Rousseau - Melody

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "unité de mélodie"
Author(s): Jacqueline Waeber

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 79-
143
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie”
JACQUELINE WAEBER
Jean-Jacques’s Illness
One morning, on which I was not in any worse shape than usual, I was putting
a little table upon its legs when I felt a sudden, almost inconceivable revolution
throughout my whole body. I cannot describe it better than as a kind of tem-
pest that rose in my blood and immediately spread to all my limbs. My arteries
began to throb so powerfully that not only did I feel their beating but I even
heard it, especially that of the carotids. This was accompanied by a great noise
in my ears of three or four different kinds: a low and muffled buzzing, a clearer
murmuring like running water, a very shrill whistling, and the throbbing I have
described, the motions of which I could easily count without taking my pulse
or touching my body with my hands.This internal noise was so loud that it
robbed me of the fine ear I had once possessed, and made me not completely
deaf but hard of hearing, as I have been to this day.
My surprise and fear may be imagined. I thought I was dead; I took to my
bed; the doctor was called; trembling, I told him my case, which I deemed to
be hopeless. I think he must have thought the same, but he did his work. He
spun together long explanations of which I could not understand a word; then,
following his sublime theory, he began in anima vili the experimental cure
which it pleased him to attempt. It was so painful, so disgusting, and so ineffec-
tive that I soon wearied of it; and at the end of several weeks, seeing that I was
neither better nor worse, I left my bed and resumed my ordinary life, with my
throbbing arteries and my buzzing, which have not left me for a minute since
that time, that is to say for the last thirty years.1
It is a pleasure to acknowledge my former colleague at Trinity College Dublin, Michael

Taylor, who encouraged me to persevere in this research, notably by facilitating a three-month
leave during the winter of 2006. The final version benefited from the insightful advice of Thomas
Christensen and Catherine Kintzler, and from my three anonymous readers for this Journal. My
thanks as well to Tom Moore and Nicole Grimes for their help in preparing the text and its trans-
lations for submission.
1. “Un matin que je n’étois pas plus mal qu’à l’ordinaire, en dressant une petite table sur son
pied je sentis dans tout mon corps une révolution subite et presque inconcevable. Je ne saurois
mieux la comparer qu’à une espéce de tempête qui s’eleva dans mon sang et gagna dans l’instant
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, Number 1, pp. 79–144, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-
3848. © 2009 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.79.
80 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau between 1766 and 1767, this episode in his
autobiography describes an event that took place in August 1736. The sudden
illness occurred during Rousseau’s summer stay at the Charmettes, near
Geneva, where he was residing in the company of “Maman”—Madame de
Warens.2 Is it true or is it invented? Given that there is no shortage of
Rousseauan exegesis in literary studies, it is puzzling, to say the least, that this
highly intriguing episode has never been analyzed.3 After all, Rousseau pur-
portedly spent the rest of his life with this “great noise” constantly buzzing in
his ears, which left him permanently hard of hearing. What he describes here is
a significant disability, and despite the uncertainty concerning its causes and
persistence, it must have affected his perception of music.
The critical edition of Les confessions from 1959 briefly explains these physi-
ological symptoms as the consequence of a “paroxistic tachycardia” strong
enough to provoke a buzzing accompanied by a violent throbbing in the
carotids.4 Rousseau’s hearing trouble could also have been tinnitus: the neu-
rologist Oliver Sacks has recently discussed a number of patients who suffer
tous mes membres. Mes artéres se mirent à battre d’une si grande force que non seulement je sen-
tois leur battement, mais que je l’entendois même et surtout celui des carotides. Un grand bruit
d’oreilles se joignit à cela, et ce bruit étoit triple ou plutost quadruple, savoir: un bourdonnement
grave et sourd, un murmure plus clair comme d’une eau courante, un sifflement très aigu, et le
battement que je viens de dire et dont je pouvois aisément compter les coups sans me tâter le
pouls ni toucher mon corps de mes mains. Ce bruit interne étoit si grand qu’il m’ôta la finesse
d’ouïe que j’avois auparavant, et me rendit, non tout à fait sourd, mais dur d’oreille, comme je le
suis depuis ce temps-là.
“On peut juger de ma surprise et de mon effroi. Je me crus mort; je me mis au lit; le medecin
fut appellé; je lui comptai mon cas en frémissant et le jugeant sans réméde. Je crois qu’il en pensa
de même, mais il fit son métier. Il m’enfila de longs raisonnemens où je ne compris rien du tout;
puis en consequence de sa sublime théorie il commença in anima vili la cure expérimentale qu’il
lui plut de tenter. Elle étoit si pénible si dégoutante et opéroit si peu que je m’en lassai bientôt, et
au bout de quelques semaines voyant que je n’étois ni mieux ni pis je quittai le lit et repris ma vie
ordinaire, avec mon battement d’artéres et mes bourdonnemens qui depuis ce temps-là, c’est-à-
dire depuis trente ans, ne m’ont pas quitté une minute.” Rousseau, in bk. 6 of Les confessions, in
vol. 1 of Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 227–28.
2. The possible date of August 1736, coinciding with the Charmettes stay, is given in
Raymond Trousson and Frédéric Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques Rousseau au jour le jour: Chronologie
(Paris: Champion, 1998), 29.
3. Medical studies of Rousseau have also bypassed this episode, including Jean Starobinski,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, first ed. 1958, expanded ed.
1971), in English as Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Gold-
hammer; with an introduction by Robert J. Morrissey (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1988). Only Martin Stern has recently discussed this episode in the light of
religious conversion. See Stern, “Le problème de la conversion dans la pensée musicale de
J.-J. Rousseau et ses conséquences théoriques” (PhD diss., Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III,
2006), 33–35.
4. See Rousseau, Les confessions, 1344n1. In my personal communication with Jean Staro-
binski (September 2005), he stressed that no identified illness can be related with certainty to
Jean-Jacques’s description of his symptoms: tachycardia remains a supposition at best.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie” 81
from “some sort of ‘noise in the ear’—rumbling, hissing, and other forms of
tinnitus, or, paradoxically, recruitment—an abnormal and often unpleasant
loudness of certain voices and noises.”5 As described by Sacks, tinnitus often
“resembles a hissing or ringing sound” (Rousseau describes a “muffled
buzzing” and a “shrill whistling”). Sacks, who himself developed a tinnitus a
few years ago, has specified that “like musical hallucinations, [tinnitus] seems
to come from the outside.”6 But here Sacks and Rousseau part company, for
Rousseau refers to an “internal noise,” one that started in his blood and
caused him to hear his arteries beating.
Rousseau’s illness could also have been a form of hyperacusia or acouphe-
nia: an excessive sensibility to noises and sounds, the most acute form of
which can lead to a general intolerance of ordinary sonic environments.7 A
well-identified form of hyperacusia is auditory hyperesthesia, as frequently ob-
served in the case of mental diseases (“hearing voices”). But none of these ex-
planations corresponds to Jean-Jacques’s buzzing, for the nonvocal nature of
“his” noise and its internal origin cannot be related to any external source.
In the end, though, I am less interested in the physiological causes of this
sudden illness than by the circumstances that led Rousseau to chronicle its on-
set, keeping in mind that this careful narration, embellished with a profusion
of details, comes from the author himself. At stake behind this mal d’oreille is
the Rousseauan concept of “unité de mélodie” (unity of melody), the main
subject of this essay.
Technically defined as the primacy of one single melody (“le sujet princi-
pal”), or a principal part (what is usually referred to as the “mélodie” or the
“chant”8) sustained by all the other parts (the “diverses Parties,” including
the bass line), “unité de mélodie” refers to a simple musical principle, that the
melody should be one and that it should have primacy over all other musical
parameters. “Unité de mélodie” is a fundamental component in Rousseau’s
praise of musical clarity and his conception of listening, for it also implies that
the listener can choose what to hear:
5. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York and Toronto: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2007), 67–68.
6. Ibid., 64n8.
7. A recent account of such neurological conditions is given in ibid. At a first look Rousseau
could have fit well among Sacks’s patients, but the great majority of them suffer from musical hal-
lucinations ranging from entire symphonies to snippets of popular songs: as stated by its title,
Musicophilia, Sacks’s book deals with fascinating cases of people suffering (although many enjoy it
as well) from an invasion of music in their minds, whereas Rousseau’s noise is clearly presented as
a negation of music.
8. The English translation of the word “chant” poses a major issue in the context of
eighteenth-century French musical vocabulary. As used by Rousseau and other eighteenth-
century French authors, “chant” was also frequently applied to refer to a purely instrumental
melody; nonetheless, “chant” retained the connotation of being primarily understood as a melody
to be sung—with words. For this reason, I have indicated the original French in my translations
where necessary.
For a Music to become interesting, for it to convey to the soul the feelings it is
intended to excite, all the parts must concur to fortify the expression of the subject;
the harmony must serve only to make it more energetic; the accompaniment
must embellish it without covering or disfiguring it; the bass must, by a uni-
form and simple progression, somehow guide the person who sings and the
one who listens, without either of them perceiving it.9 (emphasis added)
Yet this is exactly what can not take place for someone with an illness like
Jean-Jacques’s: Rousseau’s internal noise seems to have created a sonic hin-
drance between him and the music that would likely have affected his listening
capacities. Any music would become polluted when perceived through this in-
ternal noise. For that is what this illness was: un bruit. As described in Les con-
fessions, the word appears no less than five times. Usually an illness is about
how one’s body feels, but Rousseau’s illness is about more than this sort of
feeling; it is above all about hearing. Rousseau can hear the disease: “not only
did I feel their beating [of his arteries], but I even heard it.” Thereupon follows
a meticulous description of this noise, which reveals a significant amount of
complexity. Rousseau characterizes the noise as having four well-defined parts,
referring to it as a “triple [. . .] or rather quadruple [noise].” This four-part
noise, so to speak, consists of “a low and muffled buzzing,” “a clearer mur-
muring like running water,” and “a very shrill whistling.” To these three parts
is added the “throbbing” of his beating arteries, “especially that of the
carotids.”
Jean-Jacques’s illness can be read as a metaphor for his lifelong, problem-
atic relationship with music, and it draws our attention in a new way to his
search for musical simplicity and expressive immediacy. It also casts new light
on his conception of the “unité de mélodie,” which found its first culmination
in the early 1750s when Rousseau started to reject Rameau’s music (which
Rousseau used as a metonym for French music in general). Stigmatized for
excessive complexity and labored polyphony, which threatened the primacy of
melody, French music was, to Rousseau’s ears, not music but a mere noise—to
use one of his favorite modes of contrasting French music with the purity and
melodic simplicity of Italian music.
That “unité de mélodie” was an obvious condemnation of polyphony
becomes clear in Rousseau’s entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE in his Dictionnaire
de musique (written from 1755 to 1764; published in 1767): “The unity
of melody requires indeed that one never hear two melodies at the same
9. “Pour qu’une Musique devienne intéressante, pour qu’elle porte à l’ame les sentimens
qu’on y veut exciter, il faut que toutes les parties concourent à fortifier l’expression du sujet; que
l’harmonie ne serve qu’à le rendre plus énergique; que l’accompagnement l’embellisse, sans le
couvrir ni le défigurer; que la Basse, par une marche uniforme et simple, guide en quelque sorte
celui qui chante et celui qui écoute, sans que ni l’un ni l’autre ne s’en apperçoive.” Rousseau,
Lettre sur la musique françoise, in vol. 5 of Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 305; trans. adapted from
Letter on French Music, in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 154–55.
time.”10 This echoes the prior statement in his Lettre sur la musique françoise
(1753), in which the “unité de mélodie” was mentioned for the first time:
“the whole together must convey only one melody to the ear and only one
idea to the mind.”11 Patently simple though it is, “unité de mélodie” refers to
a specific conception of the word “mélodie” that needs to be clarified. For
Rousseau, as for other eighteenth-century commentators, melody was the
principal part of a musical composition, “principal” here not referring to the
harmonic foundation (the bass), but to the main melodic element and its im-
mediate identification as such by the listener:
Harmony, which should have stifled the melody, animates it, strengthens it, de-
termines it; the various parts, without being confounded, work toward the
same effect, and, even though each of them seems to have its own melody
[chant], from all these parts brought together one only hears a single and identi-
cal melody [chant]. This is what I call Unity of Melody.12 (emphasis added)
Intriguingly, Rousseau’s illness provides a definition a contrario of the

“unité de mélodie”: no melody can emerge from the muffling harmony of the
“four-part noise” in his ears. Certainly the concept of “unité de mélodie” ap-
pears as a logical product of French musical aesthetics, and as such, its promo-
tion of musical clarity and simplicity does not appear strikingly original from a
historical standpoint. The expression itself, unity of melody, sounds sufficiently
clear per se: it means, or at least seems to mean what it means. Yet I would like
to suggest that we go beyond this common understanding of “unité de
mélodie” as a mere structural device, i.e., the primacy of one principal melody
in a musical composition. It is precisely because of its apparent simplicity and
banality that the origins and influence of the concept have never been fully
addressed.
The present essay pursues four aims: first, it will demonstrate how during
the second half of the eighteenth century the reception of “unité de mélodie”
came to be closely related to the dissemination in France of the notion of peri-
odicity and the ideals of the style galant—to such an extent that “unité de
mélodie” has been strictly viewed, in recent scholarship, as resulting from
Rousseau’s encounter with the style galant. By contrast, I will stress how the
concept of “unité de mélodie” contributed to late eighteenth-century theories
10. “L’Unité de Mélodie exige bien qu’on entende jamais deux Mélodies à la fois.” Rousseau,
entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE, Dictionnaire de musique, in vol. 5 of Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 1145;
trans. adapted from entry UNITY OF MELODY, Dictionary of Music, in vol. 7 of Collected Writings,
478.
11. “Le tout ensemble ne porte à la fois qu’une mélodie à l’oreille et qu’une idée à l’esprit.”
Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 305; trans. in Letter on French Music, 155.
12. “L’Harmonie, qui devroit étouffer la Mélodie, l’anime, la renforce, la détermine: les di-
verses Parties, sans se confondre, concourent au même effet; et quoique chacune d’elles paroisse
avoir son Chant propre, de toutes ces Parties réunies, on n’entend sortir qu’un seul et même Chant.
C’est-là ce que j’appelle Unité de Mélodie.” Rousseau, entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE, Dictionnaire de
musique, 1144; trans. adapted from entry UNITY OF MELODY, Dictionary of Music, 477.
of musical periodicity and form. Second, I will identify the origins of the
“unité de mélodie”—as yet unexplored—in Rousseau’s musical thought: it
will show how this concept took shape through his reappraisal of the notion of
“contresens” mainly developed, in a musical context, by Friedrich Melchior
Grimm in 1752. Grimm’s “contresens” refers to the flaws that frequently re-
sult when text and music contradict each other. Drawing on Grimm’s defini-
tion, Rousseau reshaped the notion of “contresens” first by applying it to
Rameau’s music, which he saw as a music completely careless about text and
in which the melody is muffled by the excess of accompaniment and
polyphony to such an extent that it divides the attention of the listener
(Rousseau will refer in 1752 to the “attention partagée,” the divided atten-
tion) and becomes the very negation of meaning. The third aim is to focus on
the origins of the “unité de mélodie” in light of Rousseau’s early attempts to
reform musical notation during the 1740s. Rousseau saw in the arbitrary signs
used in traditional musical notation an obstacle between the music and the
performer, and he proposed a new notational system designed to suppress the
use of signs that hindered unmediated access to the music. Since the “unité de
mélodie” can emerge only in a situation in which music is offered unmediated
to its listener—devoid of any sonic pollution created by the excessive treat-
ment of harmony—musical notation should also be able to transmit musical
texts without analogous obstruction. Finally, this essay also aims to show how
Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie” fueled his theoretical conception of music by
linking it to his own personal experience. This uniquely personal dimension
has been largely ignored by musicological studies of Rousseau; indeed, much
of our discipline’s prejudice against him lies precisely in his personalization of
musical discourse and the tendency of the theoretical and the aesthetic to
overlap so often with personal experience.13
“Unité de mélodie,” style galant, and the Rise of Musical

Periodicity
Since scholars have understood “unité de mélodie” strictly as the notion of a

preeminent melodic line ruling a composition, they have been tempted to
view the concept as a consequence of the growing influence of the style galant
in France.14 Chronologically, this view corroborates the importance of the
13. Not to mention here the scorn often disclosed by musicologists when stressing
Rousseau’s theoretical and compositional amateurism: the point was addressed in 1980 by Jane
Fulcher, who blamed “the doctrinaire attitudes or assumptions [that] still dominate [. . .] the area
of musical aesthetics.” Fulcher, “Melody and Morality. Rousseau’s Influence on French Music
Criticism,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 11 (1980): 45.
14. This is how the “unité de mélodie” has been understood in recent musicological scholar-
ship. The expression “unité de mélodie” occasionally crops up in scholarly texts on eighteenth-
century musical aesthetics, especially in relation to the style galant, though these texts generally do
not provides a thorough explanation. There are a few exceptions however: in 1986, Carl
Dahlhaus published an essay entitled “Unité de mélodie,” but his title is misleading, for the article
1740s as the formative years in which Rousseau developed his musical taste
and came to reject French music in favor of Italian. And it seems to be con-
firmed by the fact that the first explicit occurrence of the expression “unité de
is essentially a discussion of eighteenth-century German concepts concerning the “musikalische

Formenlehre,” and the essay quickly moves to German sources after a sweeping introduction that
aims to compare them to contemporary French concepts. Dahlhaus did not explain the meaning
of Rousseau’s expression simply because he did not feel the need: “unité de mélodie” is under-
stood as thematic unity, and Dahlhaus refers throughout his text to the word “Thema” when dis-
cussing questions of musical unity: Rousseau “[versteht] darunter nichts anderes als ein Thema im
kompositionstechnischen Sinne: eine prägnante melodische Gestalt, die in der Regel am Anfang
eines Satzes steht und auf die sich die übrigen Teile als Varianten oder Zergliederungsprozesse, als
Gegensätze oder Episoden beziehen.” Dahlhaus, “Unité de mélodie,” in Aufklärungen, vol. 2,
Studien zur deutsch-französischen Musikgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert; Einflüsse und Wirkungen,
ed. Wolfgang Birtel and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts-
verlag, 1986), 25. More recently, Matthew Riley devoted one chapter of his book Musical
Listening in the German Enlightenment. Attention, Wonder, and Astonishment (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2004) to “unité de mélodie” (chap. 2, “Interlude: Rousseau’s Transports of Attention,”
47–62). Although Riley does not seem to have been aware of Dahlhaus’s essay, his conception of
the “unité de mélodie” remains fairly similar, in that he also views it as a “strict differentiation be-
tween a single voice that carries the melody and the remaining voices in the texture that function
as support or accompaniment” (48). This leads him to conclude that Rousseau’s musical concep-
tion was shaped by his love of Italian music in the very tradition of the style galant. A similar read-
ing is offered by Judith Schwartz, who briefly mentions “unité de mélodie” as a “term [that]
referred primarily to a simple texture in which the accompaniment completely subordinated itself
to the singing melody, [and that] also connoted for Rousseau a thematic continuity similar to the
affective unity expected in the aria text.” See Judith Schwartz, “Conceptions of Musical Unity
in the 18th Century,” Journal of Musicology 18 (2001): 62. Peter Gülke has discussed “unité de
mélodie” in relation to Rousseau’s entries GÉNIE and PRIMA INTENZIONE ; a musical work “di
prima intenzione,” explains Rousseau in the Dictionnaire, has been imagined and conceived im-
mediately as a whole in the mind of the composer, and thus is the mark of musical genius (see
Dictionnaire de musique, 994). Gülke rightly views these three notions as being closely related, yet
understands the “unité de mélodie” as a typical Italianate device, since only musicians with genius
(i.e., Italians) can write music respecting the rule of “unité de mélodie.” See Gülke, Rousseau und
die Musik, oder, Von der Zuständigkeit des Dilettanten (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen’s Verlag,
1984), 116. Despite an extended discussion of “Melody and the Thematic Basis of Form,” Mark
Evan Bonds does not mention “unité de mélodie” at all in his Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form
and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 90–118. Yet
Bonds quotes Johann Adam Hiller, who clearly refers to Rousseau’s definition of the “unité de
mélodie” (Einheit der Melodie)—although Bonds indicates in his translation that “Einheit der
Melodie” refers to the movement of the piece: “The main idea is the most important [idea]
within the melody. Therefore, it must be presented within every section, for in just this way, one
knows that the sections belong together, and because the unity of the melody [i.e., the movement;
emphasis added] is determined through the main idea” (“Der Hauptgedanke ist das
Vorzüglichste der Melodie; er muss deswegen in allen Perioden derselben wohl angebracht seyn,
weil sich eben hieraus erkennen lässt, dass die Perioden zusammen gehören, und weil die Einheit
der Melodie dadurch bestimmt wird”). Johann Adam Hiller, in Wöchentliche Nachrichten, no. 39
(27 March 1769), 303, quoted and trans. in Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, 165 for the English trans-
lation, 228 for the original German text. Cynthia Verba’s mention of “unité de mélodie” also pre-
sents it as a consequence of Rousseau’s taste for Italian music. See Verba, Music and the French
Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
18–19.
mélodie” comes in 1753 with Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise, pub-
lished in November of that year.15 In this scenario, Rousseau’s defense of
“unité de mélodie” is part and parcel of his new crusade in favor of transalpine
music—and a crusade Rousseau pursued with passion from 1753 onwards.
His aim in those years was to reinforce the pro-Italianate agenda of the “unité
de mélodie,” as is manifestly clear in the UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE entry in his
Dictionnaire de musique, in which he goes so far as to pretend that his one-act
opera Le devin du village (1752–53) was the first and most radical attempt by
a non-Italian to compose with “unité de mélodie” in mind:
It is this principle of the Unity of Melody, which the Italians have felt and fol-
lowed without knowing it, but which the French have neither known nor fol-
lowed; it is, I say, in this great principle that the essential difference between the
two musics consists [. . .]. When I had discovered this principle, I wanted, be-
fore proposing it, to try to apply it myself; this attempt produced Le devin du
village; after this success, I spoke of it in my Letter on French Music.16
Given Rousseau’s own history of the concept, it is hardly astonishing that

