Music in the Age of Encyclopedism: Two Recent Studies

Alain Cernuschi. Penser la musique dans l'Encylopédie (Paris: Honor Champion, 2000), Pp. 790.

Claude Dauphin. La musique au temps des encyclopédistes (Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle: Ferney Voltaire: 2001), Pp. 146.

These two studies lead us into the world of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie to remind us once more of a time before the erection of disciplinary boundaries when all roads selected by the well-appointed reader through its multi-volume text offered both the reality and illusion of participating in a grand project capable of changing the way one thought about almost anything. They also offer two very different, yet complementary modes of approaching and analyzing the presence of a particular discipline or area of knowledge in the age of encyclopedism. As both authors make clear, music has been a particularly difficult subject to assess, given its rapidly evolving status and the many debates it engendered during the eighteenth century.

Alain Cernuschi's Penser la musique makesan important contribution to eighteenth-century studies that will no doubt encourage scholars to enter the labyrinth of the Encyclopédie more often, since theauthor's project is not that of simply reporting what music represented for the encyclopedists but more importantly that of evaluating the place they had assigned to music in their general system of knowledge. The methodology used here may therefore be applied to exploration of domains other than music. The author describes his approach with a neologism, calling it an "analyse épisté mographique," where one reads the philosophical project in the light of the editorial process that gave it shape. This leads to a focus on the "diagenesis" of the book, that is to say the many different stratifications as they impacted each other during the writing process taken as a whole; the term "stratifications" refers here to the eclectic and successive contributions, compilations and editing constituting, as the author suggests, the very fabric of the Encyclopédie and its most significant feature. It is therefore very important to allow for the reader to experience the diversity of methods and ideologies distinguishing the different contributors, and to therefore read and see the Encyclopédie as the collective intellectual adventure that it was.

In trying to define the Encycopédie as process, one has first to deal with the numerous discrepancies between the project as it appears in the descriptive texts (Discours préliminaire, Prospectus, Système Figuré) and its realization. Alain Cernuschi's literary approach allows the reader to take advantage of these "problems." For example it is by questioning the discrepancy between the categories ("désignants") leading to "Music" and the place of music in the Système Figuré, that one understands the gap between the idea of music as a science, under the label "mathématiques mixtes" and the conception of the creative gesture, whereby music is under the label "imagination." This discrepancy highlights the convergence between art and science in the epistemology of the time, while helping to understand the polyphonic fabric of the book, preparing us to enter into the most detailed analysis of individual articles. The center of the book offers two series of such analysis that illustrate a crucial problematic of the time: the finding and/or the creation of relationships between the different areas of knowledge. The first series is entitled La nature et l'art: Musique et Physique dans l'Encyclopédie, while the second series is entitled Il faut un sens : Musique et langage. The author lets the text speak for itself, presenting clusters of contributions organized around certain themes or articles; for example the metaphor of Man as an instrument is the center of a cluster comprising the notions of "musical soul," "sensible string," linked to the thematic of the physical action of music on the body as in the article "tarentule." Cernuschi demonstrates the interpretative possibilities of these clusters by providing very close...