¹ Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon, Éloge de M. Rameau (Paris: de l'impr. de M. Lambert, 1764), 29–30. Quotations preserve the original orthography wherever possible, and all translations are my own unless otherwise stated. For an insightful discussion of the Éloge's place both in eighteenth-century French discourse and in Chabanon's writings see Ghyslaine Guertin, ‘Chabanon et l'héritage de Rameau’, in Rameau, entre art et science, ed. Sylvie Bouissou, Graham Sadler and Solveig Serre (Paris: École des chartes, 2016), 133–141; Legrand, Raphaëlle, ‘Chabanon et Rameau: l’éloge paradoxal’, Musicorum 17 (2007–2008), 65–79Google Scholar; Harry Robert Lyall, ‘A French Music Aesthetic of the Eighteenth Century: A Translation and Commentary on Michel Paul Gui de Chabanon's Musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poésie, et le théâtre’ (PhD dissertation, North Texas State University, 1975), 30–34; and Reilly, Edward R., ‘Chabanon's Éloge de M. Rameau’, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario 8 (1983), 1–3Google Scholar. Guertin and Reilly, in particular, read the Éloge as a prolegomenon to Chabanon's subsequent body of writings, while Lyall states that the Éloge established the ‘platform’ for Chabanon to introduce his ideas ‘à l'occasion of Rameau's death’ (31).

² Devin Burke, ‘Music, Magic, and Machines: The Living Statue in Ancien-Régime Spectacle’ (PhD dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2016). As George S. Hersey notes, the eighteenth century's engagement with animated statues is merely one point along a continuum of what he calls ‘Pygmalionism’. George S. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 97–110 and 136–138.

³ Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), xi. Cited in Burke, ‘Music, Magic, and Machines’, 1.

⁴ See respectively Burke, ‘Music, Magic, and Machines’; Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Waeber, Jacqueline, ‘Le mélodrame au-delà de l'opéra: sur le Pygmalion de Rousseau’, Nouvelle revue d'esthétique 12/2 (2013), 23–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Carr, J. L., ‘Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23/3–4 (1960), 239–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Exemplary analyses include Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 218–231; Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 99–101; and Hyer, Brian, ‘“Sighing Branches”: Prosopopoeia in Rameau's Pigmalion’, Music Analysis 13/1 (1994), 7–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ While numerous studies on the Pygmalion narrative exist, I have found the following most helpful: Henri Coulet, Pygmalion des lumières (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1998); Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

⁸ See J. Hillis Miller, ‘Pygmalion's Prosopopoeia’, in Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–12. For an application of Hiller's argument to music see Hyer, ‘Sighing Branches’. The term prosopopoeia derives from the Greek roots prósopon (face, person) and poiéin (to make, to do), and is often synonymous with the act of personification.

⁹ Sonic representations of the corps sonore in Rameau's operas are normally articulated by the strings, which are then complemented by bassoons in the tenor with flutes reinforcing the upper partials or sons harmoniques, often referred to as sons flûtés. See Geoffrey Burgess, ‘Enlightening Harmonies: Rameau's corps sonore and the Representation of the Divine in the tragédie en musique’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 65/2 (2012), 414. For more on acoustical nomenclature in eighteenth-century France see the entry ‘Sons harmoniques ou sons flûtés’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Duchesne, 1768), 449–450.

¹⁰ It is quite possible these questions were added to the livret at Rameau's request. We know from Christensen's reconstruction that de la Motte's original text did not contain such overt imagery, but the librettist Ballot de Sauvot included them anyway. This was possibly to inflect the story with common ideas of the time, to reinforce the sensationalist basis of the corps sonore, or perhaps – as historian of science Kevin Lambert has argued – to promote his erudite music theory with the wider public. See Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 228n, and Lambert, Kevin, ‘Hearing Pygmalion's Kiss: A Scientific Object at the Paris Opéra’, Physics in Perspective 16 (2014), 417–439CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For de la Motte's libretto see ‘La Sculpture’ or ‘Cinquiéme Entrée’ from Le Triomphe des arts (1700), in Œuvres de Monsieur Houdar de la Motte, six volumes (Paris: Prault, 1754), volume 6, 186–194. This version of the text was set by Michel de La Barre. See Michel de La Barre, Le triomphe des arts (Paris: Ballard, 1700). For a comparative study between La Barre's and Rameau's respective settings see Burke, ‘Music, Magic, and Machines’, 207–268.