“unité de mélodie” has essentially been perceived as the outcome of
Rousseau’s impassioned defense of Italian music. The polemics of the
Querelle des Bouffons forced Rousseau to present “unité de mélodie” as a
musically viable concept in order to compete with Rameau’s principle of basse
fondamentale.17 As observed by Martin Stern, the evolution of the concept
from 1753 until the completion of the Dictionnaire de musique (November
1764)18 suggests that Rousseau was searching for just such a universal princi-
ple in order to respond to Rameau. In 1753, the “unité de mélodie” was pre-
sented only as an “indispensable rule” (“regle indispensable”).19 Fourteen
15. A portion of the Lettre, relating to the “unité de mélodie” and discussing the merits of
the Italian duet, was itself republished in 1755, in the article DUO written for Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. As stated by the editorial note at the end of that article, it was very
likely added by d’Alembert: this addition is presented as a quotation from a passage of the
Lettre sur la musique françoise in vol. 5 (1755) of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert,
Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. (Paris: Chez
Briasson, David l’aîné, Le Breton, Durand, 1751–72), 167.
16. “C’est dans ce principe de l’Unité de Mélodie que les Italiens ont senti et suivi sans le
connoître, mais que les François n’ont ni connu ni suivi; c’est, dis-je, dans ce grand principe que
consiste la différence essencielle des deux Musiques [. . .]. Lorsque j’eus découvert ce principe de
l’Unité, je voulus, avant de le proposer, en essayer l’application par moi-même; cet essai produisit
le devin du village; après le succès, j’en parlai dans ma Lettre sur la Musique Françoise.” Rousseau,
entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE, Dictionnaire de musique, 1146; trans. adapted from Dictionary of
Music, 479.
17. This point has been made by Marie-Élisabeth Duchez: “L’un et l’autre en tirent deux
principes techniques opposés: Rameau, le principe de la Basse fondamentale; Rousseau, celui de
l’Unité de Mélodie.” See Duchez, “Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues: Un brouillon
inédit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau sur l’origine de la mélodie,” Revue de musicologie 60 (1974): 58.
18. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, “Introduction au Dictionnaire de musique,” in Rousseau,
Dictionnaire de musique, cclxxviii.
19. Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 305; three other occurrences of “unité de
mélodie” as a rule appear in this text.
years later, in the Dictionnaire de musique, the rule—a codified prescription,

yet one deprived of any absolute value—became a principle, universally admit-
ted.20 The crucial point here is that while the reception and promotion of
“unité de mélodie” after 1753 clearly had much to do with the dissemination
in France of the style galant, it may not be correct to project this connection
back onto the origins of the concept before that time,21 particularly because
Rousseau’s musical preferences during the 1740s and before the Querelle des
Bouffons were essentially pro-French—as will be discussed shortly—and also
because the origins of the “unité de mélodie” have much more to do with
Rousseau’s ideas about listening and musical communication than matters of
musical styles.
Nowhere is the reception of the “unité de mélodie” better observed than
in the works of Charles Burney, whose assimilation of Rousseau’s “unité de
mélodie” is evident in several lines of his writings from the 1770s, in which
he mentions the new style he discovered between 1746 and 1747, especially
in Vinci’s operas: “Without degrading his art, [Vinci] rendered [music] the
friend, though not the slave to poetry, by simplifying and polishing melody,
and calling the attention of the audience chiefly to the voice-part, by disentan-
gling it from fugue, complication, and laboured contrivance.”22 (emphasis
added)
20. In the Dictionnaire entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE, its mention as a principle appears five
times. On its evolution from rule to principle, see Stern, “Le problème de la conversion dans la
pensée musicale de J.-J. Rousseau,” 82–84.
21. Albeit that the expression style galant was unknown in France, it was nevertheless familiar
to at least a few French cosmopolites. See Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht, “Der ‘Galante Stil’ in der
Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts: Zur Problematik des Begriffs,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 25,
Festschrift für Erich Schenk (1962): 252–60. A telling instance appears in Charles de Brosses’s
1739 description of Italian music, one that seems to announce the “unité de mélodie”: “[Italian
composers] take care to work out only one part at a time and keep the others very simply laid
down, so that the melody of the subject can come out and be distinguished in a clear manner, so
that the chords can be correct and precise, each one against the others, without being mixed up,
as may happen when the upper part and the bass are worked out at the same time; they [the
Italians] understand all this better than we do” (“Ils observent de ne faire travailler qu’une partie à
la fois, et de tenir les autres couchées fort simplement pour que le chant du sujet sorte et se dis-
tingue d’une manière nette, pour que les accords soient justes et précis, les uns contre les autres,
sans se brouiller, comme il arrive lorsque le dessus et la basse travaillent à la fois; ils entendent tout
ceci mieux que nous”). Charles de Brosses, Letter 51, in Lettres d’Italie du Président de Brosses, ed.
Frédéric d’Agay, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 2:311.
22. Charles Burney, A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period,
4 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, 1776–89); repr., ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (New York:
Dover, 1957), part 4, 2:917. Burney had translated Rousseau’s article UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE for
Abraham Rees, Cyclopædia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, 39 vols.
(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1802–19). Between 1801 and 1805 Burney
wrote around 1,800 music articles for this revised edition of Chambers’ Cyclopædia. In the
Cyclopædia Burney also applied this notion to instrumental music—something Rousseau failed to
do in the article dedicated to the composer Johann Gottfried Müthel for the same dictionary.
Michel Noiray has briefly discussed the influence (not inaccurately referred to as “obsession”) of
Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie” on Burney’s musical aesthetics in his introduction to Charles
But to what extent is the “unité de mélodie” really indebted to Italian mu-
sic? Recent scholarship has perpetuated this linking of “unité de mélodie” and
Italian music—a view commonly held since Rousseau’s lifetime and perfectly
justified by historical circumstances. James Webster sustains this view when he
says that “the galant is understood in a broad sense that encompasses not only
‘easy listening’ [. . .] and social grace, but [also] Rousseau’s ideal of melody
‘speaking’ directly to the listener,”23 as does Michel Noiray when he evokes
the impact of the discovery of the style galant on Charles Burney in the follow-
ing terms: “It is in the context of galant aesthetics that we must understand
the success of the concept of ‘unité de mélodie’ developed by Rousseau in one
of his principal articles of the Dictionnaire de musique.”24
Because the Lettre sur la musique françoise is a pamphlet—one ridden with
the rhetorical excess of polemics—commentators have thus far focused their
attention on its main polemical aspect: the demise of French music and lan-
guage.25 But it is a mistake precipitated by the historical context of the
Querelle des Bouffons to reduce the Lettre’s content to this sole argument.
Since the nineteenth century, assessments of the Lettre have either forgotten
or judged it unnecessary to demonstrate that its focus encompassed more than
its most notorious claim—that French music did not exist.26
Burney, Voyage musical dans l’Europe des Lumières, trans. and ed. Michel Noiray (Paris:
Flammarion, 1992), 24–26.
23. James Webster, “The Eighteenth-Century as a Music-Historical Period?” Eighteenth-
Century Music 1 (2004): 54.
24. Noiray, introduction, in Burney, Voyage musical, 26.
25. See the over-quoted sentence concluding the Lettre: “From which I conclude that the
French have no music at all and cannot have any; or that if ever they have any, it will be so much
the worse for them” (“D’où je conclus que les François n’ont point de Musique et n’en peuvent
avoir; ou que si jamais il en ont une, ce sera tant pis pour eux.”) Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique
françoise, 328; trans. adapted from Letter on French Music, 174.
26. Since Albert Jansen’s 1884 seminal study on Rousseau, comments on the Lettre sur la
musique françoise have focused solely on the anti-French aspect and Rousseau’s biased reading of
Armide’s monologue. In his own chapter dedicated to the Lettre, Jansen does not mention the
“unité de mélodie.” See Jansen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Musiker (Berlin 1884; repr. Geneva:
Slatkine, 1971), 198–207; also see Julien Tiersot, J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912). Published
in 1901, Arthur Pougin’s book mentions the “unité de mélodie” in one paragraph: “Rousseau’s
‘hobby horse’ is the ‘unité de mélodie,’ which would reduce all dramatic music to its most rudi-
mentary expression, since he would ban any sort of accompaniment different from the vocal part
[. . .]. Really, Rousseau goes too far” (“Le ‘dada’ de Rousseau, [c’est] ‘l’unité de mélodie,’ et qui
réduirait la musique dramatique à sa plus rudimentaire expression, puisqu’il en proscrirait toute
espèce d’accompagnement différent de la partie de chant [. . .]. Décidément, Rousseau va trop
loin”). Pougin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, musicien (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1901), 102–3. On
the whole, Pougin’s views on Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise perpetuate the typical
franco-française tradition established during the Querelle of scorning the Genevan for his unfor-
givable outrage to French music, and to Rameau in particular. For telling instances see Roland-
Manuel, Sonate, que me veux-tu? Réflexions sur les fins et les moyens de l’art musical (Lausanne:
Mermod, 1957); and Eugène Borrel’s comments on Rousseau’s “prétendue règle, l’unité de
mélodie (?), qu’il a imaginée, et qu’il est bien incapable de définir.” Borrel, “La Lettre sur la
Not only does the Lettre offer the first fully shaped presentation of the
“unité de mélodie,” but this concept underpins Rousseau’s whole commen-
tary of the monologue d’Armide, which constitutes the dramatic acme of
the argument. To note this fact certainly does not diminish the weight of
Rousseau’s claims against French music and language; by the same turn, it is
by all means a mistake to relegate Rousseau’s presentation of the “unité de
mélodie” to the background and simply subsume its importance to
Rousseau’s dogmatic defense of Italian music. First, this concept originally has
little to do with the rising awareness in France of the style galant. As I men-
tioned above, Rousseau’s conception of “unité de mélodie” elaborates no-
tions of unity and simplicity in music that were well established in
eighteenth-century France. What is more, the Rousseauan “unité de mélodie”
had several French precursors that were not exclusively pro-Italian. This
should not surprise us, considering the values of clarity and simplicity that
were associated with French music, qualities notably emphasized by Lully’s
defenders beginning with the Querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes. Simi-
larities are easily established between Rousseau’s description of the “unité de
mélodie” in the Lettre sur la musique françoise and other texts by French au-
thors, such as Pierre Estève’s L’esprit des beaux arts, ou Histoire raisonnée du
goût (published in February 1753, before Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique
françoise, which came out in November of that year). A member of the Aca-
démie des Sciences et Lettres at Montpellier, Estève was not pro-Italian: under
the patronym of Pierre de Morand, in 1754 he published a Justification de la
musique françoise, contre la querelle qui lui a été faite par un Allemand et un
Allobroge (an obvious allusion to Grimm, the “Allemand,” and the Genevan
Rousseau, the “Allobroge”). And yet as patently pro-French as he was, noth-
ing kept Estève from publishing in L’esprit des beaux arts a musical rule virtu-
ally synonymous with Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie”: “the agreement
between many parts [must] always be subordinate to the melody, and har-
monic combinations are made only to reinforce expression and never to ren-
der it.”27 Worthy of note is the historical dimension of Estève’s explanation.
musique française,” in Histoire de la musique: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, ed. Roland-Manuel,

2 vols., 2:34–35 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Such criticisms started to be attenuated only in the
1960s, notably with the contributions on Rousseau by the Swiss musicologist Samuel Baud-Bovy
edited in a single volume after his death: see Baud-Bovy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la musique,
comp. and ed. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger (Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1988). However, and de-
spite the diatribe being much diminished, Baud-Bovy does not pay special attention to the “unité
de mélodie.” Cynthia Verba’s mention of the “unité de mélodie” in her discussion of the Lettre
sur la musique françoise is a rare exception (see Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment,
18–19).
27. “L’accord de plusieurs parties [doit] être toujours subordonné à la mélodie [et] les com-
binaisons harmoniques [ne sont] faites que pour fortifier l’expression & jamais pour la donner.”
Pierre Estève, L’esprit des beaux arts, ou Histoire raisonnée du goût, 2 vols. (Paris: C. J. Baptiste
Bauche, 1753; facsim. ed. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 1:215–16. Estève’s sensual aesthetics played
The development of polyphony clearly endangered the clarity of melody:

“The ease of putting together three, four, and even five parts produced such
elaborate accompaniments that sometimes the melody [chant] could not be
heard.”28 Like Rousseau, Estève viewed musical progress as a form of degen-
eracy: the “ingenious perfections” brought by polyphony motivated musicians
“to compose learned sonatas that only musicians can understand, miraculous
choirs in which one can distinguish nothing.”29
That the “unité de mélodie” felicitously coincided with the European dis-
semination of the style galant is an unquestionable fact, but when considering
Rousseau’s own definition, as well as Estève’s contemporaneous example, it
would be reductive, if not misleading, to accept this only explanation of its
origins. Strictly understood as a basic requirement of the style galant, the
“unité de mélodie” did have a major impact among Rousseau’s contempo-
raries. For those who espoused his ideas, the “unité de mélodie” was the most
appropriate tool for explaining the superiority of the musical style associated
with Italian opera. Nonetheless, it could perfectly serve the ideals of the other
party. Charles-Henri de Blainville’s L’esprit de l’art musical (1754) is the earli-
est statement of a style galant–oriented understanding of the “unité de
mélodie”—and paradoxically, Blainville’s main aim was to defend French mu-
sic. A remarkably silent participant during the Querelle des Bouffons,
Blainville could not deny his admiration for Italian music. In several places his
enthusiasm for Italian music reveals that he is looking for a third way (as Jean
le Rond d’Alembert was to do later in his De la liberté en musique, 1759),
which leads him to encourage French composers to borrow the main features
of Italian music: simplicity, rejection of counterpoint, and the Italian style of
accompaniment. It is when discussing this latter point (taking as examples
Italian arias, though without referring to any specific work or composer) that
the expression “unité de mélodie” crops up, in terms that betray a careful
reading of Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise:
in France a key role in questioning the principle of musical mimesis. His output has been recently
revaluated, but there is still much left to discover in his writings on music: among the few studies
available, Charles Dill has shown the originality of Estève’s conception of French recitative in
his “Eighteenth-Century Models of French Recitative,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association
121 (1995): 232–50; André Charrak has published a modern edition with critical commentary of
Estève’s Nouvelle découverte du principe de l’harmonie avec un examen de ce que M. Rameau
a publié sous le titre de Démonstration de ce principe (1751) (Fontenay: ENS Éditions, 1997),
in which Estève presented his own theory of consonances as explained by the superposition of
overtones—a forerunner of Helmholtz’s theory of consonance.
28. “La facilité de faire accorder trois, quatre & jusqu’à cinq parties, produisit des accompa-
gnemens si fort travaillés que le chant ne pût quelquefois être entendu.” Estève, L’esprit des beaux
arts 1:213.
29. “Eblouis de ces perfections ingénieuses, les habiles Artistes ne se sont souvent appliqués
qu’à composer des Sonates sçavantes & que les seuls Musiciens peuvent comprendre, des Chœurs
miraculeux & où on ne sçauroit rien distinguer [. . .].” Ibid.
These accompanying parts must make unity of melody among themselves, for
in itself harmony is nothing [. . .]. Thus unity of melody consists in that the
melody [chant] of the accompaniments should be in a character proper and
conforming to the principal subject, that is to say in the same modulation, the
same character and the same measure, following it step by step.30
Even without a systematic use of the expression “unité de mélodie,” com-

mentators in the footsteps of the Lettre sur la musique françoise started to refer
more frequently to the specifics of the Italian style in terms favored by
Rousseau: the primacy of one leading melody supported by a background ac-
companiment, with, when required, frequent uses of the unison. Jacques
Lacombe’s pro-Italian Spectacle des beaux arts (1758) perfectly illustrates the
dissemination of these characteristics conveyed by Rousseau’s “unité de
mélodie” when he writes of “these compositions, neatly drawn, in which
melody [chant] dominates, and is often woken up and reinforced by unisons,
instead of being drowned (as happens too often) by the variety of harmonic
parts.”31 From 1752 on, Lacombe’s Dictionnaire portatif des beaux arts had
been following Rousseau’s views. Lacombe’s entry ACCOMPAGNEMENT em-
phasizes the danger created by “overly loud” or “excessively labored accompa-
niment” that could “smother the melody [chant] of the principal subject.”
Obviously paying tribute to Rousseau’s article on the same topic, which had
been published the previous year in the Encyclopédie, Lacombe reused
Rousseau’s own phraseology when he blamed “most French composers [for]
loading the accompaniment with features [traits] and ornaments which divide
the attention of the listener and often prevent him from following the design
[dessein] of an air or a symphony.”32 (emphasis added) The expression “atten-
tion partagée” was typical of Rousseau and one he specifically used in the
30. “Ces parties [d’accompagnement] doivent faire entr’elles unité de mélodie, car en soi
l’harmonie n’est rien, si elle ne concourt à l’effet; c’est la couleur qui donne l’ame au dessein, ou
qui le gâte si elle est mal employée. L’unité de mélodie consiste donc en ce que le chant des ac-
compagnemens soit d’un caractere propre & conforme au sujet principal, c’est-à-dire dans la
même modulation, le même caractere & la même mesure, qu’il le suive pas à pas.” Charles-Henri
de Blainville, L’esprit de l’art musical, ou réflexions sur la musique et ses différentes parties (Geneva:
n.p., 1754; facsim. ed., Geneva: Minkoff, 1975), 23.
31. “Ces compositions, nettement dessinées, où le chant domine, & est souvent réveillé, &
fortifié par des unissons, au lieu de se noyer (comme il n’est que trop ordinaire) dans la variété des
parties harmoniques.” Jacques Lacombe, Le spectacle des beaux arts, ou, Considérations touchant
leur nature, leurs objets, leurs effets, et leurs règles principales (Paris: Hardy, 1758; facsim. of 2nd
1761 ed., Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 281–82.
32. “Il faut avoir attention de ne pas étouffer le chant du sujet principal par un Accompagne-
ment trop composé ou trop fort: & c’est peut-être un défaut à reprocher à la plûpart des
Compositeurs François, de charger l’Accompagnement de traits & d’agréments qui partagent
l’attention de l’auditeur, & l’empêchent souvent de suivre le dessein d’un Air, ou d’une
Symphonie.” Jacques Lacombe, Dictionnaire portatif des beaux arts [. . .] (Paris: La veuve
Estienne & fils et Hérissant, 1752), 11. The use by Lacombe of the expression “attention
partagée” may explain why Rousseau accused him of plagiarism. In book 12 of the Confessions,
608, Rousseau accused d’Alembert of stealing articles for the Encyclopédie from the letters and
Lettre à M. Grimm (April 1752) to refer to Rameau’s excessively complex and

overloaded accompaniments.
As we have seen, Rousseau’s own use of the expression “unité de mélodie”
referred to the features of a musical style that had been identified before him
by earlier commentators. This partly explains why the use of the expression
did not become standardized from the 1750s on, even if its avatars can be
found in texts of the late eighteenth century, such as François Marmontel’s
Essai sur les révolutions de la musique, en France, which speaks of “the en-
semble and unity of the accompaniment with the melody”33 (an allusion to
Pergolesi in a critique of French music); another example can be found in
the abbé François Arnaud, “le Pontife des Gluckistes,” who criticizes Gluck’s
“accents” as being “too short to make one forget the unity of design and of
melody that reigns in this piece.”34 But “unité de mélodie” can be a mislead-
ing expression, one imprecise enough to create confusion. That the melody
should be “une” could be read as a plea for monothematicism, or at least the-
matic economy, whereas the implications of this concept imply structural unity
at a much deeper level.
As seen in the writings of Lacombe and Blainville, “unité de mélodie” came
to be understood in relation to the style galant; nevertheless, this understand-
ing departed from Rousseau’s original meaning. Living on through various
lexical bypasses and in innumerable disguises, the “unité de mélodie” re-
mained influential until the end of the eighteenth century. This may not seem
obvious when one tries to trace explicit recurrences of this expression: more
than the “unité de mélodie” itself, it is primarily its consequences that at-
manuscripts of his musical writings. Rousseau’s main argument was that he found his own ideas
in d’Alembert’s Élémens de musique (1752) and in Lacombe’s Dictionnaire portatif—via
d’Alembert. Since this episode is itself inserted in the narration of another one that had occurred
in 1762 (Rousseau’s condemnation by the French Parliament for religious unorthodoxy, after the
publication of Émile), Rousseau probably conflated this episode with an earlier one that may have
taken place shortly after the publication of Lacombe’s first edition of his Dictionnaire portatif and
d’Alembert’s Élémens de musique, in 1752. Needless to say, Rousseau’s accusations against
d’Alembert do not make much sense. There are indeed echoes of Rousseau’s entry ACCOMPAGNE-
MENT in Lacombe’s Dictionnaire, but Rousseau’s text had been published one year before.
33. “L’ensemble & l’unité de l’accompagnement avec la mélodie.” Jean François
Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions de la musique, en France [1777], in Lesure, La Querelle des
Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes: Textes des pamphlets 1:156.
34. “Ces accens [de Gluck], trop courts pour faire oublier l’unité de dessein & de mélodie
qui règne dans ce morceau” [François Arnaud], Lettre de M. L’A.[bbé] A[rnaud] **. A Madame
d’***[Augny], in Lesure, La Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinistes: Textes des pamphlets 1:33.
The second volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique: Musique, edited by Momigny and pub-
lished in 1818, also maintains Jean-Jacques’s headword of “unité de mélodie,” supplemented
with Momigny’s critical comment—no surprise there, since the two volumes on music of the
Méthodique are primarily a commented edition of Rousseau’s Dictionnaire. Jean-Joseph de
Momigny, Encyclopédie méthodique: Musique. Tome second (Paris: Chez Panckoucke, 1818; facsim.
ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).
tracted the attention of Rousseau’s contemporaries. These consequences

could be summarized as follows: the primacy of one main melody (usually lo-
cated in the treble part) not only emphasizes the polarity between bass and
treble, but also reinforces the regular recurrence of melodic motives in order
to restrain harmony without letting it overplay its role and cast the melody
into its shadow. At stake here is the concept of periodicity: whether or not they
shared his views, Rousseau’s contemporaries and followers revisited “unité de
mélodie” during debates concerning periodicity. No one did so more explic-
itly than François-Jean de Chastellux, in his Essai sur l’union de la poésie et de la
musique (1765). Pro-Rousseauist, pro-Italian, and a future Piccinniste,
Chastellux was the first to establish a causal relation between “unité de
mélodie” and the periodicity it entails. Like Estève, he also developed a histor-
ical and geographical explanation for this phenomenon in order to emphasize
the gap between French and Italian styles. Whereas the French are naturally
inclined to the rhapsodic, favoring rambling successions provoked by erratic
improvisations, the Italians keep it simple, and—above all—they repeat:
While the seigneurs of Louis XIV’s court were content to repeat fragments
from operas that they remembered by dint of hearing, the Italians, hungry for
pleasures and lovers of the arts, spent their days and nights exercising their fin-
gers on the guitar and the violin. [. . .] They [the Italians] felt that these pre-
ludes, these cadenzas, these tricks of a hand that wanders on the instrument,
did not produce any effect and left nothing in the mind. They realized that they
could invent melody only by dedicating themselves to a very simple and unique
idea and by giving form and proportion to the expression of this idea. These
observations soon led them to discover the musical period. [. . .]35 (emphasis
added)
In the Italian style, melody (“une idée simple et unique”) entails periodic-
ity, and Chastellux does not miss an opportunity to remind us of this: “In or-
der to make the sentence of the melody [la phrase du chant] periodic, a certain
unity must be maintained, a proportion in the parts that compose it, a round-
ness in the melody [chant] that holds the attention and sustains it to the
end.”36
35. “Tandis que les Seigneurs de la Cour de Louis XIV se contentoient de répéter quelques
lambeaux d’Opéra, qu’ils avoient retenus à force de les entendre, le peuple Italien, avide des
plaisirs & amoureux des Arts, passoit les jours & les nuits à exercer ses doigts sur la Guittare & sur
le Violon. [. . .] Ils [les Italiens] sentirent que ces préludes, ces points-d’orgue, ces jeux d’une
main qui erre sur l’instrument, ne produisoient point d’effet, & ne laissoient rien dans la tête. Ils
s’apperçurent qu’ils ne pouvoient trouver du chant qu’en s’attachant à une idée simple & unique,
qu’en donnant à l’expression de cette idée des formes & des proportions. Ces observations les
conduisirent bientôt à trouver la période musicale. [. . .]” François Jean de Chastellux, Essai sur
l’union de la poésie et de la musique (The Hague and Paris: Merlin, 1765; facsim. ed., Geneva:
Slatkine, 1971), 16.
36. “Il faut pour que la phrase du chant soit périodique, qu’il y regne une certaine unité, une
proportion dans les membres qui la compose, une rondeur dans le chant qui suspende l’attention
et la soutienne jusqu’à la fin.” Ibid., 18.
Chastellux’s defense of Italian music is similar to Grimm’s arguments in his

