Paris: the End of the Ancien Régime

Abstract

Music acquired a new status in France in the eighteenth century, moving from the limited circle of specialists, where until then it had remained, to take its place at the centre of the aesthetic discussions of the Enlightenment philosophers. If the seventeenth had been a century of literary disputes, the eighteenth was to be one of musical altercation. However, the moving spirits — with the possible exception of Rousseau — were neither composers nor even very knowledgeable about musical technique itself. For all that, the art of music inspired heated polemics, and it often crystallized aesthetic and ideological differences. It is therefore particularly important, in the discussion of French eighteenth-century music, to distinguish between the study of theoretical writing about music and the study of the music itself — the more so in that the influence of the first on the second is not always clear. Sometimes, indeed, the activity of composers and performers, as well as public taste, seems to move in a direction quite contrary to the ideas developed by the theorists of the time.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyInstrumental MusicAncien RegimeVocal MusicMusic PublishingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.