¹¹ Chabanon, Éloge de M. Rameau, 5–6.

¹² Riffaterre, Michael, ‘Syllepsis’, Critical Inquiry 6/4 (1980), 625–638CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ See Michael Riffaterre, ‘La trace de l'intertexte’, La Pensée 215 (1980), 5.

¹⁴ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York: Telos, 1975), 337. Cited in Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 28.

¹⁵ This intellectual moment is covered in detail in Roger Mathew Grant, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); Alexis Roland-Manuel, Sonate, que me veux-tu?: réflexions sur les fins et les moyens de l'art musical (Lausanne: Mermod, 1957; republished Paris: Éditions Ivrea, 1996); and Violaine Anger, ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’: pour penser une histoire du signe (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2016). It should be noted that each of these texts treat Chabanon differently, and, as a result, somewhat conceal his importance in the history of musical aesthetics. While Grant places Chabanon among several other writers at the end of eighteenth-century affective debates, Roland-Manuel – whose text comprises four case studies – examines him as an interstitial figure between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy. Anger, by contrast, uses Chabanon as a launching-point to discuss instead the semiotics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century instrumental music.

¹⁶ Guertin, Ghyslaine, ‘L'universel et le singulier: l'esthétique de Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon’, Horizons philosophiques 132 (2003), 43–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 6.

¹⁸ Indeed, Chabanon's time in Saint-Domingue and cross-cultural experiences inform many aspects of his writings. See especially Olivia A. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 216–222, and Camier, Bernard, ‘Musique et société coloniale, Saint-Domingue à l’époque de Chabanon’, Musicorum 6 (2007), 13–34Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Dill, Charles, ‘Rameau's Cartesian Wonder’, Eighteenth-Century Music 14/1 (2017), 33–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Alison Peterman, ‘Descartes and Spinoza: Two Approaches to Embodiment’, in Embodiment: A History, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 217.

²¹ René Descartes [Renati Des Cartes], Compendium musicæ (Utrecht: Trajectum ad Rhenum, 1650), 5. Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 14. See also Kate van Orden, ‘Descartes on Musical Training and the Body’, in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40–84.

²² René Descartes, Les Passions de l'ame (Amsterdam: Louys Elzevier, 1650). See Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and R. Darren Gobert, The Mind–Body State: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). For Descartes's conjoining of mind and body in the context of music and music theory see Roger Mathew Grant, ‘Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects’, Representations 144 (2018), 36–37.

²³ Descartes, Les Passions de l'ame, 75 (my italics). I have chosen to translate l'agitation as ‘vibration’ to align with Descartes's understanding of sensation as resonance through our sensory organ's string-like nerves. See Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 29–68; Veit Erlmann, ‘Descartes's Resonant Subject’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, second edition, ed. Michael Bull and Les Black (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 37–52; and Carmel Raz, ‘Reverberating Nerves: Physiology, Perception, and Early Romantic Auditory Cultures, 1750–1850’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2015), 17–19.

²⁴ Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77.

²⁵ Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, two volumes (Paris: Jean Mariette, 1719).

²⁶ Georgia Cowart, ‘Sense and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’, Acta musicologica 56/2 (1984), 254.

²⁷ Charles Dill, ‘Music Criticism in France before the Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 71–78.

²⁸ Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Science of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

²⁹ Grant, Peculiar Attunements, 4–15.

³⁰ Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, à l'usage de ceux qui entendent & qui parlent (Paris, 1751), 112–113.

³¹ The story of Descartes's reception in the eighteenth century is rather complex. As Aram Vartanian has argued, even those most ardently opposed to Cartesianism – Diderot chief among them – benefited from Descartes's approach, especially with regards to sensation and imagination. Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).

³² Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 114–116.

³³ Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations, two volumes (London and Paris: Bure, 1754), volume 1, 131–132.

³⁴ Condillac, Traité des sensations, volume 2, 16.

³⁵ Stafford, Body Criticism, 417 (original italics).

