Book chapter
Music
The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, pp.167-183
Cambridge University Press
2014
DOI: 10.1017/CCO9781139108959.013
Abstract
Music takes on extremely elastic qualities through the varied forms and meanings it adopted in social, intellectual and political life in eighteenth-century France. Some of these forms and meanings will be very familiar to us today while others may seem quite foreign. This chapter provides a brief account of the meanings attributed to music in eighteenth-century France, the uses to which music was put and the reflections commentators have left us regarding the beauty (or monstrosity) of the music they heard and of the effects it had, or was believed to have, on individuals and groups. In this overview of the role of music at a very different time in history, I hope to convey indirectly some of the strangeness of the ways we live with music today. The approach I take is not an ontological one - claiming to understand what music is - but rather an anthropological one - focusing on what music does, how music is engaged as a means to other ends and how it has generated meanings in specific cultural contexts. Thus I focus less on music understood as a collection of works and composers, or an abstract range of genres and stylistic tendencies, and more on a selection of contexts that provide a non-exhaustive overview of the circulation of music, the meanings with which music was associated or which it helped to transmit and the stories that were told about music. While we can certainly affirm that music took on new forms and meanings during l'âge des lumières, the exact nature of the connection between music and Enlightenment remains an open question, one to which the present chapter will return.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Music
- Creators
- Daniel Brewer - University of MinnesotaDowning A Thomas - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, pp.167-183
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press; Cambridge
- DOI
- 10.1017/CCO9781139108959.013
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2014
- Academic Unit
- International Programs; French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9984398017202771
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