Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics

Chapter 2: Singing Democracy: Music and Politics

2 Singing Democracy: Music and Politics Ce qu’on appelle union, dans un corps politique, est une chose très équivoque; la vraie est une union d’harmonie, qui fait que toutes les parties, quelque opposées qu’elles nous paraissent, concourent au bien général de la société; comme les dissonances, dans la musique, concourent à l’accord total. Il peut y avoir de l’union dans l’Etat où on ne croit voir que du trouble; c’est-à-dire une harmonie d’où résulte le bonheur, qui seul est la vraie paix. —Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence In American life, you have all of these different agendas. You have conflict all the time. And we’re attempting to achieve harmony through conflict. Which it seems strange to say that, but it’s like an argument that you have with the intent to work something out, not an argument that you have with the intent to argue. And that’s what jazz music is. You have musicians and they’re all standing on a bandstand. Each one has their personality and their agenda. . . . So you have that question of the integrity, the intent, the will to play together. That’s what jazz music is. You have yourself, your individual expression and then you have how you negotiate that expression in the context of that group. And, it’s exactly like democracy. —Wynton Marsalis, Jazz, a film by Ken Burns Democratic theory, and particularly Rousseau’s, is suffused with the idealism and lack of pragmatism that make it both immensely compelling and extraordinarily frustrating. Conceived under the decaying edifice of the absolute monarchy, it strives toward perfection, offering theoretical formulations that often defy practical application. And yet this theory continues to inspire democratic practice and political debates even more than two hundred years after its writing. 48 Rousseau Among the Moderns One of the key problems of interpreting Rousseau’s political theory concerns the conception of democracy. Indeed, in one passage of Du contrat social Rousseau asserts, ‘‘S’il y avoit un peuple de Dieux, il se gouverneroit Démocratiquement. Un Gouvernement si parfait ne convient pas à des hommes’’ (3:406). [If there were a people of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. Such a perfect government is not suited to men]. And yet the thrust of the work and the critical force of Rousseau’s corpus encourage and challenge us to strive toward democracy, as impossible a goal as it may be for mere mortals. Music in the eighteenth century suffers from many of the same difficulties that political theory does, chief among them the tendency toward a level of abstraction that defies practical application. Like the problem of democracy in the eighteenth century, music also presents the temptation of retreat into a world of abstract perfection based on mathematical certainty with little relation to practical reality. Perhaps nowhere is the tension as acute between the ideal and the real in music as in the domain of tuning and, specifically, in keyboard tuning and the question of tempering. So, as in the political domain, there is a potentially wide gulf between music theory and music practice. Unlike his political theory, however, Rousseau’s work in music was founded in practice, as we have just seen with respect to performance. In the following pages, I propose to explore the relationship between singing and the political practice of democracy in Rousseau’s work. If there is any hope of realizing democracy in the way that Rousseau understood it, then an exploration of his work on music may provide the crucial bridge between theory and practice. Rousseau’s theoretical work in music—and singing in particular— covers a number of distinct subject areas. First, his proposal for a new system of musical notation links directly to democratic impulses in his political and social theory. Second, the kinds of emotions that music stirs are related in Rousseau’s thought to forms of expression that remain closer to their natural origins. Finally, I will demonstrate that Rousseau’s preference for melody, as opposed to harmony, relates directly to his conception of the political sphere and, specifically, to the relationship between the general will and the workings of the body politic in a democracy. Unexpectedly , reading Rousseau’s musical theory alongside his democratic theory produces a nuanced and moderate view of...