³⁶ Studies focusing on the role of the body and its fibres in seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical discourse, particularly as they relate to the human–harpsichord trope, are indeed growing. I have found the following particularly helpful: Erlmann, Reason and Resonance; Grant, Peculiar Attunements; James Kennaway, ed., Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014); and Raz, ‘Reverberating Nerves’.

³⁷ François Cartaud de La Vilate, Essai historique et philosophique sur le goût (1736; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 280.

³⁸ Charles Bonnet, Essai de physiologie (1755; Hindesheim: Olms, 1978), 13.

³⁹ Denis Diderot, Entretien entre M. d'Alembert et M. Diderot, in Œuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, five volumes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994–1997), volume 1, 616. While this work went unpublished during Diderot's lifetime, the fact remains that in the late 1760s these ideas were discursively crystallized. And, of course, it is quite possible that Diderot discussed these issues openly in salons that Chabanon attended. On Chabanon's participation in these salons – and on his relationship with Diderot at this time – see Laurine Quetin, ‘Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, “Quelques circonstances de ma vie”’, Revue Musicorum 19 (2017), 15–58. For more on Bonnet's treatment of the fibre see Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 33–37. For more about the use of biological instrumentality in Diderot and his contemporaries see Wilda Anderson, Diderot's Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Paolo Gozza, ‘Ragione e sensibilità: la metafora de clavicembalo sensible di Diderot’, in Musica e metafora: storia analisi ermeneutica, ed. Francesco Finocchiaro and Maurizio Giani (Turin: Academia University Press, 2017), 23–40; and Philippe Sarrasin Robichaud, L'Homme-clavecin, une analogie diderotienne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017).

⁴⁰ See Andrew Curran, ‘Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2001/01 (2001), 132–150; Paul Ilie, The Age of Minerva, two volumes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), volume 2, 182–191; and George S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility, ed. George S. Rousseau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 160–184.

⁴¹ Anonymous, ‘Vibration [no classification]’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, seventeen volumes (Paris: Briasson, David l'aîné, Le Breton, Durand, 1751–1765), volume 17, 230. Hereafter cited as Encyclopédie.

⁴² Anonymous, ‘Nerf, (Anatomie)’, in Encyclopédie, volume 10, 100.

⁴³ Descartes, Compendium musicæ, 12: ‘Sonus se habet ad Sonum ut nervus ad nervum’ ([One] sound is related to sounds as [one] string is related to strings). Rameau would repeat Descartes's dictum about sounds and strings in the Traité de l'harmonie reduite à ses principes naturels (Paris: Ballard, 1722), xii and 1–3; see Jean-Philippe Rameau, The Complete Theoretical Writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau, ed. Erwin R. Jacobi, six volumes (American Institute of Musicology, 1967–1972), volume 1, 18 and 30–32: ‘Sound is to sound as string is to string’ (‘Le Son est au Son ce que la Corde est à la Corde’). Hereafter cited as CTW.

⁴⁴ Descartes, Les Passions de l'ame, 19. I have chosen to translate tire as ‘pluck’ instead of ‘pull’ or ‘tug’ since the broader context of the entire article describes the resonant interactions between the nerves, the animal spirits and the pineal gland (see pages 17–19).

⁴⁵ For an account of the influences and ramifications of these experiments and propositions see Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 135–159.

⁴⁶ Jean-Philippe Rameau, Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique (Paris: Prault, 1737), 7; CTW, volume 3, 18. Cited in Maryam Moshaver, ‘Rameau, the Subjective Body, and the Forms of Theoretical Representation’, Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 23 (2016), 126.

⁴⁷ Rameau, Génération harmonique, 53; CTW, volume 3, 41.

