"Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words"
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Rameau is quietly picking a fight with the prestige economy of language. By locating both music and words in "the first cries of humankind", he drags speech down from the pedestal of reason and puts it back in the mouth: breath, urgency, raw affect. The phrase "common emotive or affective origins" is doing the real work here. If words and music share the same pre-verbal source, then words lose their claim to being the grown-up medium - the one that supposedly transcends mood and lands in clear meaning.
For an 18th-century composer-theorist, this isn’t just metaphysics; it’s professional politics. Rameau is writing in a France obsessed with rhetoric, declamation, and the idea that art should imitate nature. He’s also adjacent to the era’s running argument about whether music is an autonomous science (his own harmony-based project) or a kind of heightened speech. His line turns that debate into a tactical inversion: the closer words get to their origin in the cry, the less sovereign they seem. They become one expressive tool among others, not the master code.
The subtext is a composer’s revenge on the libretto. Opera had to pretend the text was the spine and music the ornament; Rameau suggests the opposite. If speech begins as a cry, then music is not decoration on language - it’s language remembering what it used to be before it learned to behave.
For an 18th-century composer-theorist, this isn’t just metaphysics; it’s professional politics. Rameau is writing in a France obsessed with rhetoric, declamation, and the idea that art should imitate nature. He’s also adjacent to the era’s running argument about whether music is an autonomous science (his own harmony-based project) or a kind of heightened speech. His line turns that debate into a tactical inversion: the closer words get to their origin in the cry, the less sovereign they seem. They become one expressive tool among others, not the master code.
The subtext is a composer’s revenge on the libretto. Opera had to pretend the text was the spine and music the ornament; Rameau suggests the opposite. If speech begins as a cry, then music is not decoration on language - it’s language remembering what it used to be before it learned to behave.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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