Refiguring the Early Modern Voice

In 1672 audiences at the Académie royale de musique in Paris witnessed a rather unusual spectacle: Les peines et les plaisirs de l’amour, a “pastorale” composed by Robert Cambert. A blend of ballet, spoken dialogue, and song, Cambert’s work in five acts is widely considered a forerunner of French opera. Although little of it survives beyond the libretto and the music of the prologue and first act, the event inspired one spectator to comment on the audience’s response.¹ Titled “Sçavoir si la musique à plusieurs parties a esté connüe et mise en usage par les Anciens” (Whether part music was known to and used by the ancients), the text relates a dispute between two spectators at the start of the performance of Cambert’s “pastorale.” At first the disputants, Paleologue (Expert on Things Ancient) and Philalethe (Lover of Truth), quarrel over the value of the novel type of spectacle. Philalethe, who had been present at the work’s premiere, is utterly ravished. Showing no interest in the author and composer of the piece, much less in finding out about the designer of the stage machinery, his only concern is “to know how someone was able to produce such surprising things.” Paleologue, meanwhile, declares that the only thing he is amazed about is how people who have seen Italian opera in Venice can “admire so little.” But as the curtain rises and the violins begin to intone the overture, something unexpected happens. Unlike the raucous spectators around them, who continue with their conversations and care only about the names of the female singers, the two antagonists suddenly find themselves transfixed by the interplay between different voices and the accompaniment of instruments, the “symphonie.” Even the obstinate Paleologue becomes more “docile,” listening with “less contempt” than he did at the start of their conversation.²

The eavesdropping spectator and author of “Sçavoir” is Claude Perrault (1613–88), one of France’s most prominent intellectuals during the Sun King’s reign. Brother of the celebrated author of fairy tales, Charles Perrault, and of the pioneer of modern hydrology, Pierre Perrault, Claude Perrault was the archetypical representative of what Stephen Jay Gould, in a sympathetic portrayal of the Perrault brothers, calls the “modern liberty to move on.”³ And indeed, Perrault’s activities encompassed a stupendous range of ground-breaking scientific and artistic fields. A physician by training, he conducted extensive zoological studies, “compiled” the first volume of the pioneering Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671/1676), and became a founding member of the Académie royale des sciences. But Perrault also designed the observatory, translated the work of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius into French, and authored the widely read essay Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Methods of the Ancients, 1683), widely considered one of the founding texts of modern architecture.⁴

Perrault’s real passion, however, was the ear. It was in a book on sound and the ear that he laid the foundation of what may well be his legacy as a leading figure of the late-seventeenth-century scientific and philosophical avant-garde. Titled Du bruit (Of Sound) and published in 1680 as part of the second volume of his Essais de physique, the book is the first serious attack on the Cartesian model of the machine-body, arguing that the animal body is a self-generating organism.⁵ But in intermingling architecture, opera, and otology, Perrault in Du bruit also furnished a scientific rationale for the aesthetic relativism that was beginning to shape contemporary debates about the modern. A long-overdue rereading of Perrault’s “Sçavoir” and Du bruit is thus helpful in revisiting some of the more expedient constructions of early modern vocality.⁶

One such construction, for instance, is the notion that the era witnessed the triumph of a new nexus between music, the ear, and a modern form of subjectivity based on the Cartesian ego’s representative powers.⁷ In one of the...