and no centralizing authority regulated the country’s

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intense operatic production. Handwritten copies, mostly selections of scenes or of specific arias
or duets excerpted from an opera, were the fastest way to disseminate the repertoire.
Often hastily handwritten, these scores were damaged by their circulation from hand to hand.
The multiplication of copies of copies of copies augmented the number of errors and textual
imprecisions. According to our modern, post-Baroque standards, such scores would be consid-
ered incomplete or imperfect, but they were simply flexible, since some parameters could not
be rendered through musical notation, i.e., ornamentation and the realization of the continuo.
If the French emphasis on musical engraving aimed at preserving musical works, the seem-
ingly more archaic technology of the handwritten score greatly facilitated the circulation and
widening of the musical repertoire.This tension is not better summarized anywhere than it is in
the entry ‘Copiste’ from Rousseau’s Dictionary of music:

It is certain that in Italy, the country where music is the most practiced, the printed
note has been abolished a long time ago, without the use of engraving being instead
established; from which I conclude along the judgement of the experts that the use of
the simple copy is the most convenient.
(OC 5: 734–735)

This notion of the score intended primarily as the realization of the work-as-performance
increasingly competed with the one according to which the score became the faithful mirror
of the work-as-idea. In the Avertissement of his own engraving of Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona,
published in December 1752, Rousseau insisted on giving

this work to the public, not in the state of mutilation in which this opera was per-
formed in order to soothe the impatience of spectators, but in its entirety, as it has been
for thirty years gaining the public admiration in all the theatres of Europe.
(in Pergolesi 1752: np)

. . . Di Prima Intenzione: Furor Poeticus and musical genius

Rousseau had been exposed to Italian music much more than the majority of French musicians:
this made him aware of these two competing conceptions of the score. But his mythification
of Italian music was also due to his ignorance, at least until the late 1750s, of Italian musical
pedagogy. Due to his lack of pedagogical guidance, Rousseau was never able to gain what we
would call today the ‘transferrable skills’ that would have allowed him to apply his vast theoreti-
cal knowledge to musical performance.
Italian pedagogy cultivated such skills through the exercises of solfeggi and partimenti: the
partimento required the pupil to realize a given bass at the keyboard while adding at least one
upper voice, the solfeggio to realize a given bass while singing a given melody.These instructional
basses helped pupils to build a formulaic repertoire. Notwithstanding the anachronism, solfeggi
and partimenti are similar to jazz routines based on chord sequences (II-V-I), jazz scales, and other
formulaic ‘jazz licks’ that the musician learns to master in all major and minor keys.
The methods of solfeggi and partimenti were only introduced into France in the aftermath
of the Querelle des Bouffons, as a growing number of Italian musicians settled in Paris. The
complete title Rousseau gave to his 1753 collection of Venetian barcarolles, Canzoni da batello,
may have alluded to this method: ‘Italian songs, or lessons of music for beginners,’ but the collec-
tion nowhere mentions solfeggi or partimenti. The only explicit allusion Rousseau ever made is

