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ROUSSEAU'S AIR CHINOIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2021

NATHAN JOHN MARTIN
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Abstract

Among its various ancient and extra-European examples, the celebrated Plate N of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique includes a melody of Chinese provenance. Scholars have proposed three possible sources for the melody: Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and the Abbé Prévost. By synthesizing the known sources and introducing additional archival evidence I establish that Rousseau took the melody from Du Halde, not Prévost – and definitely not Amiot. Along the way, I provide an account of Amiot's extant manuscripts and their circulation in Enlightenment Paris. These details begin to suggest the broader panorama of the French Enlightenment's encounter with China and the networks of trade, diplomacy and proselytization that facilitated it.

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Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 41 - 64
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was read at the conference ‘Music between China and the West in the Age of Discovery’, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 14–16 May 2018. I am grateful to the participants in that event for their criticisms, comments and suggestions, as well as to Jen-yen Chen, Thomas Irvine, David R. M. Irving, W. Dean Sutcliffe and this journal's anonymous readers for their feedback. All translations from French are my own.

References

1 As was common in eighteenth-century publishing, the editio princeps, published by Duchesnes's widow, appeared in November 1767, despite the date of 1768 on the title-page. See Dauphin, Claude, ed., Le ‘Dictionnaire de musique’ de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: une édition critique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 13Google Scholar.

2 I thank John Chun-fai Lam for bringing Goossens's composition to my attention in his paper ‘Ravel, Debussy and Parisian Sources of Chinese Pentatonicism since the Enlightenment’, read at the conference ‘Music between China and the West’. The most comprehensive retracings of these peregrinations currently available in print may be found in Roberto Leydi, ‘L’aria cinese da Du Halde a Hindemith: due secoli di fortune di un errore di stampa’, in Musica colta e musica populare: atti del convegno promosso dalla SIAE, Varazze, 8 e 9 giugno 1991 (no place: Società italiana degli autori ed editori, 1992), 45–65, and Lo, Kii-Ming, Turandot auf der Opernbühne (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), 77–113Google Scholar. On Weber's music for Turandot see also Listl, Paul, Weber als Ouvertürenkomponist (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch, 1936), 27–31Google Scholar; Kii-Ming Lo, ‘In Search for a Chinese Melody: Tracing the Source of Weber's Musik zu Turandot, Op. 37’, in Tradition and Its Future in Music: Report of SIMS 1990 Osaka, ed. Yosihiko Tokumaru, Makoto Ohmiya, Masakata Kanazawa, Osamu Yamaguti, Tuneko Tukitani, Akiko Takamatsu and Mari Shimosako (Osaka: Mita, 1991), 511–521. On the surprising role played by this and other Chinese melodies in nineteenth-century scholarship on Scottish music see Gelbart, Matthew, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Tchen, Ysia, La musique chinoise en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1974), 73–74Google Scholar.

4 Roberto Leydi, ‘Rousseau, pioniere dell'antropologia e dell'etnomusicologia’, in Parigi/Venezia: cultura, relazioni, influenze negli scambi intellettuali del Settecento, ed. Carlo Ossola (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 193; Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, eds, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: œuvres complètes, five volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), volume 5, 1773 (hereafter Œuvres complètes).

5 Georges Pire, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les relations de voyages’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 56/3 (1956), 360.

6 Nathan John Martin, ‘Lire le Dictionnaire de musique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: l'exemple de l'article “Dissonnance”’, Revue musicorum 17 (2016), 13–38. And in fact, not just in the Dictionnaire: Rousseau often operated by means of a kind of literary pastiche. A well-known example is the paragraph from Montesquieu's Esprit des lois in the First Discourse, discussed in Michel Launay, ‘Le Discours sur les science et les arts: Jean-Jacques Rousseau entre Mme Dupin et Montesquieu’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau et son temps, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1969), 93–103.

