‘[T]he Arts delight to travel Westward’

In 1815 Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library of more than 6,000 volumes to the American government in order to ‘recommence’ the collection of the Library of Congress, the holdings of which had been burned by British forces during their occupation of Washington, DC, the previous year. Thirteen books about music are known or believed to have been in Jefferson's library when it came to Congress, several of which develop analogies between rhetoric and music – a topic of particular interest to Jefferson as politician and statesman, as well as musician and violinist. Amongst these is a copy annotated in Jefferson's own hand of the Italian violinist-composer Francesco Geminiani's The Art of Playing on the Violin (1750), one of the most influential violin manuals to appear in the eighteenth century.

Geminiani combined remarks of a purely technical nature with broader commentary on music in general and on music performance. ‘The Intention of Musick,’ he argues, ‘is not only to please the Ear, but to express Sentiments, strike the Imagination, affect the Mind, and command the Passions.’ Accordingly, the art of playing the violin consists ‘in giving that Instrument a Tone that shall in a Manner rival the most perfect human Voice; and in executing every Piece with Exactness, Propriety, and Delicacy of Expression according to the true Intention of Musick’. An early exponent of the Italian style of violin playing in England (where he lived for most of the first half of the eighteenth century), Geminiani opposed the French tendency towards imitation in its most descriptive sense, inveighing against ‘imitating the Cock, Cuckoo, Owl, and other Birds; or the Drum, French Horn, Tromba-Marina, and the like’. But imitation of speech and oratory is implied when he states with respect to piano (soft) and forte (loud): ‘as all good Musick should be composed in Imitation of a Discourse, these two Ornaments are designed to produce the same Effects that an Orator does by raising and falling his Voice’.