Lettre sur Omphale, where he dismisses Destouches’s music as “a rhapsody of
musical sentences [. . .] sewn together without relation, without liaison and
dessein.”37 (emphasis added) But the values are now completely inverted: what
Grimm had praised in Rameau, his “régularité dans le dessein,”38 has now be-
come a purely Italian feature. Chastellux rejects the ancient French airs for be-
ing “series of notes threaded together with no principle, no object.”39 Other
similar cases mentioned by Chastellux are Lully’s ouvertures, “Rameau’s airs,”
and the Menuet of Dardanus. Whereas Rameau is all “turmoil” (égarement)
and “inconsequence,” Geminiani, for instance, is “roundness” (rondeur) and
“proportion.”40
Aesthetic prioritization of musical periodicity marked the culmination of
the reception of the “unité de mélodie”; its peak was reached during the
“Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes” (1775–79). Indeed, as Julian
Rushton puts it, “La période” became “the war-cry of Piccinnisme.”41 Thus it
was with Rousseau’s “unité de mélodie” that this French debate on periodicity
found its very roots. Already in 1765 Chastellux had praised the “roundness”
(rondeur) of a periodic melody, and few years later, the metaphor of the “cir-
cle” (cercle) associated with the “roundness,” was frequently used in the texts
of the “Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes,” especially among the latter
partisans.42 By the last third of the eighteenth century, “unité de mélodie” had
found its practical embodiment in a musical style dominated by the notions of
regularity and repetition.
37. “Une rapsodie de phrases de Musique [. . .] cousuës l’une à l’autre, sans rapport, sans liai-
son & sans dessein.” Friedrich-Melchior Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale, tragédie
lyrique, reprise par l’Académie Royale de Musique le 14 Janvier 1752, in La Querelle des Bouffons:
Textes des pamphlets, facsim. ed., ed. Denise Launay, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 1:15.
38. Ibid. 1:46. Grimm describes the air “Fatal Amour, cruel Vainqueur” from Rameau’s acte
de ballet Pygmalion.
39. “Des séries de notes enfilées qui n’ont ni principe, ni objet.” Chastellux, Essai sur l’union
de la poésie et de la musique, 18.
40. Ibid.
41. Julian Rushton, “The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme,” Proceedings of the Royal
Musical Association 98 (1971–72): 34.
42. To give but two examples here: “But the true moment of its [the music’s] glory was
when Vinci first drew the circle of periodic melody [chant périodique], this melody [chant] which,
in a pure, elegant and sustained design, presents to the ear, like the period [presents] to the spirit,
the development of a fully formed thought. This is how the great mystery of melody [mélodie]
was revealed” (“Mais le vrai moment de sa gloire fut celui où Vinci traça le premier le cercle du
chant périodique, de ce chant qui, dans un dessein pur, élégant & suivi, présente à l’oreille,
comme la période à l’esprit, le développement d’une pensée complètement rendue. Ce fut alors
que le grand mystère de la mélodie fut révélé”). Jean François Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions
de la musique, en France (1777), in Lesure, La Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinistes 1:169.
“[Gluck’s] airs, it is true, have not the melody [mélodie], the roundness, the charms of the airs
by Pergolesi, Galuppi, Jommelli; they lack these inflections, these contours, this symmetry” (“Ses
airs, il est vrai, n’ont pas la mélodie, l’unité, la rondeur, le charme des airs de Pergolese, de Galuppi,
de Jomelli; il leur manque ces inflexions, ces contours, cette symétrie”). Ibid. 1:185.
The Origins of the “unité de mélodie”: “Contresens”

and “unité du sujet”
Although the expression “unité de mélodie” appeared for the first time in
Rousseau’s 1753 Lettre sur la musique françoise (there is no autograph or
manuscript source signaling an earlier use of this expression), its idea took
shape between 1749 and the crucial year of 1752, that is to say, during the pe-
riod in which he completed circa four hundred music articles for Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (all written between 1749 and 1751), formulated
the new musical views defended in his Lettre à M. Grimm (1752) and further
pursued in the Lettre sur la musique françoise (1753), and wrote the libretto
and music of his one-act opera, Le devin du village (premiered 18 October
1752 at Fontainebleau and 1 March 1753 at the Académie royale de
musique). From 1753 onwards, Rousseau indefatigably continued to develop
this concept, the fullest formulation of which was reached in his Dictionnaire
de musique (1768, recte 1767).
One does not need to be reminded here of the importance of unity in mu-
sic theory and aesthetics of the eighteenth century, nor of how the notion of
unity derived from theories of poetic unity that had a long tradition reaching
back to Antiquity:43 already in the Lettre à M. Grimm, Rousseau warned
against piling up “three or four different motives [. . .] by three or four types
of instruments,” which was for him just as unsustainable as having “three or
four actions [. . .] in a comedy.”44 As mentioned above, “unité de mélodie”
can for this reason be considered to be unoriginal and all too like other opin-
ions of the time. Rousseau’s use of the expression “unité de mélodie” seems to
derive from the Aristotelian unity of action: “This unity of melody seems to
me an indispensable rule, and no less important in music than the unity of ac-
tion in a tragedy [. . .].”45 Some of Rousseau’s contemporaries understood his
meaning in this way. For instance, an anonymous pamphlet (possibly by
Rousselet or Fréron) published during the Querelle des Bouffons in 1754,
Lettres sur la musique françoise: En réponse à celle de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
sweepingly dismissed Jean-Jacques’s “new discovery”:
Let him [Rousseau] open a thousand treatises written in our language, and he
will find this fundamental principle of all arts, dictated almost two thousand
43. For an overview, see Schwartz, “Conceptions of Musical Unity.”

44. “Avant qu’on me persuade que c’est une belle chose que trois ou quatre desseins entassés
l’un sur l’autre par trois ou quatre especes d’instrumens, il faudra qu’on me prouve que trois ou
quatre actions sont nécessaires dans une Comedie.” Rousseau, Lettre à M. Grimm, au sujet des re-
marques ajoutées à sa Lettre sur Omphale, in vol. 5 of Rousseau, Œuvres complètes 5:273; trans.
adapted from Letter to M. Grimm on the Subject of the Remarks Added to His Letter on Omphale, in
vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 130–31.
45. “Cette unité de mélodie me paroît une regle indispensable et non moins importante en
Musique, que l’unité d’action dans une Tragédie [. . .].” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise,
305; trans. in Letter on French Music, 155.
years ago by the wise Horace. Any work of eloquence, poetry, painting, music,
architecture, etc, even composed, must be simple and one: Simplex duntaxat &
unum.46 [. . .] This hackneyed precept [has been followed] by all our musicians
[. . .] to the letter. Maybe it is even from their works that this principle came to
[Rousseau’s] mind; but he is careful not to avow it.47
As rightly stressed by this anonymous rant, Rousseau is but one among many
to revisit the Thomist dictum of unitas in varietatis, et varietas in unitate.
Rousseau had himself stressed how much the “unité de mélodie” derived
from a larger concept, universally accepted in eighteenth-century aesthetics:
“All the fine arts have some unity of object, a source of pleasure they give to
the mind.”48
The meaning and implications of Rousseau’s conception of melodic su-
premacy extend beyond the notion of a leading melodic part, the so-called
“sujet principal” ruling over the other parts. It is certainly correct to describe
the “unité de mélodie” as emphasizing the supremacy of a main melodic idea,
46. From Horace, Epistola ad Pisones: “Denique sit quod vis, simplex duntaxat et unum.”
(“In the end, make it as you will, as long as it is simple and one.”) In Horace, Opera omnia, ed.
Johann Carl Zeune, 4 vols. (London: A. J. Valpy, 1825), 3:1273.
47. “[Rousseau] s’applaudit de bonne foi de ce qu’il dit là-dessus, comme si c’étoit une dé-
couverte nouvelle. Qu’il ouvre mille Traités écrits dans notre Langue, & il y trouvera ce principe
fondamental de tous les Arts, dicté il y a près de deux mille ans par le judicieux Horace. Tout ou-
vrage d’éloquence, de Poësie, de Peinture, de Musique, d’Architecture, &c, quoique composé,
doit être simple & un: Simplex duntaxat & unum. [. . .] Vous ne sçauriez croire à quel point il est
aise d’avoir trouvé ce précepte rebattu, dont il ne se doutoit pas, & que tous nos Musiciens suivent
à la lettre. Peut-être même que c’est d’après leurs ouvrages que ce principe lui sera venu dans
l’esprit; mais il n’a garde de l’avouer.” [Rousselet, or Fréron?], Lettres sur la musique françoise: En
réponse à celle de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: 1754), in La Querelle des Bouffons: Textes des
pamphlets, facsim. ed., ed. Denise Launay, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 1:786–87.
48. “Tous les beaux Arts ont quelque Unité d’objet, source du plaisir qu’ils donnent à
l’esprit.” Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, 1143; Dictionary of Music, 476. In his critical com-
mentary on the Lettre sur la musique françoise, Olivier Pot traces the origins of “unité de mélodie”
back as far as Plutarch’s De la musica (§34–35); Pot, in Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise,
1469. Other likely sources of influence mentioned by Pot are Père André’s Essai sur le beau
(1741)—André uses the expression “unité musicale” in the chapter “Le beau musical”; and
Batteux’s Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe (1746) (ibid., 1468–70). Pot also mentions
Rousseau’s debt to Pierre Estève’s L’esprit des beaux arts, published shortly after January 1753.
But this is less about influence than convergence of thoughts, for the argument I defend here is
that “unité de mélodie” was already in gestation from 1749. And one should note that in all these
instances, the notion of unity also derives from the definition of beauty by St. Thomas Aquinas.
Another possible influence is Johann Mattheson, whose rules on melody in Kern melodischer
Wißenschaft (1737) could have reached Rousseau through Grimm: “The ear enjoys a greater plea-
sure with only one well-arranged part [Stimme] that follows an agreeable melody, than with
twenty-four [parts], in which [the melody] is so tattered that no one knows what it should be
called” (“Das Gehör hat hergegen grössere Lust an einer eintzigen wohlgeordneten Stimme, die
eine angenehme Melodie führet, als an vier und zwanzig, bey denen dieselbe so zerrissen ist, daß
man nicht weiß, was es heissen soll”). Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wißenschaft (Hamburg:
Verlegts Christian Herold, 1737; facsim. ed., Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1976), chap. 3,
“Von der Kunst eine gute Melodie zu machen,” §5, 30–31.
but such an understanding is limited, in that it does not highlight the origins
of the concept within Rousseau’s ideas on music and language from the
1740s. One impulse toward defining concept came in 1752 from Friedrich-
Melchior Grimm’s Lettre de M. Grimm sur l’Omphale de Destouches (February
1752): it was within the frame of the so-called “querelle d’Omphale” pro-
voked by Grimm’s Lettre that Rousseau started to flesh out the concept
of “unité de mélodie.”49 Much of this effort drew on Grimm’s notion of
“contresens” as defended in his Lettre sur l’Omphale. In its original meaning,
“contresens” is a rhetorical flaw: it can be approximately translated as “misin-
terpretation,” “mistranslation,” or “false reading.” Here French is more elo-
quent: also frequently spelled “contre-sens” in the eighteenth century, it
means literally “against [the] sense.” According to the first edition of the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise in 1694 (and in all its subsequent edi-
tions) “contre-sens” refers to “the sense given to a word, a discourse, opposite
to its natural meaning it. You wrongly interpret what I say, you take the contre-
sens of my words.”50
The core of Grimm’s Lettre sur l’Omphale explains this rhetorical “contre-
sens” and applies it for the very first time in a purely musical context, yet con-
fined to vocal music. Grimm was certainly not the first to notice the existence
of a musical “contresens,” but he was the first to call it by that term. The idea
that a text would not correspond to the music had been frequently discussed
in the early eighteenth century with regard to da capo and rondo forms, and a
possible source for Grimm may well have been J. G. Walther’s Musicalisches
Lexicon oder musicalische Bibliothek (1732), which mentions the contradiction
of using new words for the same melody.51
Understanding “contresens” as an error against dramatic unity, Grimm
conceived of musical unity as deriving from the rhetorical soil (a tendency like-
wise perceptible in Rousseau’s allusion to the “choix de paroles” for the ron-
deau): it is poetic unity that defines musical unity, not the contrary. According
49. Grimm’s letter was motivated by the third revival of André Cardinal Destouches’s
tragédie en musique Omphale (Académie Royale de musique, 1701; libretto by Houdar de La
Motte). The work was revived in 1721 and 1733, and eventually in January 1752, causing
Grimm’s epistolary ire.
50. “Sens qu’on donne à un mot, à un discours, contraire au sens qu’il a naturellement. Vous
interpretez mal ce que je dis, vous prenez le contre-sens de mes paroles.” Dictionnaire de l’Académie
françoise, 2 vols., 1st ed. (Paris: Chez la Veuve de Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1694), 2:460, s.v.
“contresens”.
51. “Bey der ersten Art ists zum öfftern geschehen, sonderlich wenn der Poet die Music ent-
weder gar nicht oder doch nicht recht verstanden, und in einer Strophe den sensum bald in der
ersten, andern, dritten und vierte Zeile absolviret; die folgenden Strophen aber nicht just in den
distinctionibus mit der ersten conformiret, daß wegen angebrachter Cadenzen vom Componisten,
der Verstand alsdenn zerrissen, ja über diß auch in den folgenden Strophen ein ganz contrairer
affect, als in der ersten da gewesen (nemlich im Texte) angebracht worden [. . .].” (italics in origi-
nal) Johann Gottfried Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon oder musicalische Bibliothec (Leipzig:
W. Deer, 1732; facsim. ed., Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1953), 46.
to Grimm, the composer Destouches failed to maintain the poetic unity in

Argine’s monologue from Omphale (see Ex. 1). The incriminated passage
consists of two alexandrines (each divided into two equal hemistichs of six
pieds):
Ô rage, ô désespoir! ô barbare fureur; [6 + 6 feet]
Venez venger l’Amour qui gémit dans mon cœur. [6 + 6 feet]
(Oh rage, o despair! O cruel fury;
Come and avenge Love that moans in my heart.)
According to Grimm, Destouches’s mistake was to have given “expression
to every word. He [Destouches] expresses rage, désespoir, fureur, and certainly
he applauded himself for the contrast it creates with the word gémit [. . .]; in
consequence the song [chant] of this famous monologue which forms a
unique thought [pensée unique], changes its character at every hemistich.”52
Much of Grimm’s critique sounds convoluted today, for it is certainly exagger-
ated to assert that the monologue changes character at every hemistich. The
main contrast—if any—is to be found on the second syllable of the verb
“gémit,” where the change of time signature marks a rallentando and brings
the cadential rest on “cœur.” Grimm claims to have expected the “pensée
unique” of the text to correspond to a “pensée unique” in the music. This
slightly overdrawn argument allows Grimm to stigmatize one of the main
features of chant français, its récit non mesuré that enables vocal lines to be ex-
tended without breaking the melodic unity. Grimm’s argument is question-
able, to be sure, but it is redeemed by the novelty of his critique and his
adoption of a pro-Italian point of view: the emphasis should be given to the
melodic line no matter what degree of expressivity some words may convey.
That the affect of “gémit” diverges from the more violent ones expressed by
“rage,” “désespoir,” “fureur” and “venger” should not allow the composer to
neglect the melodic line. In so doing Grimm remarkably paved the way for
Rousseau’s critique of Armide’s monologue (in his 1753 Lettre sur la musique
françoise):
Le charme du sommeil le livre à ma vengeance.
(Sleep’s charm delivers him to my vengeance.)
The words charme and sommeil were an inevitable snare for the musician; he
has forgotten Armide’s fury, in order to take a little nap here from which he
wakes up on the word percer.53
52. “Le Musicien n’a pas manqué de donner de l’expression à chaque mot. Il exprime Rage,
Désespoir, Fureur, & il s’est applaudi sans doute du contraste que cela fait avec le mot gémit ex-
primé avec soin dans le Vers suivant; de sorte que le chant de ce fameux Monologue, qui forme
une pensée unique, change de caractère à chaque hémistiche.” Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur
Omphale 1:31.
53. “Le charme du sommeil le livre à ma vengeance. Les mots de charme et de sommeil ont été
pour le Musicien un piége inévitable; il a oublié la fureur d’Armide, pour faire ici un petit somme,
dont il se réveillera au mot percer.” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 323–24; Letter on
French Music, 169.
Example 1 André-Cardinal Destouches, Omphale, act 2, scene 5: monologue d’Argine (from

the short score, Ballard [1701], 123)
$ ²²² Ł fl
Š

Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł

Ô ra - ge! ô de - ses - poir! ô bar - ba - re fu - reur! Ve-nez, Ve -
²²
Š ² Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ý ²²²
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
%
Bassons 4
$ ²²² Ł
Ł ð Ł ý Ł ./ ð
Łð
fl
Łý
Š Ł Łý Ł . Ð

fl
-nez ven - ger l’A - mour qui gé - mit dans - mon cœur!
²²
Š ² Ł Ł Ł ý Ł ./ ð ð Łý Ł . ð [ ½ ]
Łý Ł ð
Ý²² ²Ł Ð Łl Ł ŁŁŁ Ł
% ² Ł ŁŁ Ł ./ ð ð Ł .
5
As Diderot would explain later through the voice of Rameau’s nephew,

French vocabulary is full of such traps for the (French) composer who sacri-
fices the melodic line for the sake of verbal expression, as for example with
Rameau, “this famous musician [. . .] from whom we have several operas in
which there is harmony, bits of songs, unstitched ideas, clamor, flying, triumphs,
spears, murmurings, victories [. . .] and who, after having buried the
Florentine [Lully], will be buried by Italian virtuosos.”54 (emphasis added)
The case of “Ô rage, ô désespoir!” is not the only instance of a “contre-
sens” critiqued by Grimm in Omphale. Another sort of “contresens” happens
when an interrogative text is not paired with its musical analogue. In this situa-
tion, the music contradicts the question, for it stresses the singer’s line incor-
rectly with a perfect cadence (see Ex. 2):
Do you want an example of the most perfect “contresens”? Here it is. The Poet
says: “If you were in love, Iphis, would you also change?”
54. “Ce musicien celebre [. . .] de qui nous avons un certain nombre d’operas ou il y a de
l’harmonie, des bouts de chants, des idées decousues, du fracas, des vols, des triomphes, des lances, des
gloires, des murmures, des victoires [. . .], et qui, après avoir enterré le Florentin, sera enterré par
les virtuoses italiens.” Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Jean Fabre (Geneva: Droz,
1977), 6.
Example 2 André-Cardinal Destouches, Omphale, act 2, scene 2: Omphale, Iphis (from the
short score, Ballard [1701], 77)
$ fl
Š − /0 Ł ý Ł Ł ý ² Ł Ł ð Ł Ł
IPHIS
ð Ł Ł