7 See the discussion in Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43–97.

8 I have commented elsewhere on what I take the stakes of this engagement to be, namely that Rousseau is interested in finding counterexamples to Jean-Philippe Rameau's presumptuous universalizing of what are in fact parochially French musical norms. See my discussion in Martin, ‘Les planches de musique de l’Encyclopédie: un manuscrit méconnu de Rousseau et ses enjeux ethnographiques’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie 48 (2013), 178–182. In making this claim, I am developing a thesis first advanced in Robert Wokler, ‘Rameau, Rousseau and the Essai sur l'origine des langues’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 117 (1974), 179–238.

9 Œuvres complètes de Voltaire/The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman and others, 199 volumes to date (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1968–), volume 12, Le siècle de Louis XIV (II): listes et ‘catalogue des écrivains’, ed. Diego Venturino (2017), 115. On Du Halde see in particular Isabelle Landry, La preuve par la Chine: la ‘Description’ de J.-B. du Halde, jésuite, 1735 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2002).

10 By way of an introduction to the available literature on this topic see Nicolas Standaert, ‘Jesuits in China’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 169–185.

11 The circulation of Chinese music and musical thought within Europe from Amiot to Adolph Bernhard Marx is surveyed in Thomas Irvine, Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

12 On Enlightenment ‘Egyptomania’ see Alexander Rehding, ‘Music-Historical Egyptomania, 1650–1950’, Journal of the History of Ideas 75 (2014), 545–580, and Alexander Rehding, ‘Die ägyptische Spieldose’, in Konstruktivität von Musikgeschichtsschreibung: Zur Formation musikbezogenen Wissens, ed. Sandra Danielczyk (Hildesheim: Olms, 2012), 11–31.

13 I discuss related aspects of this material in two forthcoming studies, currently in development: ‘The Discovery of the Fundamental Bass’ and as the first case study in ‘Towards a Global History of Music Theory’. I hope to work further on Amiot in coming years.

14 Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), vii; Sammons's remark curiously, and I suppose inadvertently, echoes Rousseau's own judgment on his Dictionnaire de musique: ‘This is less a finished dictionary than a collection of materials for a dictionary, which just awaits a better hand to be put to use’ (‘C'est ici moins un Dictionnaire en forme, qu'un recueil de matériaux pour un Dictionnaire, qui n'attendent qu'une meilleure main pour être employés’) (Œuvres complètes, volume 5, 605). While there is of course a degree of pro-forma literary self-deprecation to these protestations, I don't think that they are merely instances of Ernst Robert Curtius's ‘affected modesty’ topos; see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 83–85.

15 In particular, Lester Hu, ‘From Ut Re Mi to Fourteen-Tone Temperament: The Global Acoustemologies of an Early Modern Chinese Tuning Reform’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2019) and Shubing Jia, ‘The Dissemination of Western Music through Catholic Missions in High Qing China’ (PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 2012). I have also benefited greatly from conversations with Qingfan Jiang and Sheryl Chow, both of whose dissertations are in progress (at Columbia University and Princeton University respectively). On Zhu Zaiyu see Gene J. Cho, The Discovery of Musical Equal Temperament in China and Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 2003).