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in the entry ‘Solfier’ (written after 1762) for his Dictionary of music, much expanded from the
original entry written c. 1749–1751 for the Encyclopédie: in the revised version Rousseau men-
tions Leonardo Leo’s ‘very esteemed’ lessons ‘called solfeggi . . . intended for beginners’ (OC 5:
1047–1048).
In Venice, once per week Rousseau would rent four or five musicians, with whom he
rehearsed excerpts from his Muses galantes and other pieces that he had enjoyed hearing at the
opera (C, OC 1: 315–316). He also listened to the music performed by the female orphans in
the ‘Scuole,’ which he found to be ‘far superior . . . to that of operas, and which in all Italy has
not its equal, nor perhaps in the whole world’ (C, OC 1: 314). Most likely, at that time Rousseau
was aware neither of solfeggi and partimenti, nor that these Scuole were the greatest disseminators
of this musical pedagogy.
In his Letter on French music, Rousseau described the son of Felice Bambini, ‘barely ten years
old,’ who realized the continuo at the Paris Opera during the 1752–3 performances of the inter-
mezzi comici. Rousseau marvelled at his ‘precise and brilliant’ accompaniment, all the more puz-
zling in that the child rarely filled the chords: he ‘omitted many notes and very often employed
only two fingers, one of which almost always sounded the octave of the Bass!’ (CW 7, 160).
Unaware of the Italian method, Rousseau did not perceive the invisible labour behind the boy’s
performance – and had he known it, he would have attributed his facility not to pedagogical
method, but to the Italian genius for music.
According to Rousseau, genius can only be revealed through spontaneity. Rousseau’s Vene-
tian stay convinced him that Italians possessed a natural facility for music, unmatched by any
other nation. Such naturalness is at its best displayed by the Venetian gondoliers, their musical
genius proven by the fact that they perfectly declaim Tasso’s verses – poetical declamation being
the outcome of the melodiousness of language. As Rousseau wrote in the Essay on the origin of
languages, no poet other than Homer has been sung, that is to say declaimed, more than Tasso,
and this despite the Venetian gondoliers ‘not [being] great readers’ (1998: 389).
Rousseau viewed unlearned facility, spontaneity, and genius as consubstantial to each other:
spontaneity was all the more fundamental to him because he knew how much he lacked it. But
in three episodes from the Confessions, Rousseau experienced the effects of creative genius, or
furor poeticus – two of these episodes deal with music (the genesis of Les Muses galantes and Le
Devin du village) and one with writing (the Illumination of Vincennes).These experiences imply
a belief that genius is not exclusively proper to learned artists. It can be felt by anyone, simply
because man has an innate aptitude for music, as for language. According to Rousseau, reason-
ing, reliance on the technologies of learning, and progress have buried man’s innate musicality.
In the Dictionary of music, Rousseau first theorized this phenomenon of furor poeticus as ‘di
prima intenzione’ (of first intention), an Italian expression meaning the mechanism through
which furor poeticus takes possession of the artist’s mind.The expression originates with medieval
philosophy, which distinguishes the terms ‘of first intention’ and ‘of second intention’ as essential
categories, the former referring to natural signs, the latter to signs of signs, or conventional signs.
Later, the expression ‘di prima intenzione’ became part of the vocabulary of painting, meaning an
artist’s rapidity of execution. Probably the earliest instance of this usage is in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Trattato della pittura (c. 1550, posthumously published in 1651). Rousseau, however, found this
expression in the Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’armonia (Padova 1754) by the com-
poser and virtuoso violinist Giuseppe Tartini. Tartini’s ‘prima intenzione’ differs from its previous
meanings: it is a harmonic phenomenon resulting from the encounter of dissonant pitches.
Rousseau, in turn, altered the meaning of this term, going back to one similar to that ascribed
to it by Leonardo. Whereas Tartini understands ‘prima intenzione’ as an acoustic phenomenon,
Rousseau locates it within human nature, and asserted through a syllogism that ‘prima intenzione’

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could not be translated by any French term, since French music – which cannot even exist, since
it lacks melody – cannot engender any work of genius.
According to the Dictionary of music a work ‘di prima intenzione’ reveals the quality of sponta-
neity that Rousseau praised among the Italians – be these the Venetian gondoliers, Pergolesi, or
the son of Bambini. ‘Prima intenzione’ was the mark of their musical genius:

An air, a piece di prima intenzione, is the one that has taken all of a sudden form, and
with it all its parts, within the composer’s mind, as Pallas came out fully armed from
Jupiter’s brain. Pieces di prima intenzione are those rare strokes of genius, of which all
the ideas are so closely connected that they make so to speak only one, and could not
have come to the mind the one without the other; they are similar to these periods by
Cicero, long but eloquent, the sense of which, suspended during the whole duration,
is only determined with the final word, and which, in consequence, have formed one
single thought only in the mind of the author. There are in the arts inventions pro-
duced by such efforts of genius, of which all the reasonings, intimately united to each
other, could not have been made one after the other, but have been necessarily offered
to the mind all at once, since the first reasoning, without the last, would make no sense.
(OC 5: 994)

