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Reviewed by:
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la conversion d’un musicien philosophe by Martin Stern
  • Julia Simon
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la conversion d’un musicien philosophe. By Martin Stern. (Les Dixhuitiè mes Siècles, 63). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012. 420 pp.

Reading Rousseau’s conversion narratives as a deliberate strategy aimed at imposing unity on his thought, and using them as an analytical tool, Martin Stern explores the richness, complexity, and centrality of Rousseau’s reflections on music for his corpus. Stern meticulously traces the evolution of Rousseau’s thought about music, undermining his a posteriori narrative constructions of sudden conversion — the ‘illumination de Vincennes’ or the experience at the Venice opera — to unpack the tensions that underpin the slow development of his mature musical theory. Instead, he understands the preference for Italian over French music as a kind of determining judgement that conditioned choices and, ultimately, led to irresolvable contradictions in Rousseau’s music theory and philosophy of music. Sterns sees the evolution of his musical thought as a laboratory or matrix for his philosophical explorations, moving from reflection about national styles (French versus Italian) and physico-mathematical properties conditioned by the relationship to Rameau towards a reconceptualization of music as a psychic and moral phenomenon, all ultimately aimed at justifying the initial insight. In this respect, musical ‘conversion’ leads to theoretical and philosophical conversions in so far as it necessitates reflection on the nature and origin of music and language and a formulation of their relation to human morality. Most convincing is a pivotal step in the argument that reads the Lettre sur la musique française alongside Le Devin du village. The musicological reading of the opera in relation to the polemical piece uncovers a gap between theory and practice that signals unresolved tensions between auditory experience and philosophical theorization. This tension deepens as Rousseau attempts to use a conception of ancient Greek music to remedy the philosophical difficulties posed by his preference for Italian music in the Essai sur l’origine des langues. Less persuasive is Stern’s reading of the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, which attempts to bring this text in line with a logic that reads the corpus as an effort to explain retrospectively and to justify the early musical prise de position through a unifying impulse. Because Stern reads the musical conversion as a kind of nuclear contagion that ‘dégage une quantité d’énergie [. . .] qui se propage dans les autres domaines de la réflexion, pour finir par irradier la quasi-totalité de l’oeuvre’ (p. 385), the reading of the Second Discourse feels truncated in as much as it traces central characteristics of Italian music — expressivity, transparency, immediacy, and simplicity — while largely ignoring central issues such as inequality or property. More successful, though technical, is a reading of Rousseau’s Pygmalion and his conflicted response to Gluck’s aesthetic revolution in opera that highlights the self-contradictions and inconsistencies that Rousseau’s musical conversion ultimately wrought. For Stern, conversion is a deliberate strategy (dispositif) undertaken by Rousseau that assumes a fairly fixed narrative form and seeks to ‘faire apparaître dans la réécriture une cohérence et une unité absente des faits. Le dispositif répond donc à une intention unifiante qui a pour but de masquer des tensions, des contradictions, signes d’un conflit intérieur risquant de devenir trop manifeste’ (p. 306). [End Page 252]

Julia Simon
University of California, Davis
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