music, language, and origins 53to rhetoric, which is first made explicit by Johann Mattheson ( 1681 –
1764 ), presupposes a transparent relationship between language and
music, with the former as the dominant partner. Neubauer suggests
that ‘Rhetorical theories tend to focus on the pragmatic question of
how to affect an audience, but they tacitly or expressly upheld the rep-
resentational, imitative function of the arts’ (Neubauer 1986 : 60 – 1 ).
Mattheson talks, for example, of how an ‘Adagio indicates distress,
aLamentolamentation, aLentorelief, anAndantehope, anAffetuoso
love, anAllegrocomfort, aPrestoeagerness, etc.’ (Strunk 1998 : 699 ).
For eighteenth-century representational theories there is always a ver-
bal equivalent of what music says, the apparently non-representational
aspect of music being catered for by an underlying representational or
mimetic conception of language as that which can render explicit what
is only implicit in the music.
Weshall look later at just how thoroughly such ideas come to be
rejected by many thinkers in the last third of the eighteenth century.
However, it is important to ask just why they were held, and what sort of
sense they made of the world. Given that these views probably seem
merely wrong to us, how should we react to them? The most obvi-
ous factor is that such views of music do not entail a division between
metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2. Both art and science are included in an
overall conception of representation which is sustained by the sense of
inherent order in the world which is to be mirrored, in differing ways, by
all forms of articulation. Music can therefore only ever be secondary to
language, the prior form of articulation of the contents of a world that
is inherently ordered and in principle rationally accessible. Even when
a tension arises between the older mathematical conception and affect
theory it does not lead to any fundamental sense of crisis. Mattheson
maintains, for example, that ‘the art of notes draws its water from the
well of nature and not from the puddles of arithmetic’ (Mattheson
1739 : 16 ). The nature in question is still, though, a nature conceived
of in rationalist terms, which composers imitate with the intention of
arousing moral sentiments in their listeners; they do not seek to make
the listeners undergo the emotions depicted in the music in a manner
which may have nothing to do with moral sentiments. To the extent to
which these conceptions dominated much of the Enlightenment they
can be said to rely on a model of world-disclosure in which represen-
tational equivalents for different aspects of the world, from words, to
notes, to images, to feelings are assumed in the last analysis to be capa-
ble of harmonising with each other. Mattheson just thinks the wrong