Guest Speaker
Dr. Charles Dill
Professor of Musicology
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Location: Humanities 2441
The chapter on music in the anonymous Entretiens galants (1681) has interested historians primarily for its description of the actress Champsmelée and its echoes of a scene in Molière's Le Malade imaginaire, but it also says something about listening to music in the seventeenth century. This chapter is neither a technical manual on performance or composition, in the manner of Bacilly; nor a scholarly comparison of contemporary music with antiquity, such as Menestrier wrote; nor is it the kind of social satire engaged in by Callières. Rather, it consists, like the rest of the Entretiens, in the type of conversation popularized by Scudéry, here divested of allegorical trappings. The Entretiens depicts a social discussion of musical experiences. Its aristocratic characters perform music, flirt, consider what makes music good or bad, and what makes a listener good or bad. They could, in other words, be said to consume music, or at least model its consumption, and in this respect the Entretiens is one of the earliest practical texts to engage with musical experience.
My paper will focus on two episodes. The first is a brief exchange early in the chapter, in which the discussants describe how music in general intersects with peoples' lives. They regard it primarily in social terms, characterizing music as an experience that situates subjects reflexively with respect to society. Several points interest me here. We see music taking on a social instrumentality, in that the person who possesses a good singing voice takes personal pleasure from it but also employs it as a means of social interaction. In this it resembles the honnête homme. We also see individuals engaging in a practice hinted at in Descartes's Compendium musicae (1618), actively holding past musical experiences in the mind for evaluation. But here we also encounter something unfamiliar to modern readers: a fascination with individuals who dislike music or, what amounts to the same thing, the particular social trappings that attend musical experience. This will remain a theme in French musical discussions well into the eighteenth century.
This latter theme is taken up again when the characters discuss the behavior of audience members at the Opéra. Of particular interest is the anxiety they exhibit over the physical responses of some audience members, both by miming performance during actual performances and, afterward, in singing ordinary conversation as though it were recitative (as, for example, Crisotine does in Saint-Évrémond's play, Les Opera). This anxiety is redolent with associations from Platonic theories of mimesis to Cartesian dualism and even Jansenist criticism of theater. In the end, the characters agree that music poses a physical risk to those who enjoy it, which can be countered through the cultivation of self-awareness.
These episodes provide material substance to some of the more abstract critical formulations of the period, suggesting a real sense of risk associated with the public performance of music. It was a timely assessment. Opera had been established as a public entertainment in 1669 and achieved real success with Lully's works beginning in 1672.
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