⁴⁸ Marie-Elisabeth Duchez, ‘Valeur épistémologique de la théorie de la basse fondamentale de Jean-Philippe Rameau: connaissance scientifique et représentation de la musique’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 254 (1986), 89–130; Catherine Kintzler, ‘L'oreille, premier instrument de musique?’ Methodos: Savoirs et textes 11 (2011) http://journals.openedition.org/methodos/2542; and Moshaver, ‘Rameau, the Subjective Body, and the Forms of Theoretical Representation’. Of course, Rameau's conclusion here is specious at best. While the composer-theorist was emphatic about the discernibility of the corps sonore – that is to say, his ear's capacity to hear a son fondamental and its sons harmoniques clearly and distinctly – others remained sceptical. Indeed, even Rameau sometimes struggled to hear these sounds, and many experiments in the Génération harmonique are complete fallacies riddled with scientific blunders. For an instructive interpretation of the corps sonore's lack of perceptual materiality see Cornelia Fales, ‘Listening to Timbre during the French Enlightenment’, in Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, ed. Caroline Traube and Serge Lacasse (Montreal: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology, 2005), 1–11. Even so, the ‘materiality’ of upper partials was well confirmed and empirically demonstrated, and Rameau's comments – especially from the Génération harmonique onwards – were informed by this fact. See Joseph Sauveur, Traité de la théorie de la musique (Paris, 1697); Joseph Sauveur, Système générale des intervalles (Paris, 1701); and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, ‘Discours sur la Propagation du Son dans les différents Tons qui le modifient’, Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. Année MDDXXXVII. Avec les Mémoires de Mathématiques et de Physique, pour la même Année, Tirés des Registres de cette Académie (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1737), 2–20.

⁴⁹ Jean-Philippe Rameau, Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe (Paris: Prault, Lambert, Duchesne, 1754). See Dill, ‘Rameau's Cartesian Wonder’, 31.

⁵⁰ Cynthia Verba, Dramatic Expression in Rameau's ‘Tragédie en Musique’: Between Tradition and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5. See also David E. Cohen, ‘The “Gift of Nature”: “Musical Instinct” and Musical Cognition in Rameau’, in Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68–92.

⁵¹ Verba, Dramatic Expression in Rameau's ‘Tragédie en Musique’, 26.

⁵² As Charles Dill has shown, Rameau believed that harmonic succession and progression carried with them linguistic properties, allowing him to treat music as an intelligible language syntagmatically. See ‘The Influence of Linguistics on Rameau's Theory of Modulation’, in Rameau, entre art et science, ed. Bouissou, Sadler and Serre, 397–408.

⁵³ Jean-Philippe Rameau, Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, 52–54; CTW, volume 3, 292–293. Translation adapted from Nathan Martin, review of Dramatic Expression in Rameau's ‘Tragédie en Musique’: Between Tradition and Enlightenment by Cynthia Verba, Notes 71/1 (2014), 76.

⁵⁴ Diderot, ‘Lettre a mademoiselle . . . ’, in Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 299. Cited in Roger Mathew Grant, ‘Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis’, Critical Inquiry 43/2 (2017), 565. See also Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, 98–99.

⁵⁵ Jean-Philippe Rameau, Code de musique pratique . . . avec de nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1760), 165; CTW, volume 4, 190. There is considerable evidence that Diderot helped Rameau draft an early version of the ‘Preface’ to Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie (1750), entitled ‘Mémoires où l'on expose les fondements du systême de musique theorique et pratique de M. Rameau’, which the composer-theorist read to the Académie française in 1749. It is somewhat easy to detect Diderot's probable influence on Rameau's corps passivement harmonique, especially if we consider the Code's textual history and its numerous publication delays throughout the 1750s. See Thomas Christensen, ‘Diderot, Rameau and Resonating Strings: New Evidence of an Early Collaboration’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 323 (1994), 131–166. (Rameau's ‘Mémoire où l'on expose les fondements du système de musique théorique et pratique’ is reproduced at 153–166.) See also Béatrice Durand-Sendrail, ‘Diderot et Rameau: archéologie d'un polémique’, Diderot Studies 24 (1991), 85–104.

⁵⁶ Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poésie et la théâtre (Paris: Tissot, 1785; facsimile edition, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 108.