Rousseau used this expression twice in his Dictionary (entries ‘di prima intenzione’ under the letter
P, written between 1759 and 1762, and ‘Canon,’ written c. 1756), and once in Book Seven of the
Confessions written in 1769. The latter recollects an episode from May 1743: having attended at
the Paris Opera a performance of an opera by Pancrace Royer, Rousseau, disappointed by the
‘feeble [music] lacking fire and invention,’ convinced himself that he ‘could do better than that.’
The morning after, he woke up ill with a chest inflammation. At the height of his fever, unable
to leave his bed, he imagined himself composing songs, duets, and choruses. Among these, some
were ‘di prima intenzione’ and would have won him ‘the admiration of the masters if they could
have heard them played. Oh, if one could keep the register of the dreams of a feverish man,
what grand and sublime things one would see sometimes resulting from his delirium!’ (C, OC
1: 293–294).
Encouraged by these imaginary works, Rousseau, convalescent, began Les Muses galantes a
month later. Its genesis mirrors the previous episode caused by Royer’s mediocre opera. One
evening, about to go to the Paris Opera, Rousseau felt himself ‘tormented, possessed by [his]
ideas.’ He ran back home and put himself to bed where he ‘abandon[ed him]self to the poetic
and musical oestrus, [composing] rapidly the best part of [his] act in seven or eight hours.’ Seized
by a stroke of genius, Rousseau imagined during the night most of the music and the libretto
of the first act – it may not be a coincidence that it was the one on Tasso. Rousseau’s narra-
tion remains imprecise enough as to indicate that most of this outburst of genius had not been
entirely written down; as with the previous episode following Royer’s opera, Rousseau had
imagined the music, and was only able in the morning to remember ‘a very small part’ of it: ‘but
this little part – almost effaced by lassitude and sleep – still did not fail to show the energy of the
pieces whose debris it presented’ (C, OC 1: 294–295).
Written in 1749 in a state close to delirium, the Illumination of Vincennes is the second
instance of furor poeticus. The last outburst occurred in March 1752, with the composition of
three airs of Le Devin du village (Colette’s opening air, Colin’s ‘Je vais revoir ma charmante
maîtresse’ and the Devin’s ‘L’amour croît s’il s’inquiète’). All three narrations dwell on the trope
of spontaneity and its corollaries: the unprepared, the unlearned.The mirror effect, that is, a neg-
ative experience which is redeemed by a positive one, is a frequent rhetorical mechanism in the

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Confessions – the most famous being the successful premiere of Le Devin du village at the Court in
October 1752, upon which Rousseau superimposes the fiasco of the 1730 ‘charivari.’ For each
of these three cases of poetic oestrus resulting in works ‘di prima intenzione,’ the Confessions give
counter-narratives showing how the misdeeds of learning muzzle spontaneity. In 1737, Rous-
seau met a Genevan, Bagueret, who knew a little chess and taught the game to Rousseau, who
learned the moves ‘almost in spite of [him]self ’ (C, OC 1: 220). Able to win against Bagueret,
Rousseau developed a sudden passion for chess, exhausting himself in memorizing games and
studying Greco’s treatise on chess. Two months later, meeting Bagueret again, Rousseau would
lose systematically:

So many combinations had gotten mixed up in my head. . . . Everytime I wanted to

practice studying the elements with Philidor’s book or Stamma’s, the same thing has
happened to me, and after having exhausted myself with fatigue I found myself weaker
than before.
(C, OC 1: 220–1)

Another failure by learning takes place around 1731, when Rameau’s fame as an opera com-
poser positively impacted the popularity of his theoretical works, the obscurity of which had so
far alienated readers. Rousseau threw himself into the study of these works, and