Tout vous dit de chan - ger, quand Al - ci - de vous
Ý /Ł Ł −ðý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² ðý
B. C.
% −0
² 5
$ OMPHALE Ł fl
Š−ð Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð

ay - me Si vous ay - miez, I - phis, chan - ge - riez - vous de mê -
Ý Ł Ł ðý −ðý Ł −Ł Ł
% −ð ² 6 4 Ł
5 5 6 6 3
$ Ł Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²ð
IPHIS
Š−Ł ²Ł
¼
-me. Je fe - rois pour ma gloire un ge - ne-reux ef - fort . . .
Ý − ðý ð Ł ð
Ł Ł
% ²
6 7 ²
Omphale is talking, and the actress, who expresses this verse with a peculiar
subtlety, preferred to leave it to the Poet rather than the musician; because the
latter, ending his melody [chant] in an irrelevant manner with a perfect ca-
dence, says: “If you were in love, Iphis, you would also change.”55
Grimm’s conception of the “contresens”—still restricted to vocal music—

had an impact on contemporary eighteenth-century commentators; on
Rousseau first of all, but also on d’Alembert, who authored the article
CONTRESENS, EN MUSIQUE in the fourth volume of the Encyclopédie (1754):
[. . .] “contresens” in the expression, when the music is sad instead of happy
[. . .]; light-hearted instead of grievous [. . .]; “contresens” in the prosody,
when one is short on long syllables, long on short syllables [. . .]; “contresens”
in the declamation, when one expresses through the same melody different or
55. “Voulez-vous un exemple du contresens le plus parfait? Le voici. Le Poëte dit:

“Si vous aimiez, Iphis, changeriez-vous de même?
“C’est Omphale qui parle, & l’Actrice qui exprime ce vers avec une finesse singulière, a mieux
aimé s’en rapporter au Poëte qu’au musicien; car ce dernier finissant mal à propos son chant par
une cadence parfaite, dit:
“Si vous aimiez, Iphis, vous changeriez de même.”
—Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale, 16–17.
opposed feelings, when one paints the words more than the feelings, when one
gives too much weight to details which should only be touched upon [. . .].56
Similar to the second case of “contresens” stressed by Grimm, d’Alembert

also refers to the “ ‘contresens’ in punctuation, when the musical sentence is
ended by a perfect cadence in places where the literal sense is suspended.”57
His argument is fueled by referring—like Grimm—to Omphale:58
There is a striking “contresens” of this type, among many others, in one part of
the opera Omphale; the composer has written the following words, as if punc-
tuated as such: “How our days are worthy of envy! / When love answers our
wishes, / Even the less happy love / Still binds us to life.”
[Que nos jours sont dignes d’envie! / Quand l’amour répond à nos
vœux, / L’amour même le moins heureux / Nous attache encore à la vie.]59
Iphis’s air (see Ex. 3) is set to a chaconne bass, which generates periods not
necessarily synchronized with the grammar of the verses—a result d’Alembert
describes as a “ridiculous gabble.” The first verse, “Que nos jours sont dignes
d’envie!” has been treated as an independent sentence in the music (with a
dominant-tonic progression in A minor), whereas its grammatical sense must
await the second verse for completion (“Quand l’amour répond à nos
vœux”).
Because of its strong polemics, Grimm’s Lettre sur l’Omphale obliged
Rousseau to develop more radical views and take a stand on the respective
merits of French music and Italian, a matter about which he had been some-
what indecisive. Rousseau’s views are developed in his answer to Grimm’s let-
ter, the Lettre à M. Grimm, published two months after Grimm’s.60 This
“querelle d’Omphale” forced Rousseau into an uncompromising opinion
about the music of Rameau, and this time not only as a theoretician (as shown
56. “[. . .] contre-sens dans l’expression, lorsque la Musique est triste au lieu d’être gaie [. . .];
légere au lieu d’être grave; [. . .] contre-sens dans la prosodie, lorsqu’on est bref sur les syllabes
longues, long sur des syllabes breves; [. . .] contre-sens dans la déclamation, lorsqu’on y exprime
par la même modulation des sentimens différens ou opposés, lorsqu’on y peint les mots plus que
le sentiment, lorsqu’on s’y appesantit sur des détails sur lesquels on doit glisser [. . .].” Jean le
Rond d’Alembert, article CONTRESENS, EN MUSIQUE, Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie 4
(1754): 141.
57. “Contresens dans la ponctuation, lorsque la phrase de Musique se termine par une ca-
dence parfaite dans les endroits où le sens littéral est suspendu.” Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. “Il y a un contre-sens frappant de cette derniere espece, entre beaucoup d’autres, dans un
endroit de l’opéra d’Omphale; le musicien a noté les paroles suivantes, comme si elles étoient ainsi
ponctuées: ‘Que nos jours sont dignes d’envie! / Quand l’amour répond à nos voeux, / L’amour
même le moins heureux / Nous attache encore à la vie.’ ” Ibid. Houdar de la Motte’s correct
punctuation of the verses is as follows: “Que nos jours sont dignes d’envie! / Quand l’amour
répond à nos vœux. / L’amour même le moins heureux / Nous attache encore à la vie.”
60. By then both men were close friends. Rousseau and Grimm met for the first time on
20 August 1749—Grimm had arrived in Paris during the winter 1748–49. The beginning of their
friendship is narrated in bk. 8 of Rousseau, Les confessions, 349–50.
Example 3 André-Cardinal Destouches, Omphale, act 4, scene 1: air d’Iphis (from the short
score, Ballard [1701], 186–87)
$ ÿ ÿ ÿ Ł Ł
IPHIS
Š/¼ ¼
Que nos
Ł Ł Łfl Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š/Ł ð Ł ð
Ý/Ł ð Ł Ł
Violons
ð Ł Łý Ł Ł
%
6
Ł ð
7 - 6
fl
6
Ł ðfl
4
$ Ł Ł ð Ł
Šð Ł Łý ² Ł Ł ð

jours sont di - gnes d’en - vi - e Quand l’A - mour ré -
Ł Ł Ł ð
Šð Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Ł ý Ł ð Ł

Ý Ł ²Ł Ł ð Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł ð Ł
%
4 5 ²
Ł ð 6
7-6 6
$ Łfl ý
2 4
Ł Ł 1.
ðý ð
2.
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š
fl
-pond a nos vœux vœux L’A-mour mê - me le
²ð Ł
Š Łý Ł Ł ²ð ý Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ýð Ł Łý Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł
% Ł Ł ð
6 ² ²
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by the content of his articles for the Encyclopédie) but also as a composer.61 It
also provided Rousseau the opportunity to confront his own musical prefer-
ences, which at the time were essentially French,62 as shown by the content of
61. For an account of Grimm’s Lettre sur Omphale as a decisive turning point in Rousseau’s
attitude towards French music and—more precisely—Rameau, see Jacqueline Waeber, “Paysage
d’avant Querelle: Rousseau continuateur de Grimm,” in Dauphin, Musique et langage chez
Rousseau, 229–49.
62. And this was despite the first contact in vivo Rousseau had had with Italian music during
his Venetian stay from December 1743 to August 1744; but like his auditory illness it is very
much obscured by the lack of sources and information. Furthermore, Rousseau’s incomplete
Lettre sur l’opéra italien et français, written between 1744 and 1745, still maintains a clear pro-
French position and speaks in favor of Rameau, without any sign of preference for Italian music.
During the 1740s Rousseau’s knowledge of Italian music remained very superficial, if not poor. It
has never been sufficiently stressed just how meager Rousseau’s knowledge of Italian vocal music
was (not to mention instrumental music), and this not just before the Querelle des Bouffons, but
also after, as shown by his references to Italian opera in the Dictionnaire de musique, which hardly
go beyond Pergolesi, Vinci, and Hasse. Yet the Venice stay is often invoked as a decisive turning
point in Rousseau’s musical evolution, despite the fact that nowhere in his correspondence and
other texts did he give a precise account of the operas he attended there. See, for instance, Daniel
Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York and London:
Norton, 2003), where Heartz implies that Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise, written “in
denunciation of the old harmonists,” was a consequence of his Venice stay, which is wrongly
situated in 1745–46 (101). It is possible, however, to reconstruct most of the Venetian opera
his unfinished Lettre sur l’opéra italien et français, an early musical writing
from ca. 1744–75 that reveals a secure knowledge of the French repertoire.63
Rousseau’s reappraisal of Grimm’s “contresens” can be most fully grasped
in his Lettre sur la musique françoise. His critique of Armide’s monologue is
entirely aimed at demonstrating how Lully’s musical “contresens” ruined
Quinault’s text (see Ex. 4). The first example is straightforward (at least for
Rousseau): “The more I behold him, the more my vengeance is vain. Everyone
who feels the genuine declamation of this verse will judge that the second
hemistich is ‘à contresens’; the voice should be raised on vengeance, and fall
again softly on vain.”64 Rousseau claims that Quinault’s famous alexandrine
“End it . . . I tremble! Avenge myself ! I sigh . . .,”65 in which both hemistichs are
divided in two contradictory affects (Armide’s desire of revenge, immediately
followed by her amorous remorse), has been wrongly understood by Lully:
“It is here that the greatest struggle is taking place in Armide’s heart. Who
would believe that the musician has left all this agitation in the same key,
without the slightest intellectual transition, without the slightest harmonic
distinction [. . .].”66
With a perfect cadence on the word “soupire,” Lully’s musical accompani-
ment creates a “contresens” by expressing a meaning contradictory to the text
seasons during Rousseau’s stay: see Eleanor Selfridge-Field, A New Chronology of Venetian Opera
and Related Genres, 1660–1760 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Her work re-
solves many discrepancies and misattributions transmitted in former studies, the most authorita-
tive of these having been Taddeo Wiel, I teatri musicali veneziani del Settecento (Venice, 1897;
facsim. ed., Leipzig: Peters, 1979). But what we still lack is any source indicating which operas
Rousseau may have seen during his stay.
63. See Rousseau, Lettre sur l’opéra italien et français, 249–57; Letter on Italian and French
Opera, 99–105.
64. “Plus je le vois, plus ma vengeance est vaine. Toute personne qui sentira la veritable décla-
mation de ce vers, jugera que le second hémistiche est à contresens; la voix doit s’élever sur
vengeance, et retomber doucement sur vaine.” Lettre sur la musique françoise, 326; trans. adapted
from Letter on French Music, 172; Scott renders the expression “à contresens” as “a misinterpreta-
tion.” Rousseau concludes his comment on Armide’s monologue: “For brevity’s sake, I pass over
the rest of this scene, which has nothing more of interest or note about it than the ordinary ‘con-
tresens’ and the continual trills [. . .]” (“Je passe pour abréger le reste de cette scene, qui n’a plus
rien d’intéressant ni de remarquable, que les contresens ordinaires et des trilles continuels [. . .]”).
Lettre sur la musique françoise, 327; Letter on French Music, 172–73; the plural “contresens” is
rendered as “misinterpretations.”
65. “Achevons . . . je fremis! Vengeons nous! Je soupire . . .” Philippe Quinault, Armide,
act 2, scene 5, in Le théâtre de Mr Quinault, contenant ses tragédies, comédies et opéras. Dernière
édition, augmentée de sa vie [par G. Boffrand] d’une dissertation sur ses ouvrages et de l’origine de
l’opéra, 5 vols. (Paris: Pierre Ribou, 1715), 5:403. I follow the punctuation of this edition.
66. “C’est ici que se fait le plus grand combat dans le cœur d’Armide. Qui croiroit que le
Musicien a laissé toute cette agitation dans le même ton, sans la moindre transition intellectuelle,
sans le moindre écart harmonique [. . .].” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 326; Letter on
French Music, 171–72.
Example 4 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Armide, act 2, scene 5: Armide’s monologue. From Armide,
tragedie mise en musique par Monsieur de Lully [. . .], 2nd ed. (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1713;
repr. Société de Musicologie de Languedoc, 1988), 88.
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(“It is fortunate to have the perfect cadence on the word soupire!”).67 This al-
ters Quinault’s text to such an extent, Rousseau continues, that with Lully’s
misuse of the cadence, it is now as if the music says, against the text: “end it;
end it. Avenge myself; avenge myself.”68 As Rousseau observes, “these perfect
cadences are always the death of expression, especially in French recitative,
where they fall so heavily.”69
67. “C’est une chose bien trouvée que la cadence parfaite sur le mot soupire!” Rousseau,
Lettre sur la musique françoise, 326; Letter on French Music, 172).
68. “Achevons; achevons. Vengeons-nous; vengeons-nous.” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique
françoise, 326; Letter on French Music, 172.
69. “Ces cadences parfaites sont toujours la mort de l’expression, surtout dans le récitatif
François où elles tombent si lourdement.” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 326; Letter
on French Music, 172. Rousseau’s conception of the cadence as a syntactical gesture similar to
written punctuation is typical of his time, and is largely represented among German theoreticians,
such as Johann Mattheson, whose writings where already influential on Grimm (see Mattheson,
Kern melodischer Wißenschaft, chap. 3, “Von der Kunst eine gute Melodie zu machen,” §5, 30–
31; see also Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, 71–74, on the parallel between written punctuation
and musical syntax, especially in Mattheson). The object of contention between Rameau and
Rousseau was their divergent conceptions of the cadence: as it is well known, Rameau’s
Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique et sur son principe (1754) refuted Rousseau’s read-
ing of Armide’s monologue, and it was fairly easy for the composer to dismiss Rousseau’s critique.
As rightly pointed out by Rameau, any change in harmony can give rise to a cadence, and this
does not necessarily mean that the musical phrase is over: Rameau understands the cadence pri-
marily as a musical progression, whereas for Rousseau, the cadence must necessarily bring closure
to the musical sentence (Rameau understood such final cadences to be a “repos absolu”). Rameau
and Rousseau thus have contradictory understandings of musical punctuation: the former empha-
sizes the “harmonic sentences” (or “modulations”) corresponding to the text, since they are simi-
lar to the sentences of a discourse. See Rameau, Nouveau systême de musique theorique, où l’on
In the Lettre à M. Grimm, Rousseau had already started to use this notion
of “contresens” against Rameau (something Grimm never did): however,
Rousseau mentions Rameau only once in this context, and almost in passing.
The “contresens” is not Rameau’s main flaw, just a consequence of it. Grimm
also admits that Rameau had too often been careless with the choice of his
librettos—an enduring reproach, already raised during the “Querelle des
Lullistes et des Ramistes,” that eventually culminated with the saying, attrib-
uted to Rameau himself, that he could set the Gazette de Hollande to music.
But Rousseau twists Grimm’s argument, explaining that it is not Rameau’s
(chief ) fault to have worked on bad librettos, for he would certainly not have
written better music with better verse: “[Rameau] is too readily accused [. . .]
of having worked with only poor words; moreover, in order for this reproach
to be reasonable, it would have to be shown that he was in a position to
choose good ones.”70 What really matters is that the composer should not
misunderstand the meaning of the words, in this way avoiding “contresens”:
“A more just reproach is that he [Rameau] did not always understand [the
words of the librettos] he was working on, that he often misunderstood the
poet’s ideas, or that he did not substitute more suitable ones for them, and
that he made many ‘contresens.’ ”71 Such “contresens” could have been
avoided had the music respected the meaning of the text (whatever its literary
découvre le principe de toutes les regles necessaires à la pratique, pour servir d’introduction au Traité
de l’Harmonie (Paris: Ballard, 1726), chap. 7, §“De la comparaison de la Musique avec le
Discours,” 40–41. Rousseau blatantly ignores—or seems to—the fact that harmonic directional-
ity cannot be grasped during just a single hemistich. Rousseau’s enduring conception that a ca-
dence punctuates the musical line with the finality of a period is still present in his Émile (1762):
“Train your little musician first to make nice sounding, nicely cadenced phrases, then to connect
them by a very simple modulation; finally, in marking their different relationships with correct
punctuation. [. . .] It is ordinarily the bass that makes this punctuation” (“Exercés vôtre petit mu-
sicien d’abord à faire des phrases bien sonores, bien cadencées, ensuite à les lier par une modula-
tion très simple; enfin à marquer leurs différens rapports par une ponctuation correcte. [. . .] C’est
ordinairement la basse qui fait cette ponctuation”). Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation, ed.
Charles Wirz, in vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes, 000; trans. adapted from Emile or On Education, ed.
and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1979), 405. On Rameau’s conception of
the cadence, which departs from the idea that the cadence creates a closing gesture similar to writ-
ten punctuation, see William Caplin, “The Classical Cadence: Conceptions and Misconceptions,”
this Journal 57 (2004): 53–55.
70. “On l’accuse assez légèrement [. . .] de n’avoir travaillé que sur de mauvaises paroles;
d’ailleurs pour que ce reproche eût le sens commun, il faudroit montrer qu’il a été à portée d’en
choisir de bonnes.” Rousseau, Lettre à M. Grimm, 271; trans. adapted from Letter to M. Grimm,
129.
71. “Aimerait-on mieux qu’il n’eût rien fait du tout? Un reproche plus juste est de n’avoir pas
toujours entendu celles dont il s’est chargé, d’avoir souvent mal saisi les idées du Poëte, ou de n’en
avoir pas substitué de plus convenables, et d’avoir fait beaucoup de contresens. Ce n’est pas sa
faute s’il a travaillé sur de mauvaises paroles, mais on peut douter s’il en eût fait valoir de
meilleures.” Rousseau, Lettre à M. Grimm, 271; trans. adapted from Letter to M. Grimm, 129;
Scott renders “contresens” as “misinterpretation.”
quality). From this very notion of “contresens,” in which the verbal and the
musical are inextricably mingled, Rousseau would construct, step by step,
the “unité de mélodie” as its best antidote. The Lettre à M. Grimm offers an
a contrario explanation of the “unité de mélodie”: the negative conditions—
which is to say the absence of unity, here exemplified through the
“contresens”—create the need for “unité de mélodie.” The lack of unity here
is not caused as much by “thematic contrast [. . .] in spite of the single mood
expressed in the poetic text”72 as it is by the “contresens” created by music
that fails to correspond suitably to the text.
Careless of the text, which itself conveys poetic unity, the music is no longer
ruled by a musical unity embodied in a well-established hierarchy between the
different parts, which maintains the predominance of a main part over the
others. Departing from Grimm, Rousseau’s “contresens” becomes the very
negation of meaning, a pure aberration: Rameau’s music does what it wants
with itself, it plays unrestrictedly, with absolute disregard for the text. Could it
have been more ironic, then, that the most accomplished instance of such
“contresens” occurs in Rameau’s ballet-bouffon Platée (1745, Versailles), in
the two airs of “la Folie” (Folly)? Referring to her first air, Downing Thomas
has stressed how it features the “vocal pyrotechnics, protracted melismas and
chromaticism that critics identified with the Italian obsession with perfor-
mance over substance, and sound over sense.”73 “Sound over sense” indeed,
since the lively music accompanies the sad words of a lament. La Folie’s next
aria makes its point by doing the contrary: an air in a slow tempo and minor
key (the first was in major), it accompanies playful words: “Always accompa-
nied by our steps, / Bantering pleasures, it is in your arms / That our flames
burn anew. / If Zephyr would not tease, / Flore would be less faithful to
him.” Rameau’s “contresens” is here intentional: as La Folie herself con-
cludes, “You admire my supreme art, / I even turn happiness into sadness, /
With my complaints and my sighs.”74
But for whom was this joke intended? Rameau seems to illustrate one of
Raguenet’s pro-Italianate claims, according to which Italian composers know
how to
sometimes unite, in a most surprising manner, the Tender with the Sprightly, as
may be instanced in that celebrated air Mai non si vidde ancor più bella fedelta
72. Schwartz, “Conceptions of Musical Unity,” 64.

