Rousseau was not only the leader of the Enlightenment Movement, but also the pioneer of the Romantic literary and artistic trend in creation and theory. His musical activities and musical aesthetic thoughts have distinctive characteristics of the times and individual characteristics, reflecting the close relationship with the French Profound opposition to classical musical aesthetic concepts. Although both classicism and romanticism hold a "heteronomous" view on the ontology of music, that is, they believe that the essence of music and the content of music expression are outside the sound form, the essence of music recognized by classical music aesthetics is reflected in the individual. Based on the transcendental laws of the external objective world, its philosophical foundation is the idealist rational philosophy since Descartes, its political foundation is the centralized autocratic regime of the Louis XIV era, and the source of its literary, artistic and musical practice comes from Maury The traditions of court drama and music since Eyre, Corneille, Racine and Lully have all been resisted and criticized to varying degrees by Enlightenment thinkers, and Rousseau, who insisted on the "emotion theory" musical aesthetics, was the most popular among them. A radical one.
Rousseau fundamentally denied the natural rationality and universality of monarchy and classical literature and art (including music). This habit is reflected in his political theory and literary works. The pantheistic philosophy based on feeling and experience emphasizes the irrational complex of personal subjective emotions in artistic works. The pursuit of a simple and primitive natural state in the name of Togu dominates all of Rousseau's thoughts and literary and artistic activities, and is bound to be profound. deeply penetrated into his musical aesthetics.
1. The essence of music is the imitation of emotion
Rousseau believed that the essence of music is the imitation of emotion, and music and language both originated from the human ability to express passion. need.
In the programmatic long "Music" in the Dictionary of Music, Rousseau wrote: "Music is the art of combining sounds in a pleasant way. When we try to find out the reasons for these combinations, When the principles and causes of pleasure it causes us, this art becomes a science.” According to Rousseau, music has two levels in a general sense, namely music as art and music as science. Although he did not point out the relationship between the two here, it can be found from subsequent narratives that in Rousseau, scientific music should obey or serve the music of art.
Rousseau believed that "music is naturally divided into two categories: theoretical music and practical music." The so-called "theoretical music" is about "knowledge of the material of music", which is what we call music theory; and "practical music" Music” is “the art of applying these theoretical principles,” what we call composition. This classification is nothing more than Rousseau citing the opinions of his predecessors. It is not difficult to see that it is aimed at music as a science and has nothing to do with whether music affects our souls or not.
Therefore, Rousseau proposed his own classification from the perspective of "artistic music": "We can and should divide music into 'natural' and 'imitation'." In his opinion, " "Natural music" only acts on the senses at the physical level, causing people to have pure pleasure, "without leaving any impression on the soul." This kind of music, according to Rousseau's aesthetic taste, lacks emotion and morality. significance. This type of music includes songs, carols, short songs, etc., which are "just melodies put together and harmonized music." In contrast, "imitation music" "expresses various emotions, depicts various pictures, and describes various things with vigorous cadences, subjecting the entire nature (of music) to exquisite imitation, and will be able to move human beings." Emotions bring to the soul”. And this kind of music is music used in drama or stage. It is a melody combined with the tone of language. It can be moved by emotion and change customs. It is the poetic drama of ancient Greece, and it is its model.
Since music is art, not pure science, and since music not only gives people the pleasure of auditory senses, but also has the function of touching the soul and conveying certain emotional connotations, then, "can move human beings" "Imitation music" that brings "emotions to the soul" is undoubtedly more representative of the essence of musical art than "natural music" that only has physical effects: "Perhaps the sequence of notes or chords will make me intoxicated for a moment, but if I want to let When I am in ecstasy, I need something beyond notes and chords that can move me.” At this point, Rousseau, Enlightenment thinkers and even classical aestheticians emphasized that music must “have something to say”, not just something. It is a combination of pure acoustic form. "Everyone gets pleasure when listening to beautiful sounds, but if this pleasure is not accompanied by familiar melodic ups and downs, it cannot please people or is just purely sensory entertainment." Therefore, the content of music is not The auditory harmony brought by the sound form itself lies in the inspiring feelings brought by the sound form. The generation of this feeling also depends on the cultural background and receiving environment of the music. The ultimate task of music is not just to use sound forms to restore or imitate the cadences of language or various sounds in nature, but to arouse inner passion through these imitation processes and achieve the moral purpose of touching the soul. Rousseau’s understanding of musical feelings is different from physiological functional reflections, nor can it be confused with the happiness brought by rational examination: “Anyone who wants to make a philosophical analysis of the power of feeling must start by distinguishing between purely sensory Impressions, intellectual impressions and moral impressions...he will avoid mistaking for themselves any power which they do not possess in the objects of sense themselves, or which derive from the emotions of the soul which they symbolize.
