Introduction

Summary

Music was a favorite topic of the siècle des lumières: the list of writers who touch upon music – whether novelists, philosophes, pamphleteers, or essayists – is virtually endless. As Condillac noted in his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, “music is an art of which every man thinks himself a judge”. Writers of all molds not only discussed and judged musical compositions, but also recognized recent music theory, particularly that of Jean-Philippe Rameau, as entirely unprecedented in its scope and analytic vision. In the “Discours Préliminaire” to the Encyclopédic, d'Alembert comments that “of all these arts, music is perhaps the one that has made the most progress in the past fifteen years”. A fashionable topic of polite conversation and controversy in high society, music also held out the promise of becoming a truly “philosophic” art. Indeed, the history of philosophical reflections on music through the end of the eighteenth century shows the importance of music in the conception and development of aesthetics: from d'Alembert's enthusiasm for music's recent progress, through Kant's view of music as a (secondary) art arousing indeterminate ideas incommensurate with cognition, to the “infinity” and “inexpressible longing” that characterize E. T. A. Hoffmann's conception of music as the most Romantic of all arts.