73. Downing A. Thomas, “Rameau’s Platée Returns: A Case of Double Identity in the
Querelle des Bouffons,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006): 15.
74. “Sans cesse accompagnés de nos pas, / Plaisirs badins, c’est dans vos bras / Que notre
ardeur se renouvelle. / Si Zephir ne badinoit pas, / Flore lui seroit moins fidele. / Vous admirés
mon art suprême, / J’attriste l’allegresse même, / Par mes sons plaintifs & dolens.” Act 2,
scene 5. Adrien-Joseph Le Valois d’Orville, Platée, Ballet bouffon en trois actes, Précédé d’un
Prologue; représenté devant le Roi, en son château de Versailles; le mercredi 31 mars 1745 (Paris:
Ballard, 1745), 41–42.
&c, which is the softest and most tender of any in the world, and yet its sym-
phony is as lively and piercing as ever was composed; they unite these opposite
characters so artfully that, far from destroying a Contrary by its Contrary, they
make the one serve to embellish the other.75
These examples of “contresens” discussed so far concern only vocal music,

thus the relation (or absence of such) between text and music. Considering
the problematic status of instrumental music in France, it would have been as-
tonishing indeed to find this notion applied to music without words. Yet
Rousseau managed to do just this. His views on instrumental music departed
little from those of his contemporaries—the entry SONATE in his Dictionnaire
de musique did not differ much from the article originally written for the
Encyclopédie, and in both versions Rousseau kept his reference to Fontenelle’s
famous bon mot, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?”76 But since Rousseau’s concep-
tion of melody was so deeply entrenched in his linguistic thought, this anchor-
age in melody can be deciphered as a compensation for verbal meaning: “the
pleasure of melody and of song [chant] is a pleasure of interest and feeling
75. “[Les Italiens] unissent quelquesfois, d’une maniére surprenante, la tendresse avec la vi-
vacité, comme on le peut voir dans le fameux Air Mai non si vidde ancor più bella fedelta &c.
lequel est le plus doux & le plus tendre du monde, & dont la Symphonie néanmoins est la plus
vive & la plus picquante qui se puisse entendre; ils allient ces caractéres opposez d’une maniére
qui, bien loin de gâter un contraire par son contraire, embellit toûjours l’un par l’autre.” François
Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et des François en ce qui regarde la Musique et les Opéras (Paris:
J. Moreau, 1702; facsim. ed., Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 49–50. Trans. adapted from A Com-
parison between the French and Italian Musick and Opera’s [sic]. Translated from the French; with
some remarks . . . (London: Printed for William Lewis, 1709), 25–26. The aria mentioned is from
Giovanni Bononcini’s Camilla (Naples, 1696): see Enrico Fubini, Music and Culture in
Eighteenth-Century Europe, trans. and ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 71 and note.
76. “Pour savoir ce que veulent dire tous ces fatras de Sonates dont on est accablé, il faudroit
faire comme ce Peintre grossier qui étoit obligé d’écrire au-dessous de ses figures; c’est un arbre,
c’est un homme, c’est un cheval. Je n’oublierai jamais la saillie du célèbre Fontenelle [. . .] ‘Sonate,
que me veux-tu?’ ” (“To know what all this hodgepodge of Sonatas that overcome us means, one
should do the same as the thick painter who was obliged to write under his figures ‘this is a tree,
this is a man, this is a horse.’ I will never forget the remark of the famous Fontenelle [. . .] ‘Sonata,
what do you want from me?’ ”). Rousseau, entry SONATE, Dictionnaire de musique, 1060. The
French writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), perpetual secretary of the Academy
of Sciences in Paris and author of the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), is supposed
to have uttered this sentence when listening to a concert of instrumental music. His reaction is
typical of the distrust early eighteenth-century French listeners maintained toward instrumental
music. The sentence was well known and frequently mentioned in eighteenth-century France.
(Diderot and d’Alembert, among many others, referred to it, as did Chastellux in his 1773 French
translation of Algarotti’s Saggio sopra l’opera in musica.) However, the quotation itself is not to be
found in any published work by Fontenelle, and the earliest reference to it seems to have been
d’Alembert’s De la liberté de la musique, published in 1759. Rousseau’s article SONATE in the
Encyclopédie was published in 1765 (vol. 15).
which speaks to the heart [. . .].”77 Interestingly, and in a manner typical of

eighteenth-century French musical vocabulary, Rousseau needs to refer here
to both the “mélodie” and to the “chant,” since he is making a distinction be-
tween purely instrumental melody and vocal melody: but for Rousseau, even
instrumental melody—as a melody—conveys the remnant of its linguistic sub-
stratum. Thus when conceived as an end in itself and whether instrumental or
vocal, music moves toward an excessive treatment of harmony, undoing the
hierarchy between the parts, so that the main melody is muffled by harmony,
before being eventually annihilated.
“Attention partagée” and “duplicité de mélodie”
It is in the Lettre à M. Grimm that Rousseau became fully able to develop the
nodal point of his critique, by explaining the consequences of such music
abusing itself, with Rameau’s accompaniments “so confused, so overcharged,
so frequent, that the head has difficulty in following the continual racket of the
various instruments.” And what is more, stresses Rousseau, is that when such
accompaniments are “overly wrought [. . .], instead of fastening the attention
of the spectator more agreeably, they destroy it by dividing it.”78 (emphasis
added). Here, Rousseau derives from “contresens” another notion that is fun-
damental to our discussion, that of an “attention partagée” (divided attention)
provoked by the multiplication of parts. We also can find in it, in nuce, the a
contrario explanation of “unité de mélodie”: one year later, in the Lettre sur la
musique françoise, Rousseau would dramatize this antagonism between “unité
de mélodie” and its dangerous contrary by using the expression “duplicité de
mélodie.”
The expression “attention partagée” found in the Lettre à M. Grimm is a
direct echo of a series of articles Rousseau had just finished for the Encyclo-
pédie: before 1752, Rousseau had already used this expression once, in the ar-
ticle ACCOMPAGNEMENT published in the first volume (1751).79 In this article
the “attention partagée” is not yet associated with Rameau—even if it hints
already at Rousseau’s critique of the theoretician. Rather, the target is French
77. “Mais le plaisir de la Mélodie et du Chant, est un plaisir d’intérêt et de sentiment qui parle
au cœur [. . .].” Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, 1144; Dictionary of Music, 477.
78. “[Rameau] a rendu ses accompagnemens si confus, si chargés, si fréquens, que la tête a
peine à tenir au tintamarre continuel des divers instrumens [. . .]. Une autre raison plus forte con-
tre les accompagnemens trop travaillés, c’est qu’ils font tout le contraire de ce qu’ils devroient
faire. Au lieu de fixer plus agréablement l’attention du spectateur, ils la détruisent en la
partageant.” Rousseau, Lettre à M. Grimm, 272–73; trans. adapted from Letter to M. Grimm,
130.
79. Other subsequent occurrences of this expression appear in the Lettre sur la musique
françoise and the entries OPÉRA and UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE of the Dictionnaire de musique.
music in general, not the composer Rameau in particular. French music, writes
Rousseau, must not be accompanied in the same way as the Italian. The
transalpine style of accompaniment, simple and without cadences and other
broderies, avoids full chords, proving that the “Italians do not care too much
about noise: a third, a well-adapted sixth, even a simple unison [. . .] is more
pleasing to them than all our clamor of parts and accompaniment.” Italian
music is thus the perfect embodiment of “unité de mélodie,” since there is
nothing “in the accompaniment or in the bass that might distract the ear from
the principal subject, and they [the Italians] are of the opinion that the atten-
tion vanishes when it is divided.”80 (emphasis added)
The “attention partagée” mentioned in the Encyclopédie entry ACCOMPANI-
MENT evokes what Rousseau would later call “duplicité de mélodie” in the
Lettre sur la musique françoise. A hapax legomenon in the Genevan’s writings,
this expression is found only in the Lettre sur la musique françoise. Remarkably,
the only other occurrence of the word “duplicité” in a musical context refers
to Rameau’s system and its consequences for the accompaniment. Rousseau
defended the idea that the “son fondamental” generating harmonic sounds
was itself the product of a lower harmonic sound—a phenomenon also ob-
served by Rameau and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan.81 Rousseau’s reason-
ing, as presented in his Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau
(1755), is based on Tartini’s geometric generation of the arithmetic series in
his Trattato di musica (1754).82 However Tartini was not dealing with under-
tones: he believed that all intervals contained in the harmonic series could re-
produce a third sound, the terzo suono, itself located one octave lower below
the fundamental.83 Tartini’s theory appealed to Rousseau and d’Alembert as
well, for both saw in it a principle strong enough to supersede Rameau’s
80. “Les Italiens font peu de cas du bruit; une tierce, une sixte bien adaptée, même un simple
unisson [. . .] leur plaisent plus que tout notre fracas de parties et d’accompagnement: en un mot,
ils ne veulent pas qu’on entende rien dans l’accompagnement, ni dans la basse, qui puisse distraire
l’oreille du sujet principal, et ils sont dans l’opinion que l’attention s’évanouït en se partageant.”
Rousseau, article ACCOMPAGNEMENT, in vol. 1 (1751) of Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie
ou Dictionnaire raisonné, 77; trans. adapted from ACCOMPANIMENT, in Articles from the
Encyclopedia, in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 203.
81. Mairan and Rameau were friends, and the former’s ideas were influential on the latter:
Rameau’s conception of the harmonic overtones heard in the corps sonore derive from Mairan’s
hypothesis. On Mairan’s theory and its relevance to Rameau’s system, see Thomas Christensen,
Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 139–42.
82. According to Olivier Pot, Georg Sord’s and Jean-Baptiste Romieu’s demonstrations
of the existence of undertones (1745 and 1751 respectively; both later refuted) could have
influenced Rousseau. See Pot’s notes on Rousseau’s Examen de deux principes avancés par
M. Rameau (1755), in vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, 1531–32n1.
83. For a survey of Tartini’s theory on the terzo suono, and his errors, see Joel Lester,
Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992), 197–200.
“basse fondamentale”84—for Rousseau a sine qua non condition was that

every chord should produce “a unique fundamental sound, for if you produce
two fundamental sounds, you represent two sonorous bodies [corps sonores] in-
stead of one and you get duplicity [duplicité] of harmony.”85 (emphasis added)
Of course “contresens” already implies the idea of duplicity, of a double or
false meaning. The specter of duplicity was still present in Rousseau’s mind
when he wrote the entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE for the Dictionnaire de musique a
few years later: “Every music in which one distinguishes several simultaneous
melodies is bad, and that the same effect results as from two or more dis-
courses pronounced at the same time in the same tone.”86
But in the early 1750s Rousseau’s conception of musical unity had not yet
departed very radically from its rhetorical substratum: hence the prevalence in
his writings of the antithesis between “attention partagée” and its contrary,
poetic unity. Interestingly, Rousseau’s first introduction of the expression
“unité de mélodie,” in the 1753 Lettre sur la musique françoise, follows the
same line of argumentation he used in the Lettre à M. Grimm. Before explain-
ing “unité de mélodie,” Rousseau defined its contrary: what produces the
“attention partagée.” The Lettre sur la musique françoise revives the same ar-
guments (and the same vocabulary), but now the critique of Rameau has been
turned into a critique of French music in general: the “contrast of the move-
ments,” the “multiplication of chords, notes, parts,” the “piling of motives on
motives, of instruments on instruments,” writes Rousseau in the Lettre sur la
musique françoise, can only generate a mere noise, a fracas. “All this fracas,
which is only a poor substitute where genius is lacking, would stifle the
melody [. . .] and would destroy the interest by dividing the attention.”87 (em-
phasis added) It is impossible for the ear, claims Rousseau, to follow several
melodies simultaneously. Only the establishment of a melodic hierarchy can
lead to “unité de mélodie.”
84. See Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 275.

85. “. . . un son fondamental unique: car si vous produisez deux sons fondamentaux vous
representez deux corps sonores au lieu d’un et vous avez duplicité d’harmonie.” Rousseau, Examen
de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau, 361–62; trans. adapted from Examination of Two
Principles Advanced by M. Rameau, in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 281–82. Scott inaccurately
translates “duplicité d’harmonie” as “double harmony.”
86. “Toute Musique où l’on distingue plusieurs Chants simultanés est mauvaise, et [il] en ré-
sulte le même effet que de deux ou plusieurs discours prononcés à la fois sur le même Ton.”
Rousseau, entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE, in Dictionnaire de musique, 1145; trans. adapted from
UNITY OF MELODY, in Articles from the Encyclopedia, 479.
87. “Comment le Musicien vient-il à bout de produir ces grands effets? Est-ce à force de
contraster les mouvemens, de multiplier les accords, les notes, les parties? Est-ce à force d’entasser
desseins sur dessein, instrumens sur instrumens? Tout ce fracas, qui n’est qu’un mauvais supplé-
ment où le génie manque, étoufferoit le chant loin de l’animer, et détruiroit l’intérêt en
partageant l’attention.” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 304–5; trans. adapted from
Letter on French Music, 154.
Obstructing Noises
Like a remedy, “unité de mélodie” can cure the evil effects of a divided atten-
tion, an evil Rousseau eloquently calls “duplicité de mélodie.” One recognizes
in this notion of duplicity a manifestation of the Rousseauan obstacle. Erected
between himself and the world, these obstructive fences are also to be found
in his descriptions of musical experience. Or to pursue the analogy, the “unité
de mélodie” acts as a musical transposition of the Rousseauan desire for trans-
parency. Musical notation is a form of hindrance, since ideally no obstacle
should exist between the music and its listeners or performers.
In his ground-breaking study Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et
l’obstacle (first ed. 1958, revised ed. 1971), Jean Starobinski highlighted how
Rousseau’s intellectual activities, and primarily his relation to writing, were af-
fected by a principle of antithesis: the utmost sincerity that he aims for in his
writings (la transparence) is nevertheless obstructed by mediating the signs
of writing itself (l’obstacle)—one recognizes here in nuce Jacques Derrida’s no-
tion of “supplément,” which he developed in his reading of Rousseau’s Essay
on the Origin of Languages in Of Grammatology (1967).88 Following in the
footsteps of Starobinski and Derrida, scholars have thoroughly investigated
this profound dualism in Rousseau’s works. Music of course does not escape
attention: Starobinski mentioned the connection between music and trans-
parency, that is, an ideal music unspoiled by harmony and rendered through
the purity of the unison; “eloquent and without an intermediary,” it has
the power to “move without mediation,” to “work directly on the soul of the
listener.”89 (emphasis in the original) More recent scholarship has further pur-
sued the analysis of music in Rousseau’s thought: the late Robert Wokler
demonstrated the nuclear role of music in shaping of Rousseau’s linguistic and
political ideas, and Martin Stern’s study of his “musical conversion,” high-
lights how Rousseau’s musical experience was the very cradle of this funda-
mental dualism, which in turn came to rule his musical perception entirely.90
88. “This kind of supplementarity determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions
within which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-
sufficient.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145. (emphasis in the original)
89. Starobinski, “La musique et la transparence,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence
et l’obstacle, 111; trans. adapted from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction,
88–89.
90. That music serves as a rich fulcrum for many of Rousseau’s nonmusical ideas has been de-
bated and analyzed in studies like Starobinski’s La transparence et l’obstacle (especially in relation
to literary creation); and Robert Wokler’s Social Thought of J. J. Rousseau (New York and London:
Garland Publishing, 1987). The impact of these two groundbreaking studies is still perceptible in
recent Rousseau scholarship, including literary studies by Michael O’Dea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Music, Illusion, and Desire (London and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and Philip Robin-
son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Doctrine of the Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), as well as Stern,
“Le problème de la conversion dans la pensée musicale de J.-J. Rousseau.” In such a context, Julia
In the introduction to her edition of the Essai sur l’origine des langues and in a
later essay published in 2004, Catherine Kintzler has forcefully demonstrated
how this dualism acts as the conceptual frame underpinning Rousseau’s musi-
cal thought: the original music was in fact language, a pure vocality unspoilt by
any consonantal articulations, but one that was lost as a consequence of the
progress of language and the introduction of hard consonants, which were
indeed obstructions that broke the “continuous fabric of the vocalic fluidity.”91
Thus the price paid for improving the language was the loss of its original
vocality. As Kintzler put it, “The vocal moment is therefore that of the
origin, fluid and continuous. The consonantal moment is that of decomposi-
tion, discontinuous and jerky; it is hardly astonishing that it is also the mo-
ment of the evolution of language and music—an evolution which is also a
deterioration.”92
The musical transpositions of this primary dualism, transparency vs. obfus-
cation, are easy to follow in Rousseau’s writings: harmony vs. melody,
polyphony vs. monody, unity vs. duplicity, and of course the most polemical—
and biased—of all, French music vs. Italian music. These fundamental opposi-
tions motivated Rousseau’s quest to eliminate all the obstacles that might
possibly obfuscate his relation to music, whether as a listener or a performer.
The classical locus of the Rousseauan primacy of melody appears as the natural
derivation from what endangers musical clarity and simplicity: the excessive
emphasis on harmony and polyphony or what Rousseau refers to as noise.
This metaphor of polyphony as noise leads us back to Jean-Jacques’s illness:
tellingly, Rousseau evokes a noise, “un bruit,” and not a sound, “un son,” as if
already willing to stigmatize the antimusical quality of his hearing trouble. It
is important to note that beginning in 1752 (with his Lettre à M. Grimm)
Rousseau routinely used the word “noise” to describe Rameau’s emphasis
on harmony and the excessive polyphony it entailed. Such details remind us
that Rousseau’s vocabulary was never innocent, something demonstrated, if
necessary, by the fact that he also produced the most important oeuvre of
eighteenth-century musical lexicography through his contributions to the
Encyclopédie and his Dictionnaire de musique.
Simon’s statement that Rousseau’s works in social and political theory and his writings on music
are “rarely, if ever, [. . .] read in tandem” is at best very questionable. See Simon, “Singing
Democracy: Music and Politics in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Thought,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 65 (2004): 433.
91. “L’articulation, qui est d’ordre ‘sourd’ et consonantique, se présente en effet comme une
cassure dans le tissu continu de la fluidité vocalique.” Catherine Kintzler, “Le dualisme de l’Essai,”
in her introduction to the Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 30.
92. “Le moment vocal est donc celui, fluide et continu, de l’origine. Le moment consonan-
tique est celui, discontinu et heurté, de la décomposition—rien d’étonnant à ce qu’il soit aussi
celui de l’évolution des langues et de la musique—évolution qui est aussi une dégradation.”
Catherine Kintzler, “Musique, voix, intériorité et subjectivité: Rousseau et les paradoxes de
l’espace,” in Musique et langage chez Rousseau, ed. Claude Dauphin, 5.
We can see in Jean-Jacques’s illness a facile metaphor for his own “poly-
phonic deafness,” that is to say his notorious, although much hyped incapacity
to cope with any music more or less polyphonic. But his illness—which pur-
portedly turned out to be a lifelong disability—is not about deafness: he expe-
rienced it as an excessive sensibility to “noise,” a word he used as a metaphor
for polyphony. Beyond the minute description of the symptoms, his account
of this illness also relates an experience of metamorphosis: transformed into a
mechanism, Rousseau’s body becomes a sonic machine. In the hands of
Diderot or d’Alembert, this episode could have provided the basis for a conte
philosophique on this sonic homme-machine, with more than a nod to Julien
Offroy de La Mettrie’s famous text L’homme-machine (1748), in which he
compares the “strings of the brain” to the strings of a violin or a harpsichord.93
For someone whose main musical dogma had been the primacy of melody
over harmony, one can hardly imagine a harsher punishment than being
turned into the involuntary subject of this experimentum in anima vili. There
is a sort of pun of self-irony inflicted in this depiction of Rousseau as a prisoner
of his newly harmonic body, the philosopher transformed into a corps sonore,
the very basis of Rameau’s system. Diderot might have enjoyed such a meta-
morphosis, but not Rousseau, who perceived this sudden transformation into
a harmonic machine as the negation of life itself: “Je me crus mort.” To be
deprived of any melodic quality is here assimilated to death—though at least it
is a meaningful death, since this harmonic machine cannot “make sense” and
only produces a meaningless noise: a true Rousseauan pleonasm. The
metaphor offered here is that of a noise embodying the very Rousseauan ob-
stacle he erected between himself and the rest of the world. As pointed out by
Catherine Kintzler, harmony (metaphorically described by Rousseau as noise)
has one main property, “its opacity”: harmony “is opaque by its physical mate-
riality.”94 Like the illness obstructing his listening capacities, harmony is an
opaque veil through which melody loses its clarity. In relation to melody, the
harmony-noise has a value identical to Derrida’s “supplément,” in that “it
adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills,
it is as if one fills a void.”95 (emphasis in the original) This connects with one
93. Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, L’homme-machine (Paris: Denoël, 1999), 165. Denis
Diderot’s 1751 Lettre sur les sourds et les muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent also
evokes an “homme automate” “like a walking timepiece” (the image comes from Descartes’s
Traité de l’homme) whose head contains a soundboard with little hammers, from which extends
an infinite number of threads to all extremities of the body. See Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les
muets, in vol. 4 of Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. Laurent Versini, 5 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1996),
28. Diderot returned to a similar metaphor in the “Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot,” the
first part of his conte philosophique, Le rêve de d’Alembert (written in 1769), in which he compares
men to instruments, the keys of which are played by nature, and sometimes played by themselves.
See Diderot, Le rêve de d’Alembert, in vol. 1 of Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. Versini, 617.
94. Catherine Kintzler, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir
à l’âge classique, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (Paris: Minerve, 1988), 145.
95. Derrida, Of grammatology, 145.
of the main subtexts of Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues (written be-
tween 1755 and 1761, and published posthumously in 1781): how a degener-
ated music speaks of the impossibility of communication in its purest, simplest
manner.
This opposition between harmony/opacity/death versus melody/
transparency/life leads us back to the fundamental dualism proper to
Rousseau’s musical experience, one metaphorically illustrated by his illness,
during which he is unable to control the four-part noise invading him. As a
result, his hearing was inescapably polluted by noise. The consequences are
dramatic, since for Rousseau, listening is primarily about defining ourselves in
relation to what we listen to, for “one cannot hear either a song [chant] or an
instrumental piece without immediately saying to oneself: another sensitive
being is present.”96 We can become aware of ourselves and others only in rela-
tion to the aural events: “As soon as vocal signs strike your ear, they announce
a being similar to yourself, they are [. . .] the organs in the soul, and though
they also depict solitude, they tell you that you are not alone. Birds whistle,
man alone sings.”97 (emphasis added) The act of listening is primarily an act of
questioning, and as such, a source of anxiety. This point is nicely illustrated at
the beginning of the definition UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE in the Dictionnaire de
musique. If our listening capacities are invaded, our attention is divided: “The
divided attention settles nowhere, and when two objects occupy us, it is a
proof that neither of them satisfies us.”98 There follows a description of the
hearing of Protestant Psalms: “When I hear our Psalms in four parts sung, I
always begin by being gripped, entranced by that full and nervous harmony
[. . .]. But hardly have I listened to what follows for a few minutes, that my at-
tention relaxes, the noise gradually dazes me; soon it wearies me, and I am
eventually bored by hearing nothing but chords.”99 (emphasis added)
One can ponder how fictionalized this account is. As he did when relating
his illness, Rousseau presents this anecdote as personal experience. Yet this
96. “L’on ne peut entendre ni chant ni simphonie sans se dire à l’instant; un autre être sensi-
ble est ici.” Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 16, “Fausse analogie entre les couleurs
et les sons,” in vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, 421; trans. adapted from Essay on the Origin of
Languages, in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 326.
97. “Sitôt que des signes vocaux frapent vôtre oreille, ils vous annoncent un être semblable à
vous, ils sont, pour ainsi dire, les organes de l’ame, et s’ils vous peignent aussi la solitude ils vous
disent que vous n’y étes pas seul. Les oiseaux sifflent, l’homme seul chante.” Rousseau, Essai sur
l’origine des langues, chap. 16, “Fausse analogie entre les couleurs et les sons,” 421; trans. adapted
from Essay on the Origin of Languages, 326.
98. “L’attention partagée ne se repose nulle part, et quand deux objets nous occupent, c’est
une preuve qu’aucun des deux ne nous satisfait.” Rousseau, entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE,
Dictionnaire de musique, 1143; trans. adapted from UNITY OF MELODY, Dictionary of Music, 476.
99. “Lorsque j’entends chanter nos Pseaumes à quatre Parties, je commence toujours par être
saisi, ravi de cette Harmonie pleine et nerveuse [. . .]. Mais à peine en ai-je écouté la suite, pendant
quelques minutes, que mon attention se relâche, le bruit m’étourdit peu-à-peu; bientôt il me
lasse, et je suis enfin ennuyé de n’entendre que des Accords.” Rousseau, entry UNITÉ DE MÉLODIE,
Dictionnaire de musique, 1143; trans. adapted from UNITY OF MELODY, Dictionary of Music, 477.
hearing of Psalms is reminiscent of an experience described by Saint-

