EDITORIAL

Extract

‘Music and …’ is the concluding topic in Ludmilla Jordanova’s editorial in an earlier issue of this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 153–155), and in reverse it will be the starting-point in mine. I fell into writing about music as an active amateur (and briefly professional) cellist with a background in theory consisting of a year’s tutoring in old-fashioned species counterpoint as an unruly fourteen-year-old. In the autumn of 1979 I was writing about the origins of reverie – that is, of representations and discussions of unfocused or unconscious awareness – in writings of the 1780s, chiefly by Rousseau, Kant and William Cowper. It occurred to me that the drifting sensibility I was describing was perfectly captured by the introduction to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. It started as a footnote, but finally required a small essay to define the contexts and work out the details. Then, however, I could invoke the representation of a state of feeling not encumbered by the rational straitjacket of concepts. Whether they knew it or not – Kant certainly didn’t, Rousseau at some level certainly did – music was what my authors were after!