Penser la musique dans l'Encyclopédie: Etude sur les enjeux de la musicographie des Lumières et sur ses liens avec l'encyclopédisme
This book is an important contribution to eighteenth century studies, which will no doubt encourage scholars to enter more often the labyrinth of the Encyclopédie. The methodology used here for music will serve as a tool to be applied to explore other domains, since the author’s project is not to simply to report what music was for the encyclopedists but to evaluate what place they assigned to music in their general system of knowledge. The author describes his approach with a neologism, the “analyse épistémographique”, where one reads the philosophical project in the light of the editorial process that gave shape to it. This leads to a focus on the “diagenesis” of the book, that is to say the many different stratifications that modified each other during the whole process. This enables the reader to experience the diversity in methods and ideologies among the different writers, and therefore to view the Encyclopédie as the collective intellectual adventure that it was.
In trying to define the Encyclopédie’s project, one has first to deal with the numerous discrepancies between the project as it appears in the descriptive texts (Discours préliminaire, Prospectus, Système Figuré) and its realization. Alain Cernuschi’s literary approach allows the reader to take advantage of these “problems”. For example it is by questioning the discrepancy between the categories (“désignants”) leading to “Music” and the place of music in the Système Figuré, that one understands the gap between the idea of music as a Science, under the label “mathématiques mixtes” and the conception of the creative gesture, whereby music is under the label “imagination”. This discrepancy highlights the convergence between art and science in the epistemology of the time, while helping to understand the polyphonic fabric of the book, preparing us to enter into the most detailed analysis of individual articles. The center of the book offers two series of such analysis that illustrates a central problematic of the time: the finding and/or the creation of relationships between the different areas of knowledge. The first series is titled La nature et l’art: Musique et Physique dans l’Encyclopédie, the second is titled Il faut un sens : Musique et langage. The author lets the text speak for itself, presenting clusters of contributions organized around certain themes or articles, and providing very close readings of them.
The first part of chapter two is explicitly devoted to procedures for establishing a corpus of articles around any given field of knowledge, in order for other researchers to be able to apply them to their field. The exhaustive and meticulous presentation of the methodology is somewhat overwhelming, but the open access to the fabric of the book compliments the spirit and goal of the project, and can be read as needed. One is well rewarded by the first hand experience it provides of the pre-modern history of ideas. This study makes clear that, as in the earliest culture of ancient Greece, when music was inseparable from education, “Penser la musique” in the Encyclopédie still means “penser l’Homme” with all the complexity and contradictions implied.