[b]y another chance I fell ill. The disease was inflammatory; it was intense and short,
but my convalescence was long. . . . During this time . . . I devoured [Rameau’s] treatise
on harmony; but it was so long, so diffuse, so poorly arranged, that I felt I needed a
considerable time to study it and sort it out.
(C, OC 1: 184)

Rousseau pursued his study after recovering, but despite the entire nights spent in copying and
accumulating compilations of Rameau’s theory, the scenario repeats itself: illness results from his
autodidact endeavours, be these successful as when resulting from furor poeticus, or driving him
to fiasco, as when he disciplined himself to learn in a methodical manner.
These narratives outline Rousseau’s longing for a musical experience that should not be
about showing off the labour of the ‘conquered difficulty’ whether through memorization or
intellectual and technical proficiency, but rather, about the spontaneity of performance. Yet
Rousseau’s arguments go blatantly against common sense: there is no such thing as a spontane-
ous, effortless music-making. His position is certainly absurd and may justify the argument that
his praise of musical simplicity disguised his frustrations at knowing too well his failures in this
art. It shows, however, that during his lifetime musical art was undergoing radical changes which
did not all of a sudden erase the legacies of the Baroque era, as French and Italian musical prac-
tices continued to be maintained in parallel.
The problematic binary of French and Italian music Rousseau maintained can be explained
as a consequence of such a double exposure. The quality of spontaneity that he attributed to
Italian music and its musicians fuelled his conception of a music in which passive, intellectual
knowledge, that is, understanding of its theory, and its counterpart, active, practical knowledge,
the kind revealed by the spontaneity of performance, were exactly the same thing. If Rousseau
eventually acquired a passive knowledge of music, he never gained fluency in its active counter-
part. To him, the progress brought to music theory – embodied in Rameau’s fundamental bass –
had accelerated the schism between two conceptions of music: one understood as an innate
talent of man, the other, as art(ifact). The latter was the outcome of a degenerative path similar

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to that of language when it gives up its primeval melodic character and figurative capacity for
the sake of abstraction and reasoning.

Musical notation without mediation

Rousseau’s project to reform musical notation, submitted in 1742 to the Académie des Sciences
(Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique), shows that he felt these changes with unprec-
edented acuity. Attempts to simplify or reform musical notation had been going on in France
since the end of the seventeenth century, revealing a continued concern about its inadequacy.
The most well-known proposals for new notation were Joseph Sauveur’s 1713 system and Jean-
François Demotz de la Salle’s from 1728. Other systems were more specifically oriented towards
the performance and study of plainchant, such as Jean-Jacques Souhaitty’s system, published in
1677, which could also be used for modern music.
What distinguishes Rousseau’s project from its predecessors is how it reflects the context of
these novel concerns about competing conceptions of musical practices and their medium, the
score. For Rousseau, notation had overgrown into a crowd of symbols: the proliferation of signs
in the musical score established a confusing mediation between the performer and the musi-
cal work. In order to reduce the quantity of symbols proper to traditional notation, Rousseau’s
system suppressed the staves and replaced the notes with numbers: 1 for C, 2 for D, 3 for E, etc.
Substituting numbers for notes had already been done by Souhaitty, leading the Académie des
Sciences to dismiss Rousseau’s notation as ‘neither new nor useful’ (C, OC 1: 284).
In Rousseau’s system, the positioning of the numbers is enhanced by the use of spaces between
these, while commas and dots indicate the rhythmic value of notes. The paradox is obvious, and
Rousseau was aware that he did not at all abolish the mediation of notation. In truth, his num-
bered notation does not make sight-reading much easier, a characteristic shared by all previous
projects as well, for there is no such thing as natural signs for music. But Rousseau tried to bypass
the paradox, explaining in his 1742 Dissertation on modern music that since ‘ciphers are the expres-
sion given to numbers, and numbers are themselves the exponents of the generation of sounds,
nothing is more natural than the expression of diverse sounds through the ciphers of arithmetic’
(1998: 171). Nothing is more natural, but this within a highly unnatural system.
One should not dismiss Rousseau’s new notation as a sole consequence of his own patchy
musical training and poor sight-reading, or as an umpteenth revamping of previous systems. His
project distinctively reflects the renewed interest at the time in the sign and its semantic value,
epitomized by the historical study of hieroglyphs and the development of a new language of
signs for the deaf (by l’Abbé de l’Epée) and, in general, by the Enlightenment’s obsession with
taxonomies, shown by the large number of dictionaries, specialized lexica, and other encyclo-
paedic enterprises from this period.
By 1742, Rousseau was already rejecting the modern conception of music, which he found
to be perverted by excessively complex notation and by the excess of technè privileging harmony
and virtuosity. Motivated by the search for a music defined by simplicity and naturalness, Rous-
seau’s new notation intended to suppress the mediation of notation, which interposed between
the musical text itself and its performer. Notation should transmit the work as it appeared in the
moment of poetic oestrus, and restore musical performance as a spontaneous act in which all
parameters are clearly given to the performer at once. Such musical notation should be able to
communicate a perfect description of the work in its totality, and in the most unmediated manner.
Rousseau’s frustrated relationship with music should be assessed in light of debates that had
emerged during the first half of the eighteenth century on the descriptive capabilities of lan-
guage as opposed to those of image, and on the respective merits, and limitations, of description