16 In the older literature see Camille de Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot et les derniers survivants de la mission française à Pekin (1750–1795) (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1915) and Aloys Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l'ancienne mission de Chine, 1552–1773 (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1932). Arnold Horrex Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin: The Jesuits at the Court of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942) retains its interest as a highly readable account of the French and Portuguese missions and their influence on eighteenth-century European culture, especially in England and France – even though it is superseded in most other respects by Catherine Jami, The Emperor's New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). By far the most comprehensive recent overview of Amiot's life and work is Michel Hermans, ‘Joseph-Marie Amiot: une figure de la rencontre de ‘l'autre’ au temps des Lumières’, in Les danses rituelles chinois d'après Joseph-Marie Amiot: aux sources de l'ethnochoréographie, ed. Yves Lenoir and Nicolas Standaert (Brussels: Éditions Lessius, 2005), 11–77. See also Ana Luísa Balmori-Padesca, ‘Os jesuítas e a música em Macau e Pequim: O caso do Pe. Joseph Marie Amiot S. J. (1718–1793)’, Revista portuguesa de musicologia 12 (2002), 129–160; and Irvine, Listening to China, 25–52. Other recent studies of Amiot are cited in the following notes, as their topics arise in the course of this article's text. I am aware, finally, that there is a wealth of scholarship on Amiot in Chinese that my own linguistic incapacities have not allowed me to profit from as yet. I thank Jen-yen Chen for drawing my attention to the following: 宫宏宇 [Gong, Hongyu], 钱德明、朱载堉与中国礼仪乐舞之西渐 [Qian Deming, Zhu Zaiyu yu Zhongguo liyi yuewu zhi xijian, Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Zhu Zaiyu and the Gradual Westernization of Chinese Ceremonial Music and Dance], 中央音樂學院學報 [Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan xuebao, Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music] 2/119 (2010), 91-97; 洪力行 [Hong, Li-Xing], 錢德明的《聖樂經譜》：本地化策略下的明清天主教聖樂 [Qian Deming de “Shengyue Jingpu”: Bendihua celüe xia de Mingqing tianzhujiao shengyue, Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot's Shengyue Jingpu: The Transformation of Catholic Sacred Music under the Inculturation Policy during the Ming and Qing Dynasties], 中央大學人文學報 [Zhongyang daxue renwen xuebao, National Central University Journal of Humanities] 45 (2011), 1-29; 李冉 (Li, Ran), 一位18世纪欧洲人眼中的中国音乐史 — 浅谈钱德明《中国古今音乐篇》中对中国音乐史的记录 [Yiwei 18 shiji ouzhouren yanzhong de zhongguo yinyueshi – Qiantan Qian Deming “Zhongguo Gujin yinyuepian” zhong dui Zhongguo yinyueshi de jilu, Chinese Music History in the Eyes of an Eighteenth-Century European: The Impact of Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot's Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, tant anciens que modernes on the Writing of Chinese Music History], 赤子 [Chizi, Newborn] 16 (2014); 龙云 [Long, Yun], 钱德明研究 — 18世纪一位处在中法文化交汇处的传教士 [Qian Deming yanjiu – 18 shiji yiwei chuzai Zhongfa wenhua jiaohuichu de chuanjiaoshi, Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot: A Missionary Outside the Current of Sino-French Cultural Interchange During the Eighteenth Century] (PhD dissertation, Beijing University, 2010); 余亚飞 (Yu, Yafei), 18世纪中国音乐文化在法国的传播 — 以来华传教士钱德明为例 [18 shiji Zhongguo yinyue wenhua zai Faguo de chuanbo – Yi laihua chuanjiaoshi Qian Deming weili, The Transmission of Chinese Music in France in the Eighteenth Century: The Activities of the Missionary Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot as Case Study), 天津音乐学院学报 [Tianjin yinyue xueyuan xuebao, Journal of the Tianjin Conservatory of Music] 4 (2013), 20–29.

17 I take these and other biographical details from Hermans, ‘Joseph-Marie Amiot’, 17–19, 21–22.

18 For a harrowing account of what travel to China from Europe by sea was like see Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1985), 64–80.

