4 - Musical Discovery in the Age of Enlightenment: History, Theory and the Academy of Ancient Music

Summary

Our story so far of the academicians’ performance of old and new music as part of a prescient agenda to advance the art of music clearly assigns them a position of considerable interest and importance in eighteenth-century English culture. In this chapter we will widen our gaze to explore further the intellectual contexts that moulded the academicians’ ambitions, and their very real engagement with that intellectual and social phenomenon nowadays associated with modernity, the Enlightenment. To proceed, we must first consider what is meant by that term which, bearing no universally agreed definition, must be handled with due care. Initially so-named in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment has until recently been associated principally with the polemical and intellectual thought of Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and other Francophile philosophes (the term through which they referred to themselves, meaning ‘lovers of knowledge’). The common aspirations that united this otherwise diverse group grew from their outright rejection of old mysticisms and received truths, and their commitment to rational enquiry and criticism. A focus for this agenda was provided by that colossal publishing project the Encyclopédie (1751–72), edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, which sought a modern and scientific treatment of all spheres of knowledge. Underlying their quest was a belief that the acquisition of rational knowledge would empower mankind in the widest sense to escape the bounds of all authority, intellectual and political. Indeed, it is now widely argued that the broader agenda for social and political reform that motivated the philosophes contributed ultimately to the French Revolution in 1789.

Although the Academy’s agenda does indeed resonate with the imperative for individual enquiry that characterised the age, it is according to the more holistic view taken in recent discussion of the Enlightenment that the Academy’s work is meaningfully seen. In this, Great Britain (whose role has traditionally been minimised in Paris-focussed accounts) plays a more prominent part as the seed-bed, not of political revolution, but of an outburst in human enquiry amongst its reading public at large. Studies by Roy Porter, John Brewer and others have shown how a publishing revolution of newspapers, novels, histories and all manner of scientific and theoretical works synergised with a voracious British appetite for knowledge that led Voltaire himself to describe England as a ‘nation of philosophers’.