⁵⁷ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 56. Compare Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon, Observations sur la Musique et principalement sur la métaphysique de l'Art (Paris: Tissot, 1779; facsimile edition, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 35: ‘Music assimilates (as best it can) its noises to other noises, its movements to other movements, and, more than that, its sensations to our sentiments’ (‘Elle assimile (autant qu'elle le peut) ses bruits à d'autres bruits, ses mouvemens à d'autres mouvemens, & plus que tout cela, ses sensations à nos sentimens’). Most of Chabanon's Observations sur la Musique was reprinted with significant alterations as the first part of De la Musique considérée en elle-même six years later – although four of the first part's chapters (1, 20, 21 and 22) appear out of order in the second. According to Chabanon, he never intended to publish this abridged version separately. A member of the Académie des Belles Lettres et Inscriptions since 1760, he was under consideration for membership in the Académie Française in 1779 and felt its publication might help his chances (Observations sur la Musique, vi–vii). As a matter of fact, he was denied twice before this in 1776 and 1777 by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, the secrétaire perpétuel at the time, supposedly for his lack of publications. However, if we are to believe Melchoir Grimm's account, d'Alembert's decision was politically motivated. Chabanon finally ascended to the academic pantheon, replacing Étienne Lauréault de Foncemagne, and delivered his first address on 20 January 1780, much to d'Alembert's chagrin. See Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. Maurice Tourneux, sixteen volumes (1753–1793; Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1882), volume 12, 36–39. For a thorough comparison of the variants between Chabanon's two treatises see Lyall, ‘A French Music Aesthetic of the Eighteenth Century’, 369–377.

⁵⁸ Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1746; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969).

⁵⁹ Dubos, Réflexions critiques, volume 1, 25. See also Grant, ‘Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects’, 36–39.

⁶⁰ Dubos, Réflexions critiques, volume 1, 434.

⁶¹ For a rather insightful comparison between Dubos and Chabanon see Catherine Dubeau, ‘De la poétique à l'esthétique: imitation, beaux-arts et nature du signe musical chez Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670–1742) et Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730–1792)’ (MA thesis, Université Laval, 2002).

⁶² Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 62.

⁶³ Chabanon, Observations sur la Musique, 166–167 (original italics). For a contemporary account of architecture's mimetic apparatus see Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Le Génie de l'architecture, ou l'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris, 1780).

⁶⁴ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 62.

⁶⁵ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 62–63. On the perceptibility of artistic imitation in Chabanon's writings see Susanna Caviglia, ‘M. P. G. de Chabanon et J. S. Duplessis: un idéal de vérité’, Musicorum 17 (2007/2008), 9–11. Duplessis was a French painter known for the clarity of his portraits. Other subjects include Christophe Gabriel Allegrain, Louis XVI, Christophe Willibald Gluck and Benjamin Franklin. In fact, Duplessis's portrait of Franklin appears on the United States hundred-dollar note and is currently on display in the White House Oval Office in Washington, DC.

⁶⁶ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses together with Replies to Critics and the Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 243. Cited in Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origin of Languages: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 101.

⁶⁷ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 102. The relationship between Rousseau and Chabanon's musical thought is indeed quite complex. For more on this topic see Claude Dauphin, ‘Michel de Chabanon: détracteur ou continuateur de Rousseau?’, in Regards sur le ‘Dictionnaire de Musique’ de Rousseau: des Lumières au romantisme, ed. Emmanuel Reibel (Paris: Vrin, 2016), 155–168; Françoise Escal, ‘Un contradicteur de Rousseau. A l'horizon de l'opéra: voix, chant, musique selon Chabanon’, in L'Opéra au XVIII^e siècle: actes du colloque organisé à Aix-en-Provence par le Centre aixois d’études et recherches sur le XVIII^e siècle, les 29, 30 avril et 1er mai 1977 (Marseille: Diffusion, J. Laffitte, 1982), 463–475; and Jacqueline Waeber, ‘Déconstruire Rousseau: Chabanon annotateur du Dictionnaire de musique’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 49 (2010), 245–280.

⁶⁸ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 229.

⁶⁹ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 167–168.

⁷⁰ Chabanon says as much in his letter to the editor to the Mercure de France, Jacques Lacombe, in response to Gluck's letter announcing his desire to come to Paris. Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon, ‘Lettre de M. de Chabanon sur les propriétés musicales de la langue française’, Mercure de France (January 1773), 183. On Chabanon's relationship with Lacombe, particularly the latter's Le Spectacle des Beaux-Arts (1758), see Waeber, ‘Déconstruire Rousseau’, 275–278.

⁷¹ Allan Keiler, ‘Music as Metalanguage: Rameau's Fundamental Bass’, in Music Theory: Special Topics, ed. Richmond Browne (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 83–100.