19 Roussier is himself a somewhat neglected figure who would warrant more sustained study. He played an important role in the dissemination of Rameau's theory of harmony in the later part of the eighteenth century through his Observations sur différents points d'harmonie (Geneva: Bailleux, 1755); his Traité des accords, et de leur succession; selon le systéme de la basse-fondamentale (Paris: Bailleux, 1764); and L'harmonie pratique, ou Exemples pour le Traité des accords (Paris, 1775). See the entry under his name in David Damschroder and David Russell Williams, Music Theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A Bibliography and Guide (New York: Pendragon, 1990). The Traité des accords receives interesting discussion in Steve Grazzini, ‘Rameau's Theory of Supposition and French Baroque Harmonic Practice’, Music Theory Spectrum 38/2 (2017), 155–177. There are occasional comments also in Erwin R. Jacobi, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Complete Theoretical Writings, six volumes (Rome: American Academy, 1967–1972). The best general overview of Roussier's theorizing is probably that given in Cynthia Gessele, ‘The Institutionalization of Music Theory in France: 1764–1802’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1989), 63–166, 171–172.

20 On Roussier's editorial interventions see Stewart Carter, ‘The Editor from Hell: Information and Misinformation on Chinese Music in Late Eighteenth-Century France’, in Music in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Mary Sue Morrow (Ann Arbor: Steglein, 2017), 23–47. On the relationship between Roussier and Amiot more generally see Michel Brix and Yves Lenoir, ‘Une lettre inédite du père Amiot à l'abbé Roussier (1781)’, Revue des archéologues et historiens d'art de Louvain 28 (1993), 63–74.

21 Jean-Philippe Rameau famously referred to Amiot's translation in the appendix (‘Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore’) to his Code de musique pratique (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1760), 189n.

22 Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, tant anciens que modernes (Paris: Nyon, 1779), 4–13.

23 Amiot, ‘Mémoire sur la musique des chinois’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds Bréquigny 2 and 13.

24 Michel Brix and Yves Lenoir, ‘Le supplément au Mémoires sur la musique des Chinois du père Amiot: édition commentée’, Revue des archéologues et historiens d'art de Louvain 30 (1997), 79–111.

25 Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, Paris, MS 1515–1517.

26 Brix and Lenoir, ‘Une lettre inédite’.

27 Rameau, Code, 189n, 191–192.

28 For example, Amiot, Mémoire, 12n.

29 Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, four volumes (Paris: Eugene Onfroy, 1780), volume 1, 144.

30 Tchen, Musique chinoise, 52–53. See also Roberto Leydi, ‘L’aria cinese’, 49, and Jim Levy, ‘Joseph Amiot and the Enlightenment Speculation of the Origin of Pythagorean Tuning in China’, Theoria 4 (1989), 64, note 3.

31 Tchen, Musique chinoise, 73; despite what Tchen says on this page, Rameau had in fact mentioned the air indirectly on page 193 of the Code.

32 On La Borde's studies with Rameau see Thomas Christensen, ‘L'Art de la basse fondamentale’, Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987), 20, note 9.

33 La Borde, Essai, volume 1, 143–144.

34 La Borde, Essai, volume 1, 145–146.

35 François-Joseph Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, second edition, eight volumes (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1860–1865; reprinted Brussels: Culture et civilisation, 1963), volume 1 (1860), 90.

36 Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14.

37 Rameau, Code de musique pratique (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1760), 189n.

38 ‘Rameau himself’, Amiot complains, ‘makes me speak of a fire that occurred, he implies, 2277 years before Jesus Christ, whereas the fire that I was speaking of, or better, the fire about which the editor of the book that I was translating was speaking of, was a fire that consumed the private house of the author, whose writings fell prey to the flames; in a word, a fire that happened, so to speak, in our times’. (‘Rameau lui-même . . . me fait parler d'un incendie arrivé, à ce qu'il fait entendre, 2277 ans avant Jesus-Christ, tandis que l'incendie dont je parle, ou pour mieux dire, dont parle l'Editeur de l'ouvrage que je traduisois, n'est qu'un incendie particulier, un incendie qui consuma la maison de l'Auteur, dont les ecrits devinrent la proie des flames; en un mot, un incendie arrivé, pour ainsi dire, de nos jours’.) Amiot, Mémoire, 11.