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as opposed to definition. Hence Diderot’s interest in using engravings in the Encyclopédie, as he

saw these as capable of describing by more efficient, that is, more immediate, means than lan-
guage. For this is where the core of the problem lies: verbal description, due to the successive
nature of speech, is unable to comprehend in full the described object in the immediacy of a first
glance.The Rousseauian project of musical notation is inscribed within contemporary concerns
shared by other Encyclopedists about the limitations of language and the need for a simplified
new language for the arts.
These issues had been raised first in the domain of natural sciences: the desire to grasp an
object in all its details and with immediacy is evinced since the first volumes of Buffon and
Daubenton’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (36 vols, 1749–1789). Both authors privilege
notions implying the overall impression over the detail: ‘Looking a thing at first glance, we per-
ceive the whole and the totality before distinguishing the parts.’ (vol. 4: 122). Emphasis is given
to notions such as ‘first glance,’ or ‘quick glance’ (‘premier coup d’œil,’ ‘coup d’œil rapide’) (vol. 1:
22; vol. 4: 11, 32, 139, 227, 379, 404), ‘first brushstroke’ (‘premier coup de pinceau’) (vol. 4: 122),
‘first sketch’ (‘premier dessein’) (vol. 4: 379), ‘main whole’ (‘ensemble général’) (vol. 1: 276; vol. 3:
3; vol. 10: 143).
Etienne Louis Geoffroy’s Histoire abrégée des insectes qui se trouvent aux environs de Paris (2 vols,
1762) also advocated for using engravings that offered ‘at first glance’ (‘premier coup d’œil’) (vol. 1:
xviii) what would otherwise have been rendered by a long, imperfect written description, since
transposing an image into language imposes the necessity of segmenting it – language unfolds
in time the description originally contained in an instant.
Similarly, Rousseau’s project of a new musical notation sought to allow the reader to seize
at first glance the musical work in the most exhaustive manner – a wish he attempted to realize
when translating through language the Illumination of Vincennes: to describe the very condi-
tions of his spontaneous poetic inspiration despite linguistic conceptualization. Rousseau’s new
notation suggests the possibility of a musical score able to present to the musician’s eye and mind
the work in its most complete state, as imagined from its very inception: the moment di prima
intenzione.
This explains the aggrandized status Rousseau gave to the music copyist, whose responsibility
in transmitting the work makes him no less important than the composer. As his entry ‘Copiste’
of the Dictionary states,

there are several intermediaries between what the composer imagines and what the
listeners hear. The duty of the copyist is to bring these two terms as close as possible,
to indicate with clarity everything that must be done so that the performed music
renders to the composer’s ear exactly what had been painted in his mind while he was
composing it.
(OC 5: 742)