⁷² While I say ‘phenomenon’ with a grain of salt, sous-entendu occupies a special place in Rameau's musical thought. He says that the son fondamental is toujours sous-entendu, or that the dissonances mineures of seventh chords are sous-entendues. Like many other aspects of his writings, it has not gone without its fair share of interpretations. David Cohen interprets sous-entendu quite literally as ‘to supply mentally in the act of hearing an element that is not actually present in the acoustical stimulus’ (Cohen, ‘The “Gift of Nature”’, 79, note 11). He thus sees sous-entendu as a type of machinery that aids in understanding the fundamental bass. Jairo Moreno explains it as an imagined voice that engenders all musical phenomena with some sort of psychological meaning, most notably by assigning a harmonic function to a chord during a cadence. To him, it is specifically dissonances sous-entendues that allow Rameau to conceptualize all harmonic motion through its paradigmatic cadence parfait (Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 94–100). For Thomas Christensen, who translates sous-entendre as ‘to impute’, Rameau's usage of the concept places the role of implication on the listener or the performer (Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 129). Naomi Waltham-Smith, too, interprets sous-entendu as something for the listener or performer to actualize, as what ‘may or may not be heard’, since sous-entendre, as an analytical hearing, can function as a ‘deconstruction’ of the musical surface, ‘opening up music's sounding in the direction of listening and analysis’ (Naomi Waltham-Smith, ‘The Time It Takes to Listen’, Music Theory Spectrum 39/1 (2017), 22). Further, Maryam Moshaver's interpretation identifies sous-entendu as a tonal compass, one that ‘originates in the temporal displacement [of] the fundamental sound’ from the surface of the music, but nevertheless functions in anything from the reconciliation of intonation to how music acts upon the memory (Moshaver, ‘Rameau, the Subjective Body, and the Forms of Theoretical Representation’, 124–125). Even Carl Dahlhaus has discussed the provocative sous-entendu, claiming that it is simply a theoretical construction that bears little consequences for audition (Carl Dahlhaus, Studies on the Origins of Harmonic Tonality, trans. Robert O. Gjerdingen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 28–30). In either case, sous-entendu allows Rameau to perceive – in some cases acoustically, in others conceptually – a governing fundamental bass to be ‘heard-understood’ below a melody or basse continue.

⁷³ For more on how the fundamental bass informs melodic progressions instinctually see Cohen, ‘The “Gift of Nature”’, 76–77.

⁷⁴ See again Dill, ‘The Influence of Linguistics on Rameau's Theory of Modulation’. For a broader perspective see also Keiler, ‘Music as Metalanguage’.

⁷⁵ Chabanon, Éloge de M. Rameau, 46.

⁷⁶ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 54. See also Chabanon, Observations sur la Musique, 31. Cited in Waeber, ‘Déconstruire Rousseau’, 278. Chabanon presents this passage first as his own in his Observations sur la Musique, only to attribute it to Aristotle in De la Musique considérée en elle-même. Incidentally, in the intervening six years between the Observations sur la Musique and De la Musique considérée en elle-même, Chabanon published a translation with commentary of Aristotle's problems concerning music. de Chabanon, Michel-Paul Guy, ‘Mémoires sur les Problèmes d'Aristote concernant la Musique, traduits et commentés par M. de Chabanon’, Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions 46 (1780–1783), 285–355Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Claude Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read, trans. Brian C. J. Singer (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 97–102.

⁷⁸ Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read, 98.

⁷⁹ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 105.

⁸⁰ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 354–355. Images of the spider and its web were common in the Enlightenment. Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, the most illustrious of Encyclopaedists (he wrote 17,266, or roughly twenty-four percent, of the more than 70,000 articles in the Encyclopédie), describes them in relation to nervous tension in the article ‘Tarentule (Histoire naturelle)’, in Encyclopédie, volume 15, 905–908. Diderot, too, uses the spider and its web as a suffusing metaphor in his writings. He uses them, for instance, to explicate a broader theory of resonance and interconnectedness in the second dialogue between Bordeu, Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse and the sleeping but still verbal d'Alembert in Le rêve de d'Alembert (c1769). For a fuller account of spiders’ and spider web's roles in eighteenth-century music, science, medicine and philosophy see Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 133–138; Ilie, The Age of Minerva, volume 2, 142–161; and Alain Cernuschi, Penser la musique dans l’‘Encyclopédie’: étude sur les enjeux de la musicographie des Lumières et sur ses liens avec l'encyclopédisme (Paris: Champion, 2000), 167–220.