39 And so admirers of Amiot's later writings must simply accept with embarrassment that the absurd speculations on the damage to Chinese ears caused by the cold, and so on, are his. On the various Chinese instruments that Amiot shipped back to France see François Picard, ‘Joseph-Marie Amiot, jésuite française à Pékin, et le cabinet de curiosités de Bertin’, Musique, images, instruments: revue française d'organologie et d'iconographie musicale 8 (2006), 68–85, and also Picard, ‘Crossing Stages, Crossing Countries, Crossing Times: Instrumental Qupai in European Scholarship’, in Qupai in Chinese Music: Melodic Models in Form and Practice, ed. Alan Thrasher (New York: Routledge, 2016), 53–72.

40 Arnaud, ‘Traduction manuscrite d'un Livre sur l'ancienne Musique Chinoise, composé par Ly-koang-ty, Docteur & Membre du premier Tribunal des Lettrés de l'Empire, Ministre, &c’. Journal étranger (October 1761), 5–36; reprinted in Arnaud and Suard, Variétés littéraires (Paris: Lacombe, 1768), volume 1, 273–311.

41 Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, ‘Cantilenae Sinicae signis Europeis expressae’, Royal Society, London, Letters and Papers, II, 422.

42 ‘Everything that that I am going to report is taken from a memoir by the Reverend Father Amiot, a learned Jesuit who has lived in China for almost thirty years, and to whom the world of letters has a great obligation, for all the knowledge that we owe to him about that country, which is as poorly known as it is interesting to know.

After the chapter went into press, I discovered in the second volume of the Variétés littéraires that the better part of this memoir by Father Amiot had been printed.’

(‘Tout ce que nous allons rapporter, est tiré d'un Mémoire du Révérand Pere Amiot, savant Jésuite qui habite la Chine depuis près de trente ans, & à qui les Lettres ont de grandes obligations, pour toutes les connaissances que nous lui devons sur cette contrée, aussi mal connue, que curieuse à connaître.

Après avoir donné ce Chapitre à l'impression, nous avons trouvé dans le second volume des variétés littéraires, que la plus grande partie de ce Mémoire du P. Amiot y avait été imprimée.’) La Borde, Essai, volume 1, 360, note (a).

43 François Picard's forthcoming article on ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’ should, I hope, resolve many of these mysteries. See also François Picard, ‘Amiot’, in Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. François Poillon (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 14–15.

44 For details see Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Introduction to the Dictionnaire de musique, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: œuvres complètes, volume 5, cclxxii.

45 For the evidence supporting this dating see Nathan John Martin, ‘An Unknown Rousseau Autograph: The Neuchâtel Manuscript of NOTES, en Musique’, in Architecture, Cultural History, Autobiography, ed. Jonathan Mallinson, SVEC [Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century] 2008/06 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), 313–314, note 5.

46 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau: juge de Jean-Jacques, in Œuvres complètes, volume 1, 680.

47 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Musique’, in Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des métiers, seventeen volumes, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton and Durand, 1751–1765), volume 10, 902 (my italics in the translation). The passage reappears with only superficial alterations in the entry ‘Musique’ in the Dictionnaire de musique, in Œuvres complètes, volume 5, 923.

48 Rousseau's autographs of the Encyclopédie entries are mostly lost, but the one that does survive – namely that of ‘NOTES, en Musique’ – contains such references, which suggests that they were not (or at least not all) added subsequently by the editors. See Martin, ‘An Unknown Rousseau Autograph’.