Évremond (who had died in 1703 but whose complete works were published
beginning in 1705 in numerous editions), in which he warns against the
prominence of music in operas, at the expense of the poetry:
At the beginning of the concerts, the accurate tuning of the chords is noticed;
none of the diverse pitches that unite themselves to form the sweetness of har-
mony escapes [us]; some time later instruments make us dizzy; music is to the
ears nothing other than a blurred noise that does not permit one to distinguish
anything. But who can resist the boredom of the recitative in a modulation that
has neither the charm of melody [chant], nor the agreeable strength of speech?
The soul, fatigued from long attention in which it does not find anything to
feel, searches within itself for some secret motion that would touch it: the mind
that had vainly given itself to outside impressions, abandons itself to reverie.100
The similarities are striking: both authors stress the positive impression
given at the beginning of the performance when the listener is first agreeably
struck by the “full harmony” (Rousseau), and the “diverse pitches” that gen-
erate the “sweetness of harmony” (Saint-Évremond). But soon the first im-
pression fades, because of weariness and boredom (“my attention wanders,
[. . .] noise makes me dizzy; soon I am weary of it” in Rousseau; “[. . .] noth-
ing other than a blurred noise, [. . .] the boredom of the recitative [. . .]. The
soul, fatigued from long attention” in Saint-Évremond). Both authors also
draw on the equation of harmony with noise, stigmatizing the absence of
melody, or rather its constriction through an excessive emphasis on harmony.
In any case, Rousseau’s account of hearing the Psalms must be included in
the early eighteenth-century French tradition of such metaphors of harmony-
oriented noise, which were systematically used as negative examples.101 Indeed
such metaphors of noise circumscribe a literary topos: like Rousseau, Saint-
Évremond’s criticism clearly relates to a specific listening experience in which
the melodic line conveying the sung text cannot be fully understood due to
the excessive music (“l’Harmonie”). And similarly, just as Rousseau, who de-
100. “Au commencement des concerts, la justesse des accords est remarquée: il n’échappe
rien de toutes les diversités qui s’unissent pour former la douceur de l’harmonie. Quelque tems
après les instruments nous étourdissent; la Musique n’est plus aux oreilles qu’un bruit confus, qui
ne laisse rien distinguer. Mais qui peut résister à l’ennui du recitatif dans une modulation qui n’a ni
le charme du chant, ni la force agreable de la parole? L’ame fatiguée d’une longue attention où
elle ne trouve rien à sentir, cherche en elle-même quelque secret mouvement qui la touche.
L’esprit qui s’est prêté vainement aux impressions du dehors, se laisse aller à la rêverie.” Charles de
Saint-Évremond, “Sur les Opera,” in vol. 3 of Œuvres de Monsieur de Saint-Évremond, new ed.,
7 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725), 170.
101. These metaphors, Saint-Évremond’s included, have been recently discussed by Charles
Dill, “Ideological Noises: Opera Criticism in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” in Operatic
Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and
Downing A. Thomas (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 66.
plored that there was no “pleasure of Melody and Song,” Saint-Évremond

laments the absence of melody (the recitative lacks “the charm of song”).
As Charles Dill puts it, “What was at stake [with the metaphor of noise]
was language itself ” and “the failure of noise to communicate.”102 To develop
this point further, “bruit,” as a metaphor with a purely negative connotation,
appears when meaning, conveyed by language, disappears. Noise is the obfus-
cation of meaning that prevents communication: a situation that corresponds
to Jean-Jacques’s auditory illness, to which this topos of meaningless musical
noise is perfectly applicable.
Communication and Listening
Although the story is much less dramatic, Jean-Jacques’s account of hearing

the Psalms resembles that of his illness. Since, to paraphrase Roland Barthes,
“Listening [unlike hearing] can only be defined through its object, or, if one
prefers, its aim,”103 the hearing of Psalms and Jean-Jacques’s illness are experi-
ences of listening, but ones in which listening is cruelly deceived and deprived
of its object. Unable to listen to a meaningful melody, Rousseau can hear—or
is even forced to hear—only a meaningless noise that he does not want to lis-
ten to.
The choice of verbs (“to hear,” “to listen”) in Rousseau’s Psalm parable is
closely related to this experience of deceived listening: first his passive hearing
causes him to be “seized [and] entranced,” then it turns into active listening,
but since he is unable to sustain his attention, the piled up melodies (“the
noise”) make him so “weary of it” that he ends “hearing nothing but chords.”
What began as passive hearing ends similarly, with a brief and hopeful moment
of active listening quickly abandoned. In Rousseau’s terms, the ideal act of
listening is a “psychological act”—as opposed to the physiological act of hear-
ing, to refer here once more to Barthes’s formulation104—for it implies the ini-
tiation of a circle of communication between the listener and the sound
source. This reciprocal action implies a dialectical relation: indeed a form of di-
alogue, generated by the primacy of one melody that requires the listener’s
participation. At stake here is the Rousseauan process of establishing a rela-
tionship between the listener and the source he or she listens to—the thing
that causes the listener to listen at all. This relationship is explored at length in
the Essai sur l’origine des langues:
102. Ibid., 67 and 69.

103. “L’écoute [contrairement à l’acte d’entendre] ne peut se définir que par son objet, ou,
si l’on préfère, sa visée.” Roland Barthes, Écoute, in Œuvres complètes V, Livres, textes, entretiens,
1977–1980, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002), 340.
104. “Entendre est un phénomène physiologique; écouter est un acte psychologique.” Ibid.
Neither hunger nor thirst, but love, hate, pity, and wrath wrested the first
voices from men. Fruit does not elude our grasp, one can feed on it without
speaking; one stalks in silence the prey one wishes to devour; but in order to
move a young heart, to repulse an unjust aggressor, nature dictates accents,
cries, wails. The most ancient words are invented in this way, and this is why the
first languages were tuneful [chantantes] and passionate before being simple
and methodical.105
Fruit gives us nothing to listen to, and the hunter will ignore his prey’s
laments, because there is no need for us to engage in a communicative ex-
change with fruit or prey. But if we have to “move a young heart” or “reject
an aggressor” an exchange must take place: we must interfere with these
objects of our attention by establishing a relationship of persuasive reciprocity
with them, even if it is a hostile one. Thus the original language-music is born
from an act of listening. Through music, we reenact this original experience of
listening: ruled by the “unité de mélodie,” music discloses to its listeners its
mythical origin as a language. That listening is paramount to Rousseau’s musi-
cal experience is a fact widely neglected, not just in Rousseau scholarship but
more generally in studies on listening, which mainly focus on nineteenth cen-
tury or Austro-German sources.106 The “unité de mélodie” is a plea for an
105. “Ce n’est ni la faim ni la soif, mais l’amour la haine la pitié la colére qui leur ont arraché
les prémiéres voix. Les fruits ne se dérobent point à nos mains, on peut s’en nourrir sans parler on
poursuit en silence la proye dont on veut se repaitre; mais pour émouvoir un jeune cœur, pour re-
pousser un aggresseur injuste la nature dicte des accens, des cris, des plaintes: voila les plus anciens
mots inventés, et voila pourquoi les prémiéres langues furent chantantes et passionnées avant
d’être simples et méthodiques.” Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 2, “Que la
pre[mière] invention de la parole ne vint pas des besoins mais des passions,” 380–81; Essay on the
Origin of Languages, 294.
106. See for instance James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); and Peter Szendy, Écoute: Une histoire de nos oreilles (Paris:
Éditions de Minuit, 2001); trans. Charlotte Wendell as Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008). Although the chronological scope of Szendy’s study is broader
than that of Johnson, which is more strictly confined to listening attitudes in nineteenth-century
France, Szendy’s coverage of the period before the 1800s is restricted to few pages, and his book
deals primarily with issues related to copyrights and transcriptions. It would go beyond the scope
of this essay to gauge the debt owed to Rousseau by the Frühromantiker: I will just mention here
that such Rousseauan “tragedies of listening” abound in many of their writings. E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s “Der Musikfeind” (Kreisleriana) still awaits a reading that takes into consideration
Rousseau’s concept of listening, as do Jean Paul’s writings, which teem with such Rousseauan
tropes as “the eye is the ear trumpet of the acoustic imagination” (“das Auge ist das Hörrohr der
akustischen Phantasie”); Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in vol. 5 of Sämtliche Werke, 6th ed.,
ed. Norbert Miller, 10 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1995), 279, a remark indebted to Rousseau’s fa-
mous claim that music “seems to put the eye into the ear” (“elle semble mettre l’œil dans
l’oreille”); Rousseau, entry IMITATION, Dictionnaire de musique, 860. Nikolaus Bacht has recently
provided a useful overview of Jean Paul’s conception of listening and how it tends toward an ideal
of pure acoustic interiority that breaks away from traditions of oculocentrism. As a consequence
of it, Jean Paul’s conception of writing is itself characterized by “the move from seeing towards
hearing,” Bacht, “Jean Paul’s Listeners,” Eighteenth-Century Music 3 (2006): 204; this too is
attentive listening in which the whole physiognomy of a musical work will ap-
pear to the listener’s mind in all its radiant clarity; this attentive listening can
be read as something similar to our modern structural perception, in which
the understanding of a musical work is transmitted to us through the immedi-
ate comprehension of listening.
Throughout his life, Rousseau’s relationship to music evolved under a sign
of nostalgia: listening to music inevitably became an experience of remem-
brance, an attempt to recover a lost original music. Two of the most illustrious
and commented upon musical episodes of the Confessions are exactly such
“souvenirs”: the air sung to Rousseau as a child by his Aunt Suzon, whose
words Rousseau could no longer remember and whose sole melody he could
not “sing until the end without being stopped by [his] tears,”107 and the “air
de Venise,” an aria probably heard by Rousseau at the Teatro San Crisostomo
during his Venetian stay of 1744–45. Obsessed by this aria, Rousseau man-
aged to get the score, “but it was not the same on paper as in my memory.”
The written notation failed to capture his experience as a listener: “The notes
were indeed the same, but it wasn’t the same thing.”108 Whereas once this
music had reached his soul directly, its essence was lost when transcribed with
the written signs of notation; only its “dangereux supplément” remains. The
Derridean reading is valid here as well, in that the musical notation that was
supposed to record the aria imposes its own mediation.109
reminiscent of Rousseau: “It is one of the great advantages of the musician to be able to paint
things that cannot be heard, while it is impossible for the painter to paint those that cannot be
seen” (“C’est un des grands avantages du Musicien de pouvoir peindre les choses qu’on ne sauroit
entendre, tandis qu’il est impossible au Peintre de peindre celles qu’on ne sauroit voir”).
Rousseau, entry OPERA, Dictionnaire de musique, 958–59; trans. adapted from Dictionary of
Music, 456. Rousseau’s influence on Jean Paul, Hoffmann, and other German writers has been
widely explored in literary studies: for a rich bibliography on the subject, see Herbert Jaumann
ed., Rousseau in Deutschland: Neue Beiträge zur Erforschung seiner Rezeption (Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995).
107. “Il m’est de toute impossibilité de la chanter jusqu’à la fin, sans être arrêté par mes
larmes.” Rousseau, Les confessions, bk. 1, pp. 11–12; trans. adapted from Confessions, 23. On this
episode, see Philip Robinson, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aunt Suzanne, and Solo Song,” Modern
Language Review 73 (1978), 291–96.
108. “Je voulus avoir ce morceau, je l’eus, et je l’ai gardé longtems; mais il n’étoit pas sur
mon papier comme dans ma mémoire. C’étoit bien la même note, mais ce n’étoit pas la même
chose. Jamais cet air divin ne peut être exécuté que dans ma tête, comme il le fut en effet le jour
qu’il me réveilla.” Rousseau, Les confessions, bk. 7, p. 314. For a thorough reading of this episode
in psychoanalytic terms, see Alain Grosrichard, “L’air de Venise,” Ornicar 25 (1982): 111–37.
109. In her article on Rousseau’s texts on botany, Alexandra Cook relies on Derrida’s notion
of “supplément” in order to establish a fruitful parallel between Rousseau’s musical and botanical
systems of notation: Rousseau the musician is like Rousseau the botanist, in that “the [latter] does
not suffer any intermediary between nature and him” (“Le botaniste ne souffre point
d’intermédiaire entre la nature et lui”). Rousseau, Fragments de botanique, quoted in Cook,
“Rousseau and the Languages of Music and Botany,” in Dauphin, Musique et langage chez
Rousseau, 75–87.
Rousseau’s auditory illness must be deciphered in the light of these musical

remembrances. Presented as traumatic experiences, Aunt Suzon’s song and
the “air de Venise” both illustrate how his attempts to revive an original expe-
rience of listening were obstructed, tragically, in the first case by his own failing
memory and in the second by the “supplément” of musical notation.
According to the Confessions, the illness irrevocably affected his hearing, veil-
ing his ears with the obstacle of noise and making listening painful. This expe-
rience was not just Jean-Jacques’s curse, but one that constantly endangers
our musical perception: if we pursue the idea further, then the metaphor reads
as an allegory. Thus shouldn’t we consider its value as universal? Such a claim
is clearly made in the Lettre sur la musique françoise: “Having only a false idea
of [melody], [French musicians] would everywhere find a melody in their
own manner: not having any genuine melody [chant], the parts of the melody
would cost them nothing to multiply because they would boldly give that
name [chant] to what would not be such [. . .].”110 The French are targeted as
being the most prone to this form of disability, and without being aware of it:
“Wherever they see notes they would find melody [chant], their melody
[chant] being only notes.”111 French music, and above all that of Rameau, is
nothing but the supplément produced by the progress of the technê. The con-
sequence of this “absence of melody” has an impact on the listening experi-
ence. This absence is not noted as such, but it leads us to an equivocal form of
listening: we believe that we are listening to that which we expect to listen to,
i.e., a melody, even if there is none. Although Rousseau does not describe this
mechanism in explicit terms, it calls to mind the way our ear often corrects or
completes unheard elements (giving a major or minor third to an open fifth,
for instance, depending on the harmonic context). This basic phenomenon,
innocuous in itself, embodies for Rousseau a musical form of evil in which
melody simply has no existence, despite purportedly existing for misguided
listeners.
“Unité de mélodie” ad absurdum: The Praise of the Unison
If modern harmony represents such an inevitable danger, then what would be

its best antidote? Melody of course, provided it keeps itself away from the dan-
ger of harmony. Less well known than Rousseau’s praise of the melody is his
110. “[. . .] les Musiciens [français] n’en ayant qu’une fausse idée [de la mélodie], trou-
veroient partout une mélodie à leur maniere: n’ayant pas de véritable chant, les parties de chant ne
leur couteroit rien à multiplier, parce qu’ils donneroient hardiment ce nom à ce qui n’en seroit pas
[. . .].” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 293; trans. adapted from Letter on French Music,
145.
111. “Partout où ils verroient des notes ils trouveroient du chant, attendu qu’en effet leur
chant ne serait que des notes.” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 293; trans. adapted from
Letter on French Music, 145.
praise of the unison, and the question of why the unison occupies such a piv-
otal place in his conception of melody and harmony has never been properly
addressed. Rousseau’s conception of the unison evolved at the same pace as
his views on melody and harmony, as is shown by his revisions of the article
UNISON from the Encyclopédie when it was prepared for inclusion in the
Dictionnaire de musique. Most of the original version of the article was left un-
altered, except for its central paragraph [§4] and the final one [§6] revised in
the Dictionnaire. Table 1 shows the modifications he made.
Table 1 J.-J. Rousseau, Excerpt from the Article UNISON as Published in the Encyclopédie
(17:386) and the Entry UNISON as Published in the Dictionnaire de musique (1141)
Encyclopédie (vol. 17) Dictionnaire de musique

published 1765 published 1768 (recte 1767)
written between 1749 and 1751 reworked between 1755 and 1764
[§4] Ce qui constitue l’unisson, c’est l’égalité [§iv] Ce qui constitue l’Unisson, c’est l’égalité
du nombre des vibrations faites en tems égaux du nombre des Vibrations faites en tems
par deux corps sonores. Dès qu’il y a inégalité égaux par deux Sons. Dès qu’il y a inégalité
entre les nombres de ces vibrations, il y a entre les nombres de ces vibrations, il y a
intervalle entre les sons qu’elles produisent. Intervalle entre les Sons qu’elles produisent.
Voyez Corde, Vibration. (Voyez CORDE, VIBRATION.)
[. . .] [. . .]
[§6] Une question plus importante est de [§vi] Une question plus importante, est de
savoir quel est le plus agréable à l’oreille de savoir quel est le plus agréable à l’oreille de
l’unisson, ou d’un intervalle consonnant, tel, l’Unisson ou d’un Intervalle consonnant, tel,
par exemple, que l’octave ou la quinte. A par exemple, que l’Octave ou la quinte. Tous
suivre le système de nos philosophes, il ne ceux qui ont l’oreille exercée à l’Harmonie,
doit pas y avoir le moindre doute sur cela; & préfèrent l’Accord des Consonnances à
l’unisson étant en rapport plus simple, sera l’identité de l’Unisson; mais tous ceux qui,
sans contredit le plus agréable. sans habitude de l’Harmonie, n’ont, si j’ose
Malheureusement, l’expérience ne confirme parler ainsi, nul préjugé dans l’oreille, portent
point cette hypothèse; nos oreilles se plaisent un jugement contraire: l’Unisson seul leur
plus à entendre une octave, une quinte, & plait, ou tout au plus l’Octave; tout autre
même une tierce bien juste, que le plus parfait Intervalle leur paroît discordant: d’où il
unisson. Il est vrai que plusieurs quintes de s’ensuivroit, ce me semble, que l’Harmonie la
suite ne nous plairoient pas comme plusieurs plus naturelle, et par consequent la meilleure,
unissons; mais cela tient évidemment aux lois est à l’Unisson. (Voyez HARMONIE.)
de l’harmonie & de la modulation, & non à la
nature de l’accord. Cette expérience fournit
donc un nouvel argument contre l’opinion
reçue. Il est certain que les sens se plaisent à la
diversité; ce ne sont point toujours les rap-
ports les plus simples qui les flattent le plus; &
j’ai peur qu’on ne trouve à la fin que ce qui
rend l’accord de deux sons agréable ou
choquant à l’oreille, dépend d’une toute autre
cause que celle qu’on lui a assignée jusqu’ici.
Voyez Consonance.
[. . .]
Table 1 continued
[§4] What constitutes the unison is the equal- [§iv] What constitutes the unison is the equal-
ity of the number of vibrations made in equal ity of the number of vibrations made in equal
durations by two sonorous bodies [corps durations by two sounds. As soon as there
sonores]. As soon as there is inequality be- is inequality between the numbers of these
tween the numbers of these vibrations, there vibrations, there is an interval between the
is an interval between the sounds they pro- sounds they produce. (See CHORD,
duce. See Chord, Vibration. VIBRATION.)
[. . .] [. . .]
[§6] A more important question is to know [§vi] A more important question is to know
which [interval] is the most pleasant to the which [interval] is the most pleasant to the
ear: the unison, or a consonant interval, such ear: the unison, or a consonant interval, such
as, for instance, the octave or the fifth. as, for instance, the octave or the fifth.
By following the system of our philoso- All those who have ears trained in har-
phers, one should not have the slightest mony prefer the agreement of consonances to
doubt about it: and the unison being in the the identity of the unison; but all those who
simplest relationship, it will be indisputably are not in the habit of harmony, have, if I dare
the most agreeable. to say so, no prejudice in the ear, bring a con-
Unfortunately the experience dos not trary judgment: the unison only pleases them,
confirm this hypothesis; our ears prefer to lis- or at the most the octave; any other interval
ten to an octave, a fifth, and even a well-tuned seems to them discordant; from which it fol-
third, rather than the most perfect unison. It lows, it seems to me, that the most natural
is true that several successive fifths would not harmony, and in consequence the best, is at
please us like several unisons; but this relates the unison. (See HARMONY.)
evidently to the laws of harmony and modula-
tion, and not to the nature of the chord.
This experience supplies then a new argu-
ment against received opinion. It is certain
that our senses are pleased by diversity; it is
not always the simplest relationships that flat-
ter them at the most; and at the end, I am
afraid to find that what renders the chord of
two sounds agreeable or shocking to the ear
depends on a wholly other cause than the
one that had been assigned to it so far. See
Consonance.
[. . .]
Rousseau’s bafflement is easy to see in the lines of the Encyclopédie article,

