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Letter to Mr. Burney and Fragments of Observations on Gluck’s “Alceste” Letter from J. J. Rousseau to Doctor Burney, Author of the General History of Music1 You have given me several precious gifts of your writings in succession, Sir, each of which well deserved express thanks. The almost absolute impossibility of writing has until now prevented me from fulWlling this duty; but, by reanimating in me a remnant of zeal for an Art upon which your own zeal has made you spend so much work, time, travel, and expense, the Wrst volume of your General History of Music rouses me to show you my gratitude by conversing with you for awhile on the favorite subject of your researches, which should immortalize your name among the true enthusiasts of this Wne art. If I had had the fortune of conferring with you about it at some leisure while some ideas remained to me that were still fresh, I would have been able to derive from your own many lessons from which the Public could proWt, but which will be lost on me, from now on deprived of memory and beyond being in a position to read anything. But I can at least here cursorily record some of the points on which I would have liked to consult you, so that artists might not be deprived of clariWcations on your part which may be worthwhile to them; and, letting those who, without knowing anything about it do not fail to astonish the Public with their learned speculations, chatter about Music in Wne phrases, I shall limit myself to what relates most immediately to practice, which does not lend itself so easily to the oracles of witty minds, but for which study alone is useful to the genuine progress of the art. 1st. You have taken too much of an interest in it, Sir, not to have often remarked how confused, muddled, and often equivocal our manner of writing music is, which is one of the reasons that makes its study so long and so diYcult. Struck by these inconveniences, forty years ago I devised a manner of writing it by numerals that is less voluminous, simpler, and, in my opinion, much clearer. I read the plan for it to the Academy of Sciences in 1742, I proposed it the following year to the Public in a brochure which I have the honor of sending you.2 If you take the trouble of glancing over 486 it, you will see therein to what point I reduced the number and simpliWed the expression of signs. As there are only seven diatonic notes in the scale, I have no more than seven characters in order to express them. All the others , which are only their replicas, appear therein by their degree, but always in the form of their original sign; the major, minor, augmented, and diminished intervals never become confused with regard to their position, as in ordinary music, but each has its inherent and proper character which, without regard to position or to the clef, appear at the Wrst glance. I proscribe the natural as useless; I never have either a Xat or a sharp on the clef; Wnally, chords, harmony, and the sequence of modulations appear in a score with a clarity that allows nothing to escape the eye, so that its succession is as clear to the sight of the reader as in the mind of the composer himself. But the newest and most useful part of this system, and that which has nonetheless been least remarked about it, is that which relates to the values of the notes and to the expression of the duration and the quantities in the beat. It is the great simplicity of this part that prevented it from creating a sensation. I have no speciWc Wgures at all for the whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, etc.; all this, related by position alone back to equal aliquots, presents the divisions of the measures and of the beats to the eye, almost without having need of their own signs for this. The zero alone suYces to express any rest whatsoever; the dot, after a note or a zero, indicates all the possible prolongations of a rest or of a sound. It can represent all sorts of values; thus, whole rests, half rests, quarter rests, eighth rests, sixteenth rests, etc., are proscribed just as are the various shapes for notes. I have taken...

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