For Rousseau, the score should transmit the musical work as idea, as well as the musical work
as performance. The Rousseauian project of musical notation can be seen as a derivation of the
eighteenth-century French practice that tended towards the preservation of repertoire. But in
Rousseau’s mind, it also became much more than that: his championing of Italian music rein-
forced his yearning for music as spontaneous expression, the moment di prima intenzione restoring
the composer’s original idea before it becomes congealed through the act of writing it down.
Like speech, Rousseau viewed music as conditioned, and condemned, by its written trace:
notation allows for more precision, but it also impoverishes music’s expressive power. Once

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written down, speech becomes more abstract and rational, but less poetic, as it loses its primeval
melodiousness and figurative quality. Similarly, musical notation prevents one from recapturing
the moment di prima intenzione by creating a cumbersome mediation between the score and its
reader. Writing down speech and notating music are viewed as one and the same act, sympto-
matic of convention and progress, disfiguring nature through nurture.
The autobiographical episode about an aria Rousseau had heard, half-asleep, at the theatre
Saint Chrysostom in Venice, captures this deception of writing:

I wanted to have this piece; I had it, and kept it for a long time; but it was not the same
on my score as in my memory.The notes were the same, but it was not the same thing.
Nowhere can that divine aria be performed but in my head, as indeed it was on the
day when it awoke me.
(C, OC 1: 314)

Rousseau’s musical experiences were forever doomed to be but a pale reflection of their
original moment of creation, since musical performance cannot ever fully re-enact the original
moment di prima intenzione. Idealized in the wake of his Venetian sojourn, Rousseau’s much-
fabricated adulation of Italian music became the template he gave to a music that he longed for,
and that no longer existed – or even never existed, except in his autobiographical experiences
that could only be revived through the prism of recollection. In the end, Rousseau’s encounters
with music are always experiences in frustration.

Further reading
O’Dea, M. (1995) Music, Illusion and Desire. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
A thorough study of Rousseau’s philosophy of music through his own autobiographical experiences.
Simon, J. (2013) Rousseau among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
An exploration of Rousseau’s musical discourse in relation to his conception of the individual’s rela-
tionship to the social order.
Waeber, J. (Convenor) Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary. Journal of the American Musicologi-
cal Society. 66(1), pp. 251–295.
A revisionist approach to Rousseau’s musical aesthetics, the relationship between his philosophy of lan-
guage and music, and its posthumous intellectual reception in music psychology and music cognition.
Wokler, R. (1987) Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music, and Language: An Historical Interpretation of his Early
Writings. New York: Garland Publishing.
An exhaustive approach to Rousseau’s musical writings in light of his political and linguistic thought.

References
Buffon, G.L.L. and d’Aubenton, L.J.M. (1749–1789) Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description
du Cabinet du Roy. vol. 36. Paris: Imprimerie Royale.
Engramelle, M.D.J. [1755] (1971) La tonotechnique, ou l’art de noter les cylindres, et tout ce qui est susceptible de
notage dans les instruments de concert mécaniques. Reprint. [Paris: Chez P. M. Delaguette.] Geneva: Minkoff.
Geoffroy, E.L. (1762) Histoire abrégée des insectes qui se trouvent aux environs de Paris; Dans laquelle ces Animaux
sont rangés suivant un ordre méthodique. vol. 2. Paris: Chez Durand.
Pergolesi, G.B. (1752) La Serva padrona[.] Intermezzo. Del Sig.r Giõ. Batta. Pergolese [sic] Rappresentato in Pariggi
nell’ Autunno 1752. Paris: Aux Adresses Ordinaires Et chez l’Editeur ruë Grenelle S.t Honoré a l’Hotel
de Languedoc.

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