in which the sixth paragraph (§6) states an unresolved paradox. The prefer-
ence for the intervals of octave, fifth, and major third over the unison seems to
be rooted in common practices and customs, yet contradicts the empirical
demonstration according to which the unison is the simplest, thus the most
perfect, of all intervals. In other words, Rousseau concludes that the force of
habit wins over scientific rationality. The Dictionnaire goes much further in
this direction and sweeps away all doubt: the revised paragraph states as a fact
that those who are accustomed to harmony prefer consonant chords to the
unison, whereas those who are unaccustomed to harmony prefer the unison
instead. The Lettre sur la musique françoise had famously exemplified this
point with the case of Felice Bambini, the son of Eustachio Bambini, director
of the Buffonisti. Born in 1743, Felice had played the continuo a few times
at some of the Buffons’ performances at the Académie royale de musique in
1753. To Rousseau’s surprise, the ten-year-old child surpassed Noblet, the
tenured—French—accompanist of the orchestra with “precise and brilliant
playing,” his little hands “almost never fill[ing] out the chords, omitt[ing]
many notes, and very often employ[ing] only two fingers, one of which al-
most always sounded the octave above the bass!”112 Rousseau, who found this
performance even more “disturbing” when he observed that “all Italians ac-
companied in the same manner as the little child,” was quick to realize the po-
tential of the barest harmony: “What! I said to myself, complete harmony
produces less of an effect than mutilated harmony, and by filling out all the
chords our accompanists produce only a confused noise.”113 He concluded
that “the most natural harmony, and in consequence the best, is the one of
the unison” (§vi, Table 1). A similar statement also appears in the entry
HARMONIE of the Dictionnaire, considerably expanded from its earlier version
in the Encyclopédie:
Every sound produces a truly perfect chord since it is formed from all its har-
monics, and it is by them that it is a sound. Nevertheless, these harmonics are
not heard, and only a simple sound is distinguished, unless it is extremely loud;
whence it follows that the only good harmony is unison, and that as soon as conso-
nances are distinguished and the natural proportion altered, the harmony has
lost its purity. [. . .] This is why the most perfect consonances naturally displease
ears little prepared to hear them; and I do not doubt that the octave itself
would be displeasing, like the others, if the mixture of the voices of men and
women did not habituate one to it from infancy.114 (emphasis added)
112. “[Felice] ne remplissoit presque jamais les accords, [il] supprimoit beaucoup de sons, et
n’employoit très-souvent que deux doigts, dont l’un sonnoit presque toujours l’octave de la
Basse!” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 311–12; trans. adapted from Letter on French
Music, 160.
113. “Quoi! disois-je en moi-même, l’harmonie complette fait moins d’effet que l’harmonie
mutilée, et nos Accompagnateurs en rendant tous les accords pleins, ne font qu’un bruit confus
[. . .]. Ceci fut pour moi un problême inquiétant, et j’en compris encore mieux toute
l’importance, quand après d’autres observations je vis que les Italiens accompagnoient tous de la
meme maniere que le petit Bambin [. . .].” Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 312; Letter
on French Music, 160.
114. “Tout Son donne un Accord vraiment parfait, puisqu’il est formé de tous ses
Harmoniques, et que c’est par eux qu’il est un Son. Cependant ces Harmoniques ne s’entendent
pas, et l’on ne distingue qu’un Son simple, à moins qu’il ne soit extrêmement fort; d’où il suit que
la seule bonne Harmonie est l’Unisson, et qu’aussi-tôt qu’on distingue les Consonnances, la
proportion naturelle étant altérée, l’Harmonie a perdu de sa pureté. [. . .] Voilà pourquoi les
Consonnances les plus parfaites déplaisent naturellement aux Oreilles peu faites à les entendre; et
je ne doute pas que l’Octave elle-même ne déplût, comme les autres, si le mélange des voix
d’hommes et de femmes n’en donnoit l’habitude dès l’enfance.” Rousseau, entry HARMONIE,
Dictionnaire de musique, 849; trans. adapted from HARMONY, Dictionary of Music, 411–12.
But how can the unison be conceived as musically pure? Once more,
Rousseau’s reasoning brings us back to the mechanism of the supplément: why
should we add harmony to something that already contains it? A sound, being
the smallest component of melody and harmony, contains in its own imma-
nent structure the harmonic evil: “A sound carries with it all of its concomi-
tant harmonies, in the relations of strength and interval that they must have
among themselves in order to produce the most perfect harmony of this same
sound.”115 The charms of melody, beautiful and rapturous though they are,
are constantly endangered by harmony. Thus Rousseau arrives at an absurd
claim—one perhaps unnoticed because it is so blatantly absurd—in the entry
HARMONIE in the Dictionnaire: “the only good harmony is the unison.”116
Since every sound provides its own series of harmonics, the addition of a new
sound will create a web of two interfering series of harmonics: “By having cer-
tain harmonics sounded, and not others, one changes the relation of force that
should reign between them all in order to produce the sensation of a unique
sound, and the unity of nature is destroyed.”117 (emphasis added) Most disturb-
ing for Rousseau is that any harmonic can produce, when sounded, “other
harmonics which do not come from the fundamental sound.”118
According to Rousseau, any chord, when played, results in a monstrous
mingling of harmonics that creates a sonic fog affecting the perception of the
listener: “It is through these added harmonics that the [sound] that produces
them is still more harshly distinguished; and these same harmonics that make
the chord thus felt do not enter in its harmony.”119 In this light, one wonders
which music indeed could adequately fulfill Rousseau’s expectations: even
modern Italian music, despite all its melodic genius, was no less dedicated to
115. “Un son porte avec lui tous ses sons harmoniques concomitans, dans les raports de
force et d’intervalle qu’ils doivent avoir entre eux pour donner la plus parfaite harmonie de ce
même son.” Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 14, “De l’harmonie,” 415; Essay on the
116. “La seule bonne Harmonie est l’Unisson.” Rousseau, entry HARMONIE, Dictionnaire
de musique, 849 (emphasis in original); HARMONY, Dictionary of Music, 411. The claim is re-
newed in the Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 14, “De l’harmonie”: “Naturellement il n’y a
point d’autre harmonie que l’unisson.” (“By nature there is no other harmony than the unison,”
Essay on the Origin of Languages, 322.)
117. “En faisant sonner certains Harmoniques, et non pas les autres, on change le rapport de
force qui doit régner entr’eux tous, pour produire la sensation d’un Son unique, et l’unité de la
Nature est détruite.” Rousseau, HARMONIE, Dictionnaire de musique, 849; HARMONY, Dictionary
of Music, 411.
118. “Les Harmoniques qu’ont fait sonner ont eux-mêmes d’autres Harmoniques, lesquels
ne le sont pas du Son fondamental.” Rousseau, HARMONIE, Dictionnaire de musique, 849;
HARMONY, Dictionary of Music, 411–12.
119. “C’est par ces Harmoniques ajoûtés que celui qui les produit se distingue encore plus
durement; et ces memes Harmoniques qui font ainsi sentir l’Accord et n’entrent point dans son
Harmonie.” Ibid. This phenomenon of harmonics colliding with one another in a given chord
had already been observed by Pierre Estève, who eloquently referred to it as “le combat des har-
moniques.” Estève’s observation is discussed in Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 244.
harmony than French music. Rousseau was not immune to contradiction

and inconsistency, and his praise of the unison reveals an abysmal ambiguity
toward music, for when developed ad absurdum, the Rousseauan supremacy
of melody over all other parameters leads to the praise of the unison and con-
sequently ends up negating all forms of modern music—Italian included.
Rousseau never went explicitly to such extremes, rather, his positions on
harmony betray his inability to address fully the problem and face its ramifica-
tions. When restricted to its roles of melodic support, enhancing modulation,
and reinforcing precision of intonation, harmony is considered to be accept-
able.120 But where is the limit? “By putting shackles on the melody, [harmony]
deprives it of energy and expression, it eliminates the passionate accent in or-
der to substitute the harmonic interval, it subjects to two modes alone songs
[chants] that should have as many modes as there are oratorical tones, it effaces
and destroys multitudes of sounds or intervals that do not enter into its sys-
tem.”121 As soon as harmony starts to support melody, it injects its disease into
the melodic realm: yet Rousseau remained remarkably unclear when it came
to specifying at what point harmony might overstep its role.
That within the melody lies the specter of harmony is also the subtext un-
derpinning Rousseau’s views on the enharmonic genre. A C and a B , for in-
stance, would be a simple unison when played on a keyboard: yet their unison
potentially leads to a “duplicity of harmony.” Unison and enharmony are
strongly connected for Rousseau, in that both are seemingly based on an idea
of equivalence and identity. Rousseau deplores the loss of the enharmonic
genre, and such loss reflects his own nostalgia for an original melody in which
inflections were not regulated by tones and semitones, a melody as yet unaf-
fected by the modern harmony that would make the infinite variety of such
inflections impossible. The loss of the enharmonic genre is at the core of his
Extrait d’une réponse du petit-faiseur à son prête-nom sur un morceau de
l’Orphée de Gluck (written circa 1774; published posthumously in 1781), a
subject that has been recently discussed by Alexander Rehding.122 Rousseau’s
text is an analysis of the scene from Gluck’s Orfeo in which Orpheus manages
through his singing and playing to tame the Furies (act 2, scene 1). Rous-
seau’s fascination with this passage lies in an enharmonic relation, in which the
singing of Orpheus, in E-flat major, momentarily vacillates toward E-flat
minor by the use of the diminished-seventh chord D–F–A –C , whose C in
turn clashes with the interjection of the choir of Furies on a B (understood
120. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, 416; Essay on the Origin of Languages, 322.
121. “Mais en donnant aussi des entraves à la mélodie [l’harmonie] lui ôte l’énergie et
l’expression, elle efface l’accent passioné pour y substituer l’intervalle harmonique, elle assujetit à
deux seuls modes des chants qui devroient en avoir autant qu’il y a de tons oratoires, elle efface et
détruit des multitudes de sons ou d’intervalles qui n’entrent pas dans son système.” Rousseau,
Essai sur l’origine des langues, 416; trans. adapted from Essay on the Origin of Languages, 322–23.
122. Alexander Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau, and Enharmonic Furies in the French
Enlightenment,” Journal of Music Theory 49 (2005): 141–80.
harmonically as belonging to the key of C minor). Here Rousseau

contradicts himself in a remarkable way: on the one hand he praises the unison
for being the only interval able to contain the harmonic evil, on the other
hand he praises a music in which the unison between C and B discloses a pe-
culiar moment of “duplicity of harmony.” To go beyond this glaring contra-
diction, one must keep in mind that Rousseau’s fascination with this passage
lies primarily in the charms of a musical souvenir: as explained by Rehding, it
remains questionable to what degree Rousseau could have experienced at the
keyboard the shrill enharmonic friction created by this pairing of B and C ;
throughout his analysis, Rousseau relies on a musical recollection as well.123
He could explore this passage only at the keyboard, an instrument unfit to
render the enharmonic quarter-tone: “This is what my memory has been able
to suggest to me concerning this passage.”124 Rousseau’s narrative gesture is
clearly to fictionalize the restitution of this scene by locating its original hear-
ing in a unspecified past (which could not have been that remote since the
Extrait is contemporary with the French Orphée at the Paris Opéra). One
should also notice how, from the beginning of the text, Rousseau insists that
what will be discussed is above all a remembrance: “This admirable piece is,
as far as I can recall it [. . .].”125 As rightly pointed out by Rehding, “For
Rousseau [. . .] the keyboard sound seemed to be enough to trigger the mem-
ory of an ancient musical culture where melodic inflection was still possible
and music still possessed its sublime orphic powers.”126 Indeed, Gluck’s music
can be heard as the remnant of this Ur-music-language in which the infinity of
intervals had not yet been rationally reduced by modern harmony. By repro-
ducing at the keyboard what could be truly reproduced only by the strings
and the human voice, Rousseau activated his musical nostalgia. This is indeed
a pattern in his musical experiences: a similar mechanism leads him to sing
Aunt Suzon’s air and to write down the “air de Venise.” Playing music or just
simply listening to it becomes simultaneously delightful and sorrowful ow-
ing to the pleasure of the remembrance it brings to us and our incapacity
to ever fully recreate the original experience: “[Harmony] separates
melody [chant] from speech so much that these two languages combat
one another, contradict one another, deprive each other mutually of every
123. Rousseau had seen the French Orphée in Paris in 1774, but his Extrait d’une réponse dis-
cusses Gluck’s Italian version of this scene, one that—significantly—had been transposed into an-
other key for the French version (ibid., 171n1). As far as we know, Rousseau did not have perfect
pitch, and if we assume that he had not yet seen Gluck’s score of the French version, he was most
likely unaware of the transposition.
124. “Voilà ce que ma mémoire a pu me suggérer sur ce passage.” Rousseau, Extrait d’une
réponse du petit faiseur à son prête-nom, sur un morceau de l’Orphée de Gluck, in vol. 5 of Œuvres
complètes, 464; trans. from Extract from a Response by the Underlaborer to His Frontman concern-
ing a Piece from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo,’ ” in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 509.
125. “Cet admirable morceau est, autant que je puis [sic] me le rappeller [. . .].” Rousseau,
Extrait d’une réponse, 461; Extract from a Response, 506.
126. Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau,” 170.
characteristic of truth.”127 One should not misread Rousseau and assert that
he is referring strictly to vocal music: again, “chant” can mislead the reader, es-
pecially if it is translated as “song.”128 Here “chant” clearly signifies “melody,”
whether instrumental or vocal. Because of harmony, melody cannot maintain
the “multitude [. . .] of intervals that do not enter into [the] system [of har-
mony].”129 Consequently, it can only grow estranged from its linguistic soil.
“. . . a throng of signs . . .” The Obstacle of Musical Notation

and the Search for Musical Clarity
The deconstructive mechanics of the supplément at work in Rousseau’s con-

ception of the threat harmony posed to melody is likewise in evidence in his
views on musical notation—and this is not really so surprising, since musical
notation is, like writing, a system of signs. Traditional musical notation, claims
Rousseau, obstructs the mind of the musician, whose attention drowns in a
surplus of signs: “One certainly feels, in truth, that such quantity of lines, clefs,
transpositions, sharps, flats, naturals, simple and compound meters, whole
notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, thirty-second
notes, whole rests, half rests, quarter rests, eighth rests, sixteenth rests, etc.,
yields a throng of signs and their combinations, from which result considerable
confusion and inconvenience.”130 (emphasis added)
Rousseau’s musings on musical notation find their roots as early as 1741–
42, with his Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique (submitted
to the Académie des Sciences de Dijon on 2 August 1742)131 in which he pro-
posed to replace traditional musical symbols with a system based on numerals.
A year later, his Dissertation sur la musique moderne (1743) developed the
127. “[L’harmonie] sépare tellement le chant de la parole que ces deux langages se combat-
tent, se contrarient, s’ôtent mutuellement tout caractère de vérité.” Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine
des langues, 416; Essay on the Origin of Languages 322–23.
128. As in John T. Scott’s translation of all Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 323.
129. “Des multitudes [. . .] d’intervalles qui n’entrent pas dans son système.” Rousseau,
Essai sur l’origine des langues, 416; trans. adapted from Essay on the Origin of Languages, 322.
130. “On sent bien, à la vérité, que cette quantité de lignes, de clés, de transpositions, de
diéses, de bémols, de bécarres, de mesures simples et composées, de rondes, de blanches, de
noires, de croches, de doubles, de triples croches, de pauses, de demi-pauses, de soupirs, de demi-
soupirs, de quarts de soupir, etc. donne une foule de signes et de combinaisons d’où résulte bien de
l’embarras et bien des inconvéniens.” Rousseau, Dissertation sur la musique moderne (1734), in
vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, 173; trans. adapted from Dissertation on Modern Music, in Collected
Writings, 38.
131. Despite noting his clarity and elegant prose style, the members of the Académie ex-
pressed doubts about the utility of Rousseau’s new system, moreover judging it to be neither new
nor original; in this last regard, they specifically mentioned Jean Jacques Souhaitty, Nouveaux élé-
mens de chant, ou, L’essay d’une nouvelle découverte qu’on a faite dans l’art de chanter [. . .] (Paris:
Le Petit, 1677); and idem, Essai du chant de l’église par la nouvelle méthode des nombres [. . .]
(Paris: T. Jolly et A. Pralard, 1679).
arguments of the Projet further with the aim of “making music more conve-
nient to notate, easier to learn, and much less diffuse.”132 The Projet concer-
nant de nouveaux signes in particular echoes the progress in France of fixed
solmisation (to which Rousseau was opposed, since his new system, called
“solfège par transposition,” was based on movable solmisation).133
Rousseau’s critique of traditional musical notation shares common ground
with an idea subsequently developed in the Essai sur l’origine des langues about
the divorce between the act of transcribing a text and the act of restituting it:
Writing, which seems as if it should fix language, is precisely what alters it; it
changes not its words but its genius; it substitutes precision for expressiveness.
[. . .] In writing, one is forced to take all the words according to common
meaning; but he who speaks varies the meanings by his intonation, he deter-
mines them as he pleases; less constrained to be clear, he relies more on force-
fulness, and it is not possible for a language one writes to keep for long the
liveliness of one that is only spoken. Voices are written but not the sounds; yet
in an accented language, it is the sounds, the accents, the inflections of every
sort that constitute the greatest energy of the language.134 (emphasis added)
Certainly any musician would agree that the art of writing music does not
relate in such a simple way to the art of performing it. But here it is worth revis-
iting the Derridean trope of the “supplément” in light of this somewhat
schematic discussion of musical notation, because it is revealing to read this
passage by substituting in it writing for musical notation and speech for per-
formance. To do so illustrates how both debates, on verbal and musical nota-
tions, grew from a common ground, and it encourages us to consider them in
tandem.
Rousseau’s lifelong and problematic relation with signs must be under-
stood in the context of the Enlightenment ideas concerning the origins of
languages and the birth of historical linguistics. More than any other period,
132. “Ce projet tend à rendre la Musique plus commode à notter, plus aisée à apprendre, et
beaucoup moins diffuse.” Rousseau, Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique, in
vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, 133; trans. as Plan Regarding New Signs for Music, in vol. 7 of
Collected Writings, 3.
133. See Sidney Kleinman, La solmisation mobile: De Jean-Jacques Rousseau à John Curwen
(Paris: Heugel, 1974); and Günther Noll, “Untersuchungen über die musikerzieherische
Bedeutung Jean-Jacques Rousseaus und seiner Ideen—Allgemeiner Überblick und spezielle
Darstellung seiner Ziffernschrift als Anfang einer modernen Musikmethodik” (PhD diss.,
Humboldt Universität, 1960).
134. “L’écriture, qui semble devoir fixer la langue est précisement ce qui l’altére; elle n’en
change pas les mots mais le génie; elle substitue l’exactitude à l’expression. [. . .] En écrivant on est
forcé de prendre tous les mots dans l’acception commune; mais celui qui parle varie les acceptions
par les tons, il les détermine comme il lui plait; moins gêné pour être clair, il donne plus à la force,
et il n’est pas possible qu’une langue qu’on écrit garde longtems la vivacité de celle qui n’est que
parlée. On écrit les voix et non pas les sons: or dans une langue accentüée ce sont les sons, les ac-
cens, les infléxions de toute espéce qui font la plus grande énergie du langage [. . .].” Rousseau,
Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. 5, “De l’écriture,” 388; trans. adapted from Essay on the
the eighteenth century deserves to be seen as the century of the sign, and no
prior period had seen such a proliferation of signs as followed in the wake of
historical enquiries into ancient languages, the renewed interest in hiero-
glyphs, and the codification of sign language for the deaf, to name but a few
examples.135 In the eighteenth century, the distinction between “natural
signs” and “conventional signs” (signes d’institution) was well established, and
it had been discussed at length by Dubos, Condillac, and the Encyclope-
dists.136 It was inevitable that for Rousseau both categories became strongly
polarized, since his conception of nature and man was so completely dualistic.
And here it is informative to turn again to Starobinski’s thesis of transparency
and obstruction, for the latter is embodied by the use of conventional signs,
and the former can be reached only by the use of natural signs. Rousseau
feared not just the falsity and deceit implied by conventional signs, but also
their proliferation: like polyphony and its excess of intertwined melodies, tradi-
tional musical notation discloses a troubling quantity of conventional signs.
Polyphony produces in the listener what notation produces in the performer:
“l’attention partagée.” As has been discussed above, this expression appears
regularly at strategic points in Rousseau’s writings, particularly where he de-
scribes at any length the characteristics of any music lacking “unité de
mélodie.” However as early as 1742, Rousseau used the expression “attention
partagée” in fairly different circumstances, when devising his new system of
musical notation. The “attention partagée” could also be caused by the nega-
tive effect of the excessive number of signs in traditional musical notation.
Speaking of his new notation, Rousseau says “it would be advantageous [. . .]
for these [new] signs to be known already, in order that the attention might be
less divided, and easy to form, in order to make music more convenient.”137
(emphasis added)
Rousseau’s attempt to simplify musical notation can be read at two differ-
ent levels. Julia Simon has signaled Rousseau’s new notation as motivated by a
135. Literature on this topic is vast: see Daniel Droixhte, La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire
(1600–1800) (Paris and Geneva: Droz, 1978); and Umberto Eco, Ricerca della lingua perfetta
nella cultura europea, trans. James Fentress as The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford and
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), esp. chap. 15, “Philosophic Language from the Enlighten-
ment to Today.”
136. Rousseau’s attitude can be compared to that of Diderot, whose discussion of “hiéro-
glyphe” (which he calls “emblème”) in the Lettre sur les sourds et les muets (1751) testifies to his
thoughts when confronted by the proliferation of signs. In the case of Diderot however the multi-
plicity of hieroglyphs incites pleasure, not fear: good poetry is “un tissu de hiéroglyphes entassés
les uns sur les autres [. . .]. Je pourrais dire en ce sens que toute poésie est emblématique.”
Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, 34. For a discussion of natural and conventional signs, es-
pecially in relation to Condillac, see Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language:
Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68–70.
137. “Il seroit avantageux, outre cela, que ces [nouveaux] signes fussent déjà connus, afin
que l’attention fût moins partagée, et facile à figurer, afin de rendre la Musique plus commode.”
Rousseau, Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 174; trans. adapted from Dissertation on Modern
Music, 39.
“distinctly democratic impulse”138—and one thinks of the decisive turning

point marked by Rameau’s basse fondamentale, which allowed a general sim-
plification for the theory of chords and thus brought music instruction “à la
portée de tous” with a democratic simplification of what had been a more eso-
teric practice. To this extent, these educational programs were very much in
accordance with Enlightenment tendencies to facilitate and disseminate artis-
tic knowledge and its techniques, and on the surface, Rousseau’s new notation
perfectly mirrors the simplifying trends of Enlightenment rationalism: his
system is symptomatic of eighteenth-century preoccupations with coded signs
and their correlates, the whole derived from the eighteenth-century search for
the origins of languages. But this should not distract us from a second, more
profound significance disclosed by Rousseau’s disquiet with this “multitude of
signs.” Among the vices Rousseau identifies in music, “the first is the multi-
tude of signs and their combinations that uselessly overload the minds and
memories of beginners, so that, the ear being formed, and the organs having
acquired all the necessary facility long before one is able to sight-sing, it fol-
lows that the difficulty is wholly in the observation of the rules, and not at all
in the performance of the melody [chant].”139 (emphasis added)
Rousseau describes a paradoxical figure, a musician whose physiological ap-
titudes (hearing, mechanical technique) are efficiently trained, but who still
feels uncomfortable when required to sight-read the score; paradoxical, yes,
though quite a frequent category of musician, and there is of course the echo
of his personal experience behind these lines.140
The final aim of Rousseau’s attempt to renew musical notation was to
attain immediate understanding of the musical work as a whole. With his new
notation, he intended to make the whole work perceptible in one glance. The
new notation he had proposed in 1742 would have transmitted not only
universal value but also expressive immediacy; indeed, in his utopian character-
ization of it, the new notation would even be “easier than the ordinary lan-
guage,” and hence would not remain a mystery to the general public. But
here Rousseau’s vocabulary reveals a remarkable twist, for it seems to imply
that his system or method of notation is the language itself, and not just a set of
signs transcribing it:
138. Simon, “Singing Democracy,” 434.

