Volume 1

Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau / Jean Jacques Rousseau.

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau / Jean Jacques Rousseau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    surprised and flattered me, for I did not imagine that, in the opinion of an Academy, anyone who did not belong to it could possess common sense. The commission appointed to examine me consisted of MM. de Mairan, Hellot and De Fouchy, all three certainly persons of ability, but not one was sufficiently acquainted with music, at least, to be competent to judge of my scheme. [1742.]—In the course of my conferences with these gentle¬ men, I became convinced, with as much certainty as surprise, that if learned men are sometimes less prejudiced than others, they cling more closely, by way of revenge, to those prejudices which they do entertain. However weak, however false for the most part their objections were—and although I answered them timidly, I confess, and in ill-chosen terms, but yet with decisive arguments—I never once succeeded in making myself understood or in satisfying them. I was always astounded at the readiness with which, by the help of a few sonorous phrases, they refuted without having understood me. They discovered, somewhere or 1 other, that a monk named Souhaitti had already conceived the idea of denoting the scale by figures. This was enough to make them uphold that my system was not new. That may be ; for \ although I had never heard of Souhaitti—although his method of writing the seven notes of plain-song, without paying any attention to the octaves, in no respect deserved to be compared with my simple and convenient invention for noting all imagin¬ able kinds of music, without difficulty, by means of numbers— keys, rests, octaves, measures, time, and value of the notes, of which Souhaitti had never even thought—nevertheless, it was quite true that, as far as the elementary designation of the seven 1 notes is concerned, he was the first inventor. But they not only 1 attributed to this primitive invention more importance than it de- ■ served, but did not stop there ; and, as soon as they attempted to i speak of the fundamental principles of the system, they did ! nothing else but talk nonsense. The greatest advantage of my system was, that it did away with transpositions and keys, so j that the same piece could be noted and transposed at will into 1 whatever key one pleased, by means of the supposed change of a single initial letter at the beginning of the air. These gentlemen 1 had heard it said by Parisian strummers that the method of playing a piece of music by transposition was worthless. Starting ; from this, they turned the most distinct advantage of my system into an insuperable objection, against it, and they came to the decision that my system of notation was good for vocal, but