49 On this manuscript see Martin, ‘Les planches de musique de l’Encyclopédie’, 115–136.

50 Royal Society, London, Journal Copy Book, volume 21, fols 281–283. See Hermans, ‘Amiot’, 27.

51 Rameau, Code, 189n.

52 In all likelihood it was somewhat later than that. Amiot arrived in Beijing, as noted above, during the summer of 1751. The description of Beijing in winter that begins on page 117 of the manuscript, however, sounds first-hand. Also, the manuscript's very opening – ‘After having provided as exact an acquaintance as I was able to with the music that the Chinese cultivated in ancient times’ (‘Après avoir donné une connoissance aussi exacte qu'il ma été possible de la Musique que les Chinois cultivoient anciennement’) – suggests that ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’ postdates Amiot's lost translation of Li Guangdi, assuming that that translation is indeed the intended reference. Lastly, in the preliminary discourse to his Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois (page 3), Amiot indicates that the impetus for his study of Chinese music came from his superior Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759), who was based in Beijing. In a letter sent from Beijing to the Royal Society in London, dated 30 October 1751, Gaubil mentions Amiot's arrival and his intention to study Chinese music. See Antoine Gaubil, Correspondance de Pékin, 1722–1759, ed. Renée Simon (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 642–644. The original letter is in the British Library (MS Add. 4439, no 526/190). A translation of the letter follows the manuscript ‘Cantilenae Sinicae signis Europeis expressae’ in the archives of the Royal Society (Letters & Papers, II, 422). A second letter from Gaubil, dated 5 November 1751, appears to be the covering letter accompanying Amiot's transcriptions. I suppose, on the grounds of the much fuller treatment therein, that ‘De la musique moderne’ postdates these transcriptions. The original of the second letter is likewise in the British Library (MS Add. No 4439, 530/198).

53 Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Neuchâtel, fonds Du Peyrou, MS R. 55, fol. 488r.

54 Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, in Œuvres complètes, volume 5, 686.

55 Ferdinand Verbiest, Astronomia europæa sub imperatore Tartaro Sinico Cám Hy’ (Dillingen: Johan Caspar Bencard, 1687), 89–90; trans. Noel Golvers as The ‘Astronomia europaea’ of Ferdinand Verbiest, S. J. (Dillingen, 1687): Text, Translation, Notes and Commentaries (Nettetal: Steyler, 1993), 129.

56 Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, four volumes (La Haye: Henri Scheurleer, 1736), volume 3, 328–332. (This work was first published in Paris by Le Mercier in 1735.) An English translation of the passage in question is available in Strunk's Source Readings in Music History, ed. Leo Treitler and others, seven volumes (New York: Norton, 1998), volume 4, 725–729.

57 On this point see Zhang Na, La pensée musicale de Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Chine (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2018). And see, more generally, François Picard, ‘Oralité et notations, de Chine en Europe’, Cahiers d'ethnomusicologie 12 (1999), 35–53.

58 On Rousseau's relations with the Dupins in the 1740s more generally see Jean-Pierre Le Bouler, ‘Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743: essai de chronologie critique’, Études de Jean-Jacques Rousseau 4 (1990), and Le Bouler, ‘La “déclaration” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Madame Dupin: d'après une copie inédite’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 81 (1981), 431–437.

59 Rousseau, Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, volume 1, 341.

60 Claude Dupin, Réflexions sur quelques parties d'un livre intitué De l'esprit des loix (Paris, 1749), and Observations sur un livre intitué de l'esprit des loix (Paris, c1755). In 2004 Claude Dupin's manuscript was discovered by Cecil Courtney: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, Seligman MS./1750–51/Dupin. Dupin's critique has been much discussed in the secondary literature on Montesquieu: see Alexis François, ‘Rousseau, les Dupin, Montesquieu’, Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 30 (1943–1945), 47–64; Robert Shackleton, ‘Montesquieu, Dupin and the Early Writings of Rousseau’, in Reappraisals of Rousseau: Studies in Honour of R. A. Leigh, ed. Simon Harvey, Marian Hobson, David Kelley and Samuel S. B. Taylor (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1980), 234–249; and Charles Porset, ‘Madame Dupin et Montesquieu, ou les infortunes de la vertu’, in Actes du colloque international tenu à Bordeaux, du 3 au 6 décembre 1998, ed. Louis Desgraves (Bordeaux: Académie de Bordeaux, 1999), 287–306.

