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1 Performance, Rhythm, and the Constitution of Community With the musical experience, the expectation is that something musical will happen in the playing of the music, and it is the something that fascinates, that elevates the expectation and places the hearer in a critical mode. —Floyd, The Power of Black Music There is a strong dialectical tension throughout Rousseau’s work between the individual and the community. Whether in the social and political writings , the works dealing with education, or even in fictional representations, Rousseau seems to struggle between championing the rights of the individual over and against the claims of the multitude and maintaining the rights of community against dissenting voices.1 Perhaps most representative of this emblematic tension is the gulf between the insistence on independence and isolation in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité and the primacy accorded to the community in Du contrat social. Rousseau’s theoretical writings on music are not exempt from this tension . His privileging of melody over harmony seems to align nicely with the arguments in favor of individual rights. Self-expression and the cries of passion override mathematical considerations of harmony or polyphony.2 On the other side, his system of musical notation, as we will see in the following chapter, strives for accessibility by rendering harmonic relationships easier to comprehend—enlarging the community of musicians. Likewise , his opera implies and even requires a group effort, a community of sorts, for performance. The tension between individual and community that is present in other works runs throughout the discussions of music. I would like to begin by reopening the individualist/collectivist debate in 20 Rousseau Among the Moderns Rousseau, but from the vantage point of music theory and practice. Speci fically focusing on the dynamics and demands of performance and reception , I would like to probe Rousseau’s understanding of the tension between individual and community within the context of musical performance with a view to a different understanding of what underlies and motivates group dynamics in Rousseau. I wish to emphasize the role of performance in Rousseau’s work on music for a number of reasons. To begin with a historical contextualization , as a twenty-first-century reader of Rousseau, I have sought to remind myself continually of the wide gap during the eighteenth century between the written notes on the page and the music’s performance.3 To state the obvious, without recording technology, music only has two modes of existence : virtual and realized. The intermediary state of recorded performance does not mediate between the two. As a listener or as a musician, one must be in the company of others in order to appreciate music as sound (except in the case of soloists playing for themselves). Clearly, in the case privileged by Rousseau of a singer performing with accompaniment, or even of opera, the music requires live performance, including cooperation between players for its realization. This makes the disjuncture between written and performed music even greater in his world than it is today—a fact that is oddly difficult to bear in mind. If we take Rousseau’s own entrée into the intellectual scene in 1742 as a point of departure—his presentation of the Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique to the Académie des sciences—the emphasis on performance seems justified. Indeed, the Projet foregrounds the importance of performance, especially for vocalists, by insisting on making key transposition and sight-reading easier.4 Rousseau argues, and I will develop further in the next chapter, that a notation system that fosters transparency would enable more people to learn to sing and perform earlier in life. Foregrounding performance privileges music’s temporal existence over its spatial one. From Rousseau’s perspective, the virtual life of music (notes on a page) is less important than the live sound generated through performance for an audience of listeners. While this might seem obvious and intuitive in our age of easy access to recorded performances, such was not the case in the eighteenth century. As I will argue in chapter 3, many composers and even performers, such as Rameau, privilege the notes on the page over live performance because they make the entire system visible. The written score externalizes and concretizes the harmonic system, whereas live performance makes such things apparent only for the most skilled listeners.5 Privileging performance thus is consistent with Rousseau’s privileging of [52.14.168.56] Project MUSE (2024...

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