⁸¹ Compare Diderot, Entretien entre d'Alembert et Diderot, in Œuvres, volume 1, 616–621. See also Catherine Dubeau, ‘Corps et musique chez Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon: sensation, énergie, sublime’, in Représentations du corps sous l'ancien regime, ed. Isabelle Billaud and Marie-Catherine Laperrière (Laval: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2007), 241–263. Again, since La rêve de d'Alembert went unpublished during Chabanon's lifetime, it is difficult to say if he knew of Diderot's specific usage. In all likelihood, Chabanon drew much of his influence with regard to webs and spiders from the broader Enlightenment trope, especially as it appears in Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, whose experiments with music and spiders Chabanon cites and recreates in De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 40–45.

⁸² Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 1–2.

⁸³ Jean-Philippe Rameau, Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie, servant de base à tout l'art musical théorique et pratique (Paris: Durand, Tissot, 1750), 28–29; CTW, volume 3, 181.

⁸⁴ This is not to say Pigmalion is the only instance of the corps sonore in a compositional context. As a matter of fact, sonic representations of the corps sonore are riddled throughout Rameau's operas. See Burgess, ‘Enlightening Harmonies’.

⁸⁵ For a discussion of ‘L'Amour triomphe’ in relation to the statue's animation see Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 228–231.

⁸⁶ Condillac, Traité des sensations, volume 1, 224. Quoted in Bradley M. Spiers, ‘Music and the Spectacle of Artificial Life’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2020), 87. This moment in Condillac informs the moment of animation in Rousseau's Pygmalion (1770), which is explored in Hyer, ‘Sighing Branches’, 40, and Spiers, ‘Music and the Spectacle of Artificial Life’, 88–90.

⁸⁷ Leonard, Daniel, ‘Condillac's Animated Statue and the Art of Philosophizing: Aesthetic Experience in the Traité des sensations’, Dalhousie Review 82/3 (2002), 504–506Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Rameau, Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie, 11–12; CTW, volume 3, 172.

⁸⁹ Rameau, Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie, 12; CTW, volume 3, 172.

⁹⁰ Chabanon, Éloge de M. Rameau, 30.

⁹¹ Compare Chabanon, Observations sur la Musique, 40, and De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 59–60.

⁹² Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 60.

⁹³ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 154; Chabanon, Observations sur la Musique, 128–129.

⁹⁴ We would not be incorrect in imputing Hanslickian resonances here. Chabanon's Observations sur la Musique was translated by Johann Adam Hiller as Ueber die Musik und deren Wirkungen (Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jacobder und Sohn, 1781), making Chabanon's ideas accessible to readers of German. This point was not lost on Mathis Lussy, who published an article comparing individual passages between Chabanon's Observations sur la Musique and Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), although he uses Charles Bannelier's French translation. See Lussy, Matthis, ‘Chabanon précurseur de Hanslick’, Gazette musicale de la Suisse Romande 3 (1896), 95–98Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Louis-Bertrand Castel, review of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie reduite à ses principes naturels, Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences & des beaux arts (November 1722), 1892.

⁹⁶ Chabanon, De la Musique considérée en elle-même, 172.

⁹⁷ Hyer, ‘Sighing Branches’, 41–42, and Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). One cannot help but think of Nicolas-Étienne Framery's famous assertion about the opera orchestra: ‘the voice utters the thoughts of the dramatic character while the orchestra indicates those that are left unsaid. It is, so to speak, its inner voice’ (‘La voix rend les pensées qui échappent au personage dramatique; la symphonie indique celles qu'il ne dit pas; elle est, pour ainsi dire, son organe intérieure’). ‘Accompagnement figure’, in Nicolas-Étienne Framery, Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny and Pierre-Louis Ginguené, eds, Encyclopédie méthodique: Musique, two volumes (Paris: Panckoucke, 1791), volume 1, 19 (my italics).

⁹⁸ Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, xi.