61 Bibliothèque de Genève, MS R. 162. The Institutions chymiques were first edited by Maurice Gautier and published in two volumes of the Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 12 (1918–1919), 1–164 and 13 (1920–1921), 3–178. A more recent edition by Bruno Bernardi (Paris: Fayard, 1999) is also available. On the position of the work in Rousseau's œuvre and in eighteenth-century chemistry see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Bruno Bernardi, ‘Pour situer les Institutions chimiques’, Corpus: Revue de philosophie 36 (1999), 5–39. And on Rousseau's relationship to the eighteenth-century sciences more generally see Bensaude-Vincent and Bernardi, eds, Rousseau et les sciences (Paris: L'Hamattan, 2003).

62 The title is due to Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert, who first described the work in print in Le Portefeuille de Madame Dupin (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1884).

63 Some scholars, though, have tried to recuperate an early, feminist Rousseau. See Jean-Pierre Le Bouler, ‘Sur les écrits “féministes” de Rousseau’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 199 (1981), 225–236, and Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘The Early Rousseau's Egalitarian Feminism: A Philosophical Convergence with Madame Dupin and The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’, History of European Ideas 43/7 (2017), 732–744.

64 Prior to being auctioned, the papers were catalogued by Anicet Sénéchal in ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin’, Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 36 (1966), 173–288. Many of the manuscripts have subsequently been tracked down thanks to the efforts of Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Catherine Lafarge. See their ‘Catalogue topographique partiel des papiers Dupin-Rousseau dispersée de 1951 à 1958’, Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 39 (1980), 243–280.

65 Sénéchal indicates twenty-five folios (‘Rousseau, secrétaire’, 216). Of these, I have seen the three preserved at the Ransom Center in Austin (Dupin papers, box 1, folder 18), as well as the seventeen folios held at the Bibliothèque de Genève (MS fr. 216, fols 205–223).

66 Antoine Deschevrens, ‘Étude sur le système musical chinois’, Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 2 (1901), 526–528.

67 Tchen, Musique chinoise, 34–36.

68 ‘Fragen und Antworten’, Mitteilungen der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 3/1 (1901), 40–41.

69 ‘Antwort’, Mitteilungen der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 3/3 (1901), 125–126.

70 In the interest of charity, it is perhaps worth remembering that in 1901, and indeed even in 1974 – before the historical-performance movement had led to the widespread revival of la musique française classique – familiarity with the French violin clef was surely less widespread than it is today.

71 Pire, ‘Relations de voyage’, 358. The English collection in question is John Green, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, four volumes (London: Thomas Astley, 1745–1747).

72 Pire, ‘Relations de voyage’, 360.

73 Pire, ‘Relations de voyage’, 363–364, 367–370.

74 Pire, ‘Relations de voyage’, 360–361.

75 ‘I will not pursue this kind of enquiry further, since I have reached the goal that I set for myself: to show to the various scholars who study Rousseau that much of the knowledge he boasts of originates in travellers’ accounts and in particular in the Histoire générale des voyages, a vast work that furnishes a host of particulars on all sorts of questions’; ‘Rousseau had the habit of giving second-hand citations . . . Jean-Jacques found in the Histoire générale des voyages the sum total of all earlier travelogues. When he alludes to Battel, Dapper, Kolben, Merolla, Kaempfer, Paul Lucas, Tavernier . . . it is to this collection that he is referring, and not to the original writings’ (‘Nous ne pousserons pas plus loin ce genre de recherches, car nous avons atteint le but que nous nous proposions: montrer aux divers spécialistes qui étudient Rousseau qu'un grand nombre de connaissances dont il fait étalage trouvent leur origine dans les récits des voyageurs et plus spécialement dans l’H. G. V., vaste ouvrage qui fournit une foule de renseignements sur toutes sortes de questions’; ‘Rousseau a l'habitude de fournir des citations de seconde main . . . Jean-Jacques a trouvé dans l’H. G. V. la somme de toutes les relations de voyages antérieures. Quand il fait allusion à Battel, Dapper, Kolben, Merolla, Kempfer [sic], Paul Lucas, Tavernier . . . c'est à cette collection qu'il se réfère, et non aux écrits originaux’). Pire, ‘Relations de voyage’, 361–362, 376.