139. “La premiére [sorte de vice] est la multitude des signes et de leurs combinaisons qui sur-
chargent inutilement l’esprit et la mémoire de Commençans, de façon que l’oreille étant formée,
et les organes ayant acquis toute la facilité nécessaire longtems avant qu’on soit en état de chanter
à livre ouvert, il s’ensuit que la difficulté est toute dans l’observation des régles, et nullement dans
l’éxécution du chant.” Rousseau, Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 173–74; trans. adapted
from Dissertation on Modern Music, 38–39.
140. An episode in the Confessions recalls how one of his young pupils constantly teased him
by playing at sight. Rousseau’s main activity in the 1730s was divided between giving music
lessons to beginners and working as a music copist (see Les confessions, bk. 4, p. 148); his fascina-
tion with the musician Venture is also largely indebted to the latter’s capacity for sight-reading
(ibid., bk. 3, p. 124).
In composing do you want to paint for the eyes the relationship of your parts,
the progression of your chords, and the whole ordering of your harmony? The
practice of my system fulfills all this, and I conclude, finally, that to consider my
method only as like that special language of the Egyptian priests [. . .], it would
still be infinitely useful for initiates in Music, with this difference, that instead of
being more difficult, it would be easier than the ordinary language, and in con-
sequence, could not for long remain a mystery to the public.141
Of course, such a twist—if intentional—reveals Rousseau’s longing for the

unattainable ideal of a notation that would render music without the media-
tion of signs: a fully transparent notation. Given how aware Rousseau was of
the limitations of his own system, and how willing he was to find the most nat-
ural signs, it is curious that he chose the numerals, which he explains by insist-
ing that “men will never find characters as convenient or natural as numerals
alone to express the sounds and all their relationships.”142 The choice of nu-
merals seems paradoxical, and even in contradiction to Rousseau’s intention
to avoid the most artificial signs. Because music must unavoidably be notated
with signs, then one must choose signs whose naturalness reveals, paradoxi-
cally, the very artificiality of this system. The numeral is itself the sign of a
sign—the number—which is in turn itself the sign of the mathematical pro-
portion of a sound: “Numerals being the expression that has been given to
numbers and the numbers themselves being the exponents of the generation
of sounds, nothing is so natural as the expression of the various signs by the
numerals of arithmetic.”143 (emphasis added) At its best, Rousseau’s new
notation is a lesser evil.
The ideal score for Rousseau implies a reciprocal and necessarily active rela-
tionship with the musician, whose ear and sensibility must compensate for the
lack of the information. In the article ACCOMPAGNEMENT from the Encyclo-
pédie, Rousseau transformed the figure of the Italian musician into a myth of
ideal communication, in which the mediation of the score is collapsed to the
point that the score becomes redundant. This argument culminates in the
discussion of figured bass notation, in which figures play a prominent role in
141. “Voulez-vous en composant peindre aux yeux le raport de vos parties, le progrès de vos
accords, et tout l’état de votre harmonie? La pratique de mon systême satisfait à tout cela, et je
conclus enfin qu’à ne considérer ma méthode que comme cette langue particuliére des Prêtres
Egyptiens [. . .], elle seroit encore infiniment inutile aux initiés dans la Musique, avec cette differ-
ence, qu’au lieu d’être plus difficile, elle seroit plus aisée que la langue ordinaire, et ne pourroit,
par conséquent, être longtems un mystére pour le public.” Rousseau, Dissertation sur la musique
moderne, “Préface,” 163; trans. adapted from Dissertation on Modern Music, 32.
142. “J’ose dire que les hommes ne trouveront jamais de caractéres convenables ni naturels
que les seuls chiffres pour exprimer les sons et tous leurs raports.” Rousseau, Dissertation sur la
musique moderne, 171; Dissertation on Modern Music, 36.
143. “Les chiffres étant l’expression qu’on a données aux nombres, et les nombres eux-
mêmes étant les exposans de la génération des sons, rien n’est si naturel que l’expression des divers
sons par les chiffres de l’Arithmétique.” Rousseau, Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 171;
Dissertation on Modern Music, 36.
conveying harmonic information: “Italians scorn figures; the score itself is

hardly necessary to them; the promptness and the sharpness of their ear substi-
tutes for it, and they accompany very well without all this apparatus [. . .].”144
Rousseau’s interest in musical notation is still quite noticeable here—and it did
not fade after the Querelle des Bouffons. But scholarship has neglected this:
because of their practical nature, Rousseau’s Projet and the Dissertation from
1741–42 have not received the same attention as Rousseau’s later writings on
music—except for studies related to the history of solmisation and issues on
eighteenth-century musical pedagogy. His new system proved to be a failure
and was never adopted, except by Rousseau himself; nonetheless, both texts
mark a decisive step toward his later elaborations on music, language, and
writing that would take full shape in the Essai sur l’origine des langues and the
Dictionnaire de musique. Whether through a new musical notation or
through the “unité de mélodie,” Rousseau sought clarity and unmediated un-
derstanding between the listener and the source of listening and between the
performer and the musical score. Rousseau’s musings on musical notation re-
flect his lifelong obsession with simplicity and clarity; it also explains his rejec-
tion of anything that could divert the attention: the “throng of signs,” as he
expressively puts it, and the figures of bass notation endanger the communica-
tive immediacy between the performer or listener and the score by imposing a
dangerous visual mediation.145 His new notation not only aimed to perfect
the transparency of the musical score before the performer, but also to pre-
serve the transmission of the musical expression intended by the composer.
Rousseau’s early musings on notation also raised an issue that would be-
come increasingly problematic during the nineteenth century: confrontations
between the genius of the performer and the musical text that provoked ques-
tions concerning the limits on a performer’s freedom to render a musical
work. This is what Mary Hunter has nicely described as “the spiritual exercise
involved in interpretative performance,”146 and although Hunter is keen to re-
inforce the Austro-German background of this idea, Rousseau’s influence in
the nineteenth century was considerable, as can be seen in this passage from
Pierre Baillot’s L’art du violon (1835): “An abundance of signs is favorable
to music in that it can prevent many false readings [contresens] [. . .] but it can
144. “Les Italiens méprisent les chiffres; la partition même leur est peu nécessaire; la prompti-
tude & la finesse de leur oreille y supplée, & ils accompagnent fort bien sans tout cet appareil
[. . .].” Rousseau, article ACCOMPAGNEMENT, in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie,
1 [1751]:75; trans. adapted from ACCOMPANIMENT, in Articles from the Encyclopedia, 198.
145. Elisabeth Le Guin evokes “Rousseau’s anti-visuality” in this specific case of the per-
former confronted with the score, quoting Rousseau’s entry EXÉCUTION in the Dictionnaire de
musique: “[the performer must play] the thing itself instead of the sign”—the thing being “the
music itself,” and the sign, its graphic notation. Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in
Carnal Musicology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 138.
146. Mary Hunter, “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the
Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics,” this Journal 58 (2005): 365.
end up extinguishing the genius of performance, which delights in divining and

creating its own way. This inconvenience can be avoided by studying old music
[. . .]; this always leaves a wide field open where the imagination may exercise
itself.”147 (emphasis added)
Reshaping our understanding of Rousseau’s musical conception and re-
assessing its reception during the nineteenth century must then include a
reconsideration of his early texts on musical notation. Tellingly, Rousseau still
went back to these issues in his very last writing on music, the Lettre à
M. Burney 148 (written as late as 1776–77; published posthumously in 1781),
in which the “testament” value of the document is enhanced by the fact that
Rousseau revisits all the main issues that have obsessed him in relation to
music (music and language, French opera, the uses of recitative by Gluck and
in his own Pygmalion149). Such texts show a remarkable coherence and conti-
nuity in his musical quest that cannot be simply reduced to a background
polemic between “French music vs. Italian music” that would eventually
culminate in the “unité de mélodie.”
Conclusion
As we have seen, the very roots of the “unité de mélodie” find their origins
well before the start of the Querelle des Bouffons and Rousseau’s belief in the
supremacy of Italian music, and this despite the fact that the expression itself,
“unité de mélodie,” was coined only after Rousseau had formulated the con-
cept. It was already known to him in an intuitive way in the 1740s through its
perfect antithesis, the multiplication of parts (in music) and signs (in writing),
which in both cases generated an “attention partagée.” The “unité de
mélodie” made its first explicit appearance only in the 1753 Lettre sur la
147. “L’abondance des signes est favorable à la musique en ce qu’elle peut empêcher bien des
contre sens [. . .], mais elle pourrait finir par éteindre le génie d’exécution qui se plait surtout à
deviner, à créer à sa manière. On évitera cet inconvénient en étudiant la musique ancienne [. . .]:
elle laissera toujours à l’imagination un vaste champ pour s’exercer.” Pierre Baillot, L’art du violon
(Paris: Imprimerie du Conservatoire de Musique, 1835; facsim. ed., Courlay, France: Fuzeau,
2001), 162; quoted in Hunter, “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer,’ ” 365. Trans.
slightly adapted from The Art of the Violin, trans. and ed. Louise Goldberg (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1991), 287.
148. Rousseau, Lettre à M. Burney et Fragmens d’observations sur l’Alceste de Gluck, in vol. 5
of Œuvres complètes 434–37; trans. as Letter to Mr. Burney and Fragments of Observations on
Gluck’s “Alceste,” in vol. 7 of Collected Writings, 486–89.
149. Rousseau wrote the libretto (a theatrical monologue) in 1760; later in April 1770
Horace Coignet wrote the music under Rousseau’s guidance. Qualified as a “scène lyrique” by
Rousseau, the work nevertheless launched the European vogue of late eighteenth-century melo-
drama characterized by spoken declamation interspersed with musical ritornellos, precisely follow-
ing the model of the accompanied recitative, as explained by Rousseau in his Fragmens
d’observations sur l’Alceste, 446–49; Fragments of Observations on Gluck’s “Alceste,” 495–97.
musique françoise—as if the turning point of the years 1752–53, during which
Rousseau radicalized his pro-Italian position, obliged him to fabricate new
arms.
Before it was retooled as a universal—and anti-French—musical principle,
the “unité de mélodie” was first and foremost an attempt to theorize
Rousseau’s own autobiographical experience and his confrontation with the
musical act, whether through listening or performance. In Rousseau’s own
writings, the mysterious illness of 1736 is certainly the oldest evocation of
such a confrontation, and one described in particularly dramatic terms: forced
to live with this inner noise, Rousseau suffered the degradation of his listening
capacities, which damaged and corrupted the perception of any music he
listened to. Read as a metaphor, this noise is an obstacle that threatens
Rousseau’s ability to communicate and participate in humanity; it also prefig-
ures his painful confrontations with Rameau’s music, virulently present in the
Lettre à M. Grimm and his subsequent writings. As Paul De Man has put it,
“the difference between a fictional and a theoretical text carries very little
weight in the case of Rousseau.”150 The thrust of my argument here is that
Rousseau is unprecedented in linking his own personal experiences (whatever
their level of fictionalization) to his theoretical conception of music. The im-
pact of Rousseau’s autobiography can be fully perceived in the elaboration of
his musical views: that the “unité de mélodie” can be grasped from the
autobiographical episode of his illness, and that his hearing of the Genevan
psalms was incorporated in the Dictionnaire de musique are both telling
instances—among many others—of the conflation between his musical
thought and his personal experience. If the multiple layers of meaning offered
by Rousseau’s autobiographical and theoretical texts easily explain the fascina-
tion they exert on literary scholars and historians of ideas, Rousseau’s musical
discourse remains for our discipline excessively shadowed, if not polluted, by
autobiography and the literary creation of his fictional persona.151 Yet it is pre-
cisely this inextricable intertwining of autobiographical experience and the
practice and theory of music in the Enlightenment that uniquely defines
Rousseau’s aesthetics. Throughout his life, his musical experience was marked
by the tension between a desire for transparency, which allows for the pure
and unaltered transmission of expression between musician and listener, and
150. Paul de Man, “Political Allegory in Rousseau,” Critical Inquiry 2 (1976): 650.
151. This also explains why the reception of Rousseau’s musical thought in the eighteenth
century and beyond, not to mention his reception in the Austro-German area, from the Früh-
romantiker to Nietzsche, are topics nearly still unexplored in current musicological studies. There
are a few exceptions, notably Alexander Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau,” and Elisabeth Le Guin’s
recent book in which she reassesses Rousseau’s contributions to the field of eighteenth-century
performance practice (Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, esp. 24–25, 138). On the influence of
Rousseau’s Essay on the origin of languages on Beethoven, see Stephen Rumph, “Beethoven and
the Ut Pictura Poësis Tradition,” Beethoven Forum 12 (2005): 113–50.
the crude reality of an obstacle, embodied in his own difficulties when learning
and practicing music and exemplified by his desperate attempts to understand
“Rameau’s obscure treatises” and his inability to become a fluent sight reader.
The “unité de mélodie” and the listening attitude it involves are also symp-
tomatic of Rousseau’s response to the new paradigm in which music was un-
derstood not as meaningless, but as excessively meaningful: the rise of this new
paradigm must be related to the progressive acceptance, particularly complex
in eighteenth-century France, of instrumental music. Tracing back the origins
of the “unité de mélodie” leads then to a typical Rousseauan phobia: the fear
of the sign, or more precisely, the fear of its endless multiplication. This fear
encompasses not only the signs of writing and musical notation, but also the
signs of music itself, to which Rousseau clearly refers in his Essai sur l’origine
des langues: “The sounds of a melody do not act on us solely as sounds, but
as signs of our affections, of our feelings; it is in this way that they excite in us
the emotions they express, whose image we recognize in them.”152 (emphasis
added) The affective signs conveyed by melody can be understood only
through the experience of listening, as an act of recognition, and thus of com-
munication. Rousseau’s fear of polyphony is motivated by a refusal of the
sonic polysemy produced by an excess of melodic parts and its resultant—and
frightening—excess of signs. Because of its polysemy, music does not offer im-
mediately itself to the listener; rather, the understanding of music must unfold
in time and at a certain cost—the sustained and undivided attention of the lis-
tener, something only the “unité de mélodie” can preserve.
Rousseau’s rejection of the intense production and codification of signs
that characterized the Enlightenment led him to look deeply into the obscure
mirror of the score and its interplay with listening and performing music. No
one before him had interrogated the nature of musical communication with
such urgency: despite much wavering between autobiography and fiction, the
account of Jean-Jacques’s illness provides the metaphorical leitmotif of his
lifelong musical quest, illustrating the fundamental dualism of his thought
and how this impacted his conception of the nature of communication. In his
illness Rousseau described not only the erosion of his own capacity of listen-
ing, but the “deafness” of modern listeners lead astray from the “unité de
mélodie” by the deceitful supplément created by harmony. In so doing
Rousseau laid the foundations of a strikingly modern ontology of musical
experience, one with many implications for further understanding our modern
anxieties about listening and musical communication.
152. “Les sons dans la mélodie n’agissent pas seulement sur nous comme sons, mais comme
signes de nos affections, de nos sentiments; c’est ainsi qu’ils excitent en nous les mouvemens
qu’ils expriment et dont nous y reconnoissons l’image.” Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues,
chap. 15, “Que nos plus vives sensations agissent souvent par des impressions morales,” 417;
trans. adapted from Essay on the Origin of Languages, 323.
Works Cited
Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Collected writings:
Œuvres complètes. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al. 5 vols. Paris:
Gallimard, 1959–1995.
vol. 1: Les confessions. Autres textes autobiographiques. 1959.
—Les confessions, 3–656.
vol. 4: Émile—éducation—morale—botanique. 1969.
—Émile, ou de l’éducation, 241–868.
vol. 5: Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre. 1995.
—Dictionnaire de musique. Edited by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, 605–1191.
—Dissertation sur la musique moderne. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and
Sidney Kleinman, 167–245.
—Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation
musicale. Edited by Jean Starobinski, 375–429.
—Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau dans sa brochure inti-
tulée “Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie.” Edited by Olivier
Pot, 349–66.
—Extrait d’une reponse du petit faiseur à son prête-nom, sur un morceau de
l’Orphée de Gluck. Edited by Olivier Pot, 461–65.
—Lettre à M. Burney et Fragmens d’observations sur l’Alceste de Gluck. Edited
by Olivier Pot, 433–57.
—Lettre à M. Grimm, au sujet des remarques ajoutées à sa Lettre sur Omphale.
Edited by Olivier Pot, 261–74.
—Lettre sur la musique françoise. Edited by Olivier Pot, 289–328.
—Lettre sur l’opéra italien et français. Edited by Olivier Pot, 249–57.
—Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique. Edited by Bernard
Gagnebin and Sidney Kleinman, 129–54.
The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly.
12 vols. Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2006.
vol. 7: Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Translated
and edited by John T. Scott. 1998.
—Articles from the Encylopedia, 198–221.
—Dictionary of Music [Selections], 366–485.
—Dissertation on Modern Music, 27–98.
—Essay on the Origin of Languages, 289–332.
—Examination of Two Principles Advanced by M. Rameau in His Brochure
Entitled: “Errors on Music in the Encyclopedia,” 271–88.
—Extract from a Response by the Underlaborer to His Frontman concerning a
Piece from Gluck’s “Orfeo,” 506–9.
—Letter on French Music, 141–74.
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—Letter to Mr. Burney and Fragments of Observations on Gluck’s “Alceste,”
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—Plan Regarding New Signs for Music, 1–20.
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Abstract
Introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter on French music (1753),

“unité de mélodie” has commonly been understood as a technical rule assert-
ing the primacy of melody over all the other musical parameters. It is the key
concept of Rousseau’s musical thought. Yet studies on eighteenth-century for-
mulations of musical unity have paid only scant attention to Rousseau’s dis-
cussions of it, explaining its presence in his œuvre as a symptom of the growing
influence of the style galant in France. Drawing on Rousseau’s autobiographi-
cal and theoretical writings, this essay investigates the genesis of the “unité de
mélodie,” beginning with its rhetorical roots and the influence of Friedrich-
Melchior Grimm’s notion of the musical “contresens.” But Rousseau’s own
autobiography is also key to understanding his intellectual approach to music.
I argue that the “unité de mélodie” originated well before the years 1752–53,
and that it is inextricably linked with Rousseau’s preoccupation with writing
and musical notation, a preoccupation motivated by his search for musical
texts that would allow for direct comprehension, whether through listening or
through score reading. Finally, in the concept of “unité de mélodie,” we can
see how Rousseau made a seminal contribution to late eighteenth-century
French theoretical discourses on musical periodicity and on the importance of
melody in establishing form.
Keywords: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “unity of melody,” style galant, listening,

musical notation

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "unité de mélodie"

Author(s): Jacqueline Waeber

American Musicological Society, University of California Press are collaborating with

It is a pleasure to acknowledge my former colleague at Trinity College Dublin, Michael

Intriguingly, Rousseau’s illness provides a definition a contrario of the

“Unité de mélodie,” style galant, and the Rise of Musical

Since scholars have understood “unité de mélodie” strictly as the notion of a

is essentially a discussion of eighteenth-century German concepts concerning the “musikalische

Given Rousseau’s own history of the concept, it is hardly astonishing that

years later, in the Dictionnaire de musique, the rule—a codified prescription,

musique française,” in Histoire de la musique: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, ed. Roland-Manuel,

The development of polyphony clearly endangered the clarity of melody:

Even without a systematic use of the expression “unité de mélodie,” com-

Lettre à M. Grimm (April 1752) to refer to Rameau’s excessively complex and

tracted the attention of Rousseau’s contemporaries. These consequences

Chastellux’s defense of Italian music is similar to Grimm’s arguments in his

The Origins of the “unité de mélodie”: “Contresens”

43. For an overview, see Schwartz, “Conceptions of Musical Unity.”

to Grimm, the composer Destouches failed to maintain the poetic unity in

Example 1 André-Cardinal Destouches, Omphale, act 2, scene 5: monologue d’Argine (from

As Diderot would explain later through the voice of Rameau’s nephew,

Grimm’s conception of the “contresens”—still restricted to vocal music—

55. “Voulez-vous un exemple du contresens le plus parfait? Le voici. Le Poëte dit:

Similar to the second case of “contresens” stressed by Grimm, d’Alembert

72. Schwartz, “Conceptions of Musical Unity,” 64.

These examples of “contresens” discussed so far concern only vocal music,

which speaks to the heart [. . .].”77 Interestingly, and in a manner typical of

“Attention partagée” and “duplicité de mélodie”

“basse fondamentale”84—for Rousseau a sine qua non condition was that

84. See Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 275.

hearing of Psalms is reminiscent of an experience described by Saint-

plored that there was no “pleasure of Melody and Song,” Saint-Évremond

Communication and Listening

Although the story is much less dramatic, Jean-Jacques’s account of hearing

102. Ibid., 67 and 69.

Rousseau’s auditory illness must be deciphered in the light of these musical

“Unité de mélodie” ad absurdum: The Praise of the Unison

If modern harmony represents such an inevitable danger, then what would be

Encyclopédie (vol. 17) Dictionnaire de musique

Rousseau’s bafflement is easy to see in the lines of the Encyclopédie article,

harmony than French music. Rousseau was not immune to contradiction

harmonically as belonging to the key of C minor). Here Rousseau

“. . . a throng of signs . . .” The Obstacle of Musical Notation

The deconstructive mechanics of the supplément at work in Rousseau’s con-

“distinctly democratic impulse”138—and one thinks of the decisive turning

138. Simon, “Singing Democracy,” 434.

Of course, such a twist—if intentional—reveals Rousseau’s longing for the

conveying harmonic information: “Italians scorn figures; the score itself is

end up extinguishing the genius of performance, which delights in divining and

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. Translated by

Noll, Günther. “Untersuchungen über die musikerzieherische Bedeutung Jean-

Introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter on French music (1753),

Keywords: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “unity of melody,” style galant, listening,

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