Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics

Chapter 3: Rameau and Rousseau on Absolute and Relative Value: The Theory/Practice Problem

3 Rameau and Rousseau on Absolute and Relative Value: The Theory/Practice Problem Comment? Tous les intervalles de mon Clavecin sont altérés? . . . Fi, le vilain instrument ; ne m’en parlez plus. . . . Je veux chanter. —Anton Bemetzrieder, Leçons de Clavecin The band of the night takes you to ethereal heights over dinner And you wander the streets never reaching the heights that you seek —Crowded House, ‘‘Chocolate Cake’’ In the preceding chapter, I argued for an understanding of the general will as a relative absolute consistent with conceptions of normative group dynamics functioning in musical ensembles. Pitches are given to establish an absolute standard for tuning that can be revised according to conditions of practice and performance. As we saw using the tuning example, the general will can be understood to be absolute in the sense that all players are constrained to tune their instruments according to the tone given, but at the same time, adjustments to that pitch can be made as the instruments warm up. Likewise, I argued that in the democratic community, adjustments to the conception of the general will should be made in the process of democratic deliberation to enable a taking into account of legitimate differences of opinion. Thus the general will can be understood as a normative value that is both relative and absolute. In this chapter, I propose to continue the exploration of the problem of absolute and relative value in the context of Rousseau’s debates with JeanPhilippe Rameau, looking beyond the social and political domain to pose questions in epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. At stake in the 76 Rousseau Among the Moderns musical debate between Rousseau and Rameau are distinctly different understandings of the nature of philosophical or aesthetic systems, what is natural, and the ways in which values are derived. Opposing Camps: The Paradox of Temperament The debates between Rameau and Rousseau span a wide array of musical topics—including the relative merits of harmony and melody, use of counterpoint , recitatives, and styles of accompaniment, to name just a few—and cover a fairly lengthy span of time, from Rousseau’s Lettre sur l’opéra italien et français (1745, unpublished) through the articles penned for the Encyclopédie (1749), and finally, the Dictionnaire de musique (1767–68), published after Rameau’s death.1 The debates are often characterized as pitting Rameau’s Cartesian physicomathematical harmonic system against Rousseau’s reception-oriented, affect-driven theory of melody.2 While Rameau’s theory of the fundamental bass and sonorous body (corps sonore) grounds all music in a rational, empirically based system, Rousseau ’s insistence on the expressive capacity of melody, especially through the use of accent to communicate passion, offers a profound critique of Rameau’s rationalism. At first glance, and based on these overgeneralizations of their positions, it would seem that Rameau would represent an absolutist point of view: all music can be derived from the mathematical relations among the vibrations that sounds set into play. Rousseau, on the other hand, would seem to be more of a relativist, at least in the subjective sense: music communicates passion and emotion from composer, through performer, to listener.3 Before examining their positions in detail, I would like to offer a concrete example of an issue on which they take opposing sides (not unexpectedly), yet not the sides that we might imagine. I use this example in order to complicate from the outset what is at stake in the notion of absolute and relative value for both Rameau and Rousseau. The question concerns equal temperament. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the tuning of keyboard instruments requires a degree of compromise. As I explained, each note is played in the exact same way when the plectrum or hammer causes the string to vibrate. The performer does not have the ability to shorten or lengthen the string inside the body of the instrument to adjust for key like a violin player might do with fingerings. The problem of tuning keyboard instruments arises because of the mathematical ratio produced by the sound waves of resonating notes. To take the example of tuning the octaves on the harpsichord as a starting point, Stuart Isacoff explains, ‘‘A do can be put in tune with Rameau and Rousseau 77 every other do, for example; a re in tune with every other re. Each of these tones on the keyboard can be...