76 See also Jean Morel, ‘Recherches sur les sources du discours de l'inégalité’, Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 5 (1909), 190–194. On Rousseau's exploitation of eighteenth-century natural history and (proto-)ethnography in the Second Discourse more generally see, in addition to the whole fourth part of Morel's article (pages 179–198), Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: François Maspero, 1971), 322–376; Robert Wokler, ‘Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited’, Daedelus 107/3 (1978), 107–134; Victor Gourevitch, ‘Rousseau's Pure State of Nature’, Interpretation 16/1 (1988), 23–60; Heinrich Meier, ‘The Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men: On the Intention of Rousseau's Most Philosophical Work’, Interpretation 16/2 (1988–1989), 211–228; Francis Moran III, ‘Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau's Second Discourse’, Journal of the History of Ideas 54/1 (1993), 37–58; and Francis Moran III, ‘Of Pongos and Men: “Orangs-Outang” in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality’, Review of Politics 57/4 (1995), 641–664.

77 Rousseau, Confessions, Œuvres complètes, volume 1, 374, 630.

78 Rousseau, Confessions, Œuvres complètes, volume 1, 375–376, 382–383. On the chronology see Waeber, Jacqueline, ‘“Cette horrible innovation”: The First Version of the Recitative Parts of Rousseau's Le devin du village’, Music & Letters 82/2 (2001), 177, 181–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 ‘One would expect to find in the Dupin–Rousseau papers a good number of extracts from the volume borrowed from the Royal Library and, more generally, from volumes 1–7 of the Histoire des voyages, published from 1746 to 1749. Well: there is nothing. Although Rousseau carefully enclosed his extracts from Du Halde in a cover, there is no file devoted to Prévost’ (‘On s'attendrait à trouver dans les papiers Dupin–Rousseau bon nombre d'extraits du volume emprunté à la Bibliothèque du roi et, plus généralement, des tomes i à vii de l’Histoire des voyages, publiés de 1746 à 1749. Or il n'en est rien: alors que Jean-Jacques a soigneusement rangé dans une chemise ses extraits de Du Halde aucun dossier n'est consacré à Prévost’). Bouler, Jean-Pierre Le and Lafarge, Catherine, ‘Les emprunts de Mme Dupin à la Bibliothèque du roi dans les années 1748–1750’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 182 (1979), 163Google Scholar.

80 Le Bouler and Lafarge, ‘Les emprunts de Mme Dupin’, 157, 160–165.

81 Michèle Duchet, ‘L’Histoire des voyages: Originalité et influence’, in L'Abbé Prévost: actes du colloque d'Aix, décembre 1963, ed. Jean Fabre (Gap: Éditions Ophrys, 1965), 149, note 17; and Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 86, note 132, 485.

82 For details on this source and its modes of exploitation see Le Bouler and Lafarge, ‘Les emprunts de Mme Dupin’, 110–111.

83 Antoine-François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, ou Nouvelle collection de toutes les relations des voyages, ou, nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyage par mer et par terre, qui ont été publiées jusqu’à présent dans les differentes langues de toutes les nations connues . . . enrichi de cartes géographiques et de figures, twenty volumes (Paris: Didot, 1746–1761), volume 6, 5. In the copying and compiling that is characteristic of Prévost, Du Halde and other French writers on China one sees, I think, the persistence of the kinds of earlier practices of authorship described, for instance, in Grafton, Anthony, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, volume 6, 288.