52 music, philosophy, and modernity
brought into a system, by Rhythmos, the temporal order of music...
and by Logos, language as the expression of human reason’ (Dahlhaus
1978 : 14 ). Music reflected an objective order of things.
The beginning of the revolution in conceptions of music parallels
Descartes’ initiation of the turn of philosophical attention from the
object to the subject that thinks about the object, and he is also the
first theorist to consider music primarily in terms of the listener. In
theCompendium Musicaeof 1618 he claims that music requires imagina-
tive activity on the part of the listener if the differing bars of a piece are
to be made into a discernible unity: ‘when we hear the end we recall
at this instant what there was at the beginning and in the rest of the
song’ (Descartes 1987 : 60 ). This theoretical claim is accompanied by
related changes in music praxis: from the seventeenth century onwards
European music increasingly becomes a spectacle, rather than just a
ritual or a collective participatory activity. The listener’s role becomes
more individualised, and more attention is paid to music’s subjective
effects. Especially in Italy, the rise of opera in the seventeenth century
also occasions theoretical debates about the relative priority of music
and language. In the first half of the eighteenth century, immediately
prior to the advent of the main ideas associated with modernity as the
era of human self-determination, concern with the subject’s responses
to music leads to the dominant conception being that music represents
human feelings. The combination of attention to subjective feeling
and attention to language constitutes the matrix in which the new con-
ceptions will develop. The major differences between the conceptions
relate to the idea of representation and to the notions of language
associated with it.
Ideas from the earlier part of the eighteenth century about the rela-
tionship of music to a verbal text presuppose a straightforward notion
of representation. In his 1704 Comparison of Italian and French Music,
Le Cerf delaVi ́eville had demanded in rationalist vein, for example,
that music ‘apply such proportionate tones to the words that the verse
is indistinguishable from and lives again in the music’ (Strunk 1998 :
681 ), and thinkers like Abb ́e Dubois claimed that music imitated the
sounds which nature makes to express feelings. A recurrent feature of
views of music and language during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth
century lies, as John Neubauer ( 1986 ) has shown, in the connection of
the theory of the affects to the theory of rhetoric, rather than, as in the
previous two centuries, to mathematically oriented Pythagorean theo-
ries of the kind referred to by Dahlhaus. The connection of affect theory