Snarking at Rousseau again

I'm starting to come out of my 18th century music obsession (see here for an infodump on what that was about) but I wanted to get one more notebook post in on a nice paper I found by Robert Gjerdingen that has some funny stuff about Rousseau.

Partimento, que me veux-tu? is about Rousseau's failure to learn composition through the systematic music theory of the time, about the parallel trade-school education system that would have taught him successfully if he'd had access to it, and about the romanticised idea of Italian music he developed in the absence of understanding how the real thing was made. (The title means "partimento, what do you want from me?" and is a snowclone of something Fontenelle said. It doesn't matter much for this post.)

I've been interested in Rousseau's weird thoughts on music for a while now. I first learned about them through Derrida, who picks them apart in Of Grammatology. Then I revisited the topic last year and read Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, and it was entertainingly mad. My snarky summary from that post:

His argument in the Essay is something like, um... so he starts off by claiming that language grew out of 'passion' rather than 'need', as a form of emotional expression rather than for practical use. This happened in warmer, southern climates, where life wasn't too hard and people could spend a lot of time emoting about things, and language started out very close to song with lots of melodic vowel sounds.

Then, as people moved north, the weather got worse and they had to spend longer doing annoying practical stuff, and language got used more for needs than passions. As part of this evolution it got harsher and more cluttered up with consonants, and generally moved away from its roots in song.

I can't emphasise enough how much it really is like that. I'm paraphrasing in a bit of a silly way but I'm not altering the structure of the argument itself to make it stupider. If anything I'm underselling how forcefully he asserts all this stuff and how little justification he provides for any of it.

The second half of the book is the same thing again, but for music. Music from the south (and from Italians in particular) is full of free-flowing songlike melody which just pours out of them naturally or something. Gjerdingen quotes this passage by Rousseau from his Dictionnaire de musique:

The Italians hold the cyphers in contempt, the partition itself is of little service to them; the quickness and nicety of the ear supplies their place, and they accompany extremely well without all this preparation, but it is to their natural disposition alone that they are indebted for this facility and another people, not born to music like themselves, find in the execution of the accompanying, several difficulties almost insurmountable.

In contrast, music from the north is more clogged up with harmony, the musical equivalent of consonants. It's built up more vertically as a series of chords, rather than following the horizontal flow of the melodic line, which makes it more contrived and artificial. He's particularly aiming his criticism at Rameau, a very popular French composer who had written an influential treatise on harmony:

As Thomas Christensen has noted, “Rameau’s theory of music was seen as a scientific system. In both method and structure, it was frequently compared to Newton’s systematization of celestial mechanics and optics. . . . Not surprisingly, Rameau was often granted the accolade ‘Newton of Music’”

Rousseau objected to all this heavy northern formalism. But also, from a practical point of view, he found it hard to actually learn anything from the book:

As I began to read music tolerably well, the question was, how I should learn composition? The difficulty lay in meeting with a good master, for, with the assistance of my Rameau alone, I despaired of ever being able to accomplish it...

This was fair enough. It was genuinely very difficult, maybe impossible, to learn to write music people would actually want to listen to just from this kind of formal systemisation of music theory. But this didn't mean that you should instead follow the Italians and intuitively pour out music like birdsong according to your natural disposition. Because of course the Italians didn't do that!

This is where I loop round to my previous infodump on partimento practice. Students in the Italian conservatories would spend years on a rigorous curriculum, starting maybe as early as seven. This curriculum didn't consist of systematic theory like the Rameau textbook. Instead, it was based around working through huge numbers of examples, developing their taste first through singing and then through learning to compose melodies over progressively more complex bass lines.

The conservatories that taught this were trade schools for students who would go on to be chapel masters and court musicians, and who were treated as skilled artisans rather than aristocrats. There's a funny quote from Rousseau where he fails to understand this and is mortified to learn that his compositions are not going to get him the place in high society he hoped for:

Perceiving it to be about one o’clock, I prepared to take my leave. Madam de Beuzenval said to me: “You are at a great distance from the quarter of the town in which you reside; stay and dine here.” I did not want asking a second time. A quarter of an hour afterwards, I understood, by a word, that the dinner to which she had invited me was that of her servants’ hall.

This sort of trade education was passed on from master to student, and huge parts of it weren't written down, so it was hard for outsiders to get an understanding of how it worked. The books of partimenti were available, but these are just bass lines and maybe some rules, the equivalent of exercise books without solutions. Without a master to explain how to compose melodies on top of the bass line and feed you examples of good style, it's hard to make much sense of them. There were music theory books aimed at the aristocracy, but they were more suitable for teaching music appreciation than actual practice.

So maybe it makes sense that Rousseau, lacking an insider's knowledge, failed to understand how composers learned to compose, and I wouldn't be snarky if his alternative theory wasn't so ridiculous. He was right that Rameau alone wouldn't work. But it turns out that systematic rational theory and untrained romantic intuition are not the only options.