"So, the most fundamental content of "imitation music" lies in the movement of emotion, and what distinguishes this emotion from purely sensory and purely intellectual impressions lies in its moral purpose. The essence of this morality comes from Rousseau's social and ethical thought The emotional and life concepts of the petty bourgeoisie
2. The same origin of music and language
The emotional nature of music cannot but be traced back to Rousseau’s musical aesthetics ideological system. Another important aspect of the book is the homology between music and language on the origin of music. This view has been elaborated and systematically elaborated in his article "On the Origin of Language" and in Chapter 12 "The Origin of Music". In "The Origin", Rousseau wrote clearly: "As the human voice develops, various passions cultivate corresponding initial words or sounds...The amount of stress and the inflection of the intonation all depend on the emotions attached to them. . The final pauses and inflections of the tone are formed together with the syllable steps, passion prompts the function to sound, and strives to modify and shape the human voice, so that poetry, song and speech come from the same source. "This shows that various language and music systems were gradually formed due to the needs of human emotional expression. Language and music have been two sides of the same thing from the beginning. Both are products of passion, and in language and music, the most The first and most essential form is poetry and melody. From the perspective of the internal mechanisms of these two sound phenomena, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the basic elements that constitute music melody and the basic elements that constitute poetic language: “Accent. A melody is formed, and the length of the syllables forms the duration of the melody. People sing with tone and rhythm just like speaking with sentences and pronunciation. "
In a sense, the melody of music is a deepening of rhythmic language expression. "A language with only words and sounds is far from rich enough; although it can express meaning, it can If you want to express various emotions and images, you also need rhythm and tone. This is melody. This is also a trait that Greek has and our language lacks. "That is to say, the emergence of music (melody) is to better express the emotional meaning contained in language (poetry). This is the essence and content of music identified by Rousseau.
3. Primitive That is, the essential aesthetic scale and value concept
In Rousseau’s view, the art of integrating poetry and music in ancient Greece will always be the highest example of music and poetry, which most perfectly embodies the emotional essence of music. Certain morphological characteristics he regarded as essential elements of good music: here poetry and melody are extremely natural and simple, have clear and understandable meanings, have vivid expressions, and serve moral and emotional purposes. It is a model of literature and music. Monophonic ancient Greek music accompanied by poetry embodies the essence and spirit of music according to Rousseau and is the ideal state of music. In contrast, the development of Western European music since the Middle Ages. Rousseau seems to represent the degeneration and transformation of musical art, which is a deviation from the essence of music. In the last chapter of "On the Origin of Language", "How Music Degenerated", Rousseau displayed this perfection without any scruples. Prejudice: “As musical language is perfected, melody is brought under new rules, imperceptibly losing its ancient power, and the tortuous pliability of tone is sacrificed to numbers and intervals…the more laws are imitated, the more The effect of imitation is less. "The essence of the degeneration of music, for Rousseau, is that it breaks away from the simple form combined with poetry, no longer relies on the richness of melody to simulate the rhythm of emotion, but independently develops its own system that does not rely on literary language; and Correspondingly, after language is separated from music, its musicality becomes less and less, and poetry loses its moving rhythm and melody. It relies on theoretical preaching and grammatical logic to impress readers. This degradation began even in ancient times. , and the degenerate facts he listed are actually the development and progress of Western European music that we are talking about. Rousseau finally concluded: "Melody was forgotten, all attention was directed to harmony, everything. Finally being focused on this new thing. Styles, scales, modes were all re-examined... Our musical system gradually became purely harmonic. It is not surprising, then, that it loses the stress and almost all the energy of the word. "This means that "natural music" has replaced the central position of "imitation music" in the past, and "its effect is limited to purely physical sounds." Music has lost the content it should have - ― Emotional and moral effects, since the form of "natural music" has nothing to do with it
According to Rousseau, the laws of language and music themselves are constantly perfected with the advancement of reason, resulting in both. As far as music is concerned, the dominant position of melody is replaced by counterpoint and harmony, which means that music is no longer an imitation of passion and a foil to language, but becomes a kind of freedom based on mathematics. The product of the system, this kind of music is "natural" rather than "imitation". It only has a physical effect and cannot have an emotional or moral effect on the human mind. Under this musical grammar, ancient music The rich material he possessed was gradually forgotten, and a seemingly rigorous and logical harmonic function system usurped the central position of the original melody.
Rousseau introduced it in a way of discussing the classics separately. Qi completely denied the development of European polyphonic music theory and practice, and showed the trump card that is the epistemological basis of his musical aesthetics: the identification of originality with essence and essence.
He believes that the more the form of music develops, the farther away it is from its essence. The more rational factors are added to the form of music, the less emotional factors serve as the content of music. This is completely consistent with the view in his famous work "On Science and Art".