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Observations on Our Instinct for Music and on Its Principle In Which the Means for Recognizing the One by the Other Leads to Being Able to Account with Certainty for the DiVerent EVects of that Art by Monsieur Rameau Preface In order to enjoy the eVect of Music fully, one must be in a state of pure self-abandonment, and in order to judge it, it is to the Principle by which one is aVected that one must resort. This principle is Nature itself; it is from it that we derive that feeling which moves us in all our musical Operations , it has given us a gift which may be called Instinct. Let us therefore consult it in our judgments, let us see how it develops its mysteries in us before we make pronouncements. And if men are still found so full of themselves as to dare decide upon it on their own authority, there is room to hope that there will no longer be any so weak as to listen to them. A mind preoccupied while listening to Music is never in a free enough position to judge it. If in its opinion, for example, it attributes the essential beauty of that Art to transitions from low to high, from soft to loud, from fast to slow, means which are used to vary sounds, it will judge everything in accordance with this prejudice without reXecting on the feebleness of these means, on the little merit there is in employing them, and without perceiving that they are foreign to Harmony, which is the unique basis of Music and the principle of its greatest eVects. A truly sensitive soul judges quite otherwise! If it is not penetrated by the power of the expression, by those vivid portraits of which Harmony alone is capable, it is not at all fully satisWed: not that it does not know how to lend itself to everything that can amuse it, but at least it values things in proportion to the eVects it experiences from them. It belongs to Harmony alone to stir the passions; Melody derives its force only from that source, from which it directly emanates;1 and as for the diVerences from low to high, etc., which are only the superWcial modiWcations of the Melody, they add almost nothing to it, as is demonstrated by striking examples in the course of the Work, wherein the principle is 175 veriWed by our Instinct and this Instinct by its principle, that is, wherein the cause is veriWed by the eVect one experiences and this eVect by its cause. If the imitation of noises and of motions is not as frequently employed in our Music as in Italian, it is because the dominant object of ours is feeling , which does not at all have determinate motions and which, consequently , cannot be everywhere subjected to a regular meter without losing that truth which constitutes its charm. The expression of the Physical is in the meter and the movement,2 that of the Pathetic, in contrast, is in the Harmony and the inXections: which must be weighed carefully before determining what should prevail. Since the Comic genre almost never has feeling for its object, it is consequently the sole one which is constantly susceptible of those rhythmic movements for which Italian Music is honored, without its nevertheless having been perceived that our Musicians have employed them happily enough in the small number of Attempts which the delicacy of the French taste has permitted them to venture: Attempts in which we have proven, by child’s play, how easy it was for us to excel in this genre.* This small Work may be regarded as the result of all the others I have presented on the same subject, and I hope that, given this, I will be pardoned some repetitions necessary for the comprehension of what happens to be connected to what is new in it. If I have elaborated a bit on certain points which will perhaps not be equally interesting to all Readers, some Authors, at least, will be able to recognize through this wherein they may have been mistaken. While I was laboring on this Work, in which at Wrst I had in view our Instinct for Music and its Principle, there appeared several Writings on the Theory of the Art,† to which I believed I could not better respond than by proWting from my Wrst ideas in order to put everyone in a position not...

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