REVOLUTION IN MUSIC

To speak about ‘revolution’ in connection with a topic like the history of music may appear far-fetched. But if we do so in connection with some important aspects of the history of music in the eighteenth century, we are doing no more than following the practice of some contemporary writers on musical matters. A book on the controversies aroused by Christoph Willibald Gluck with the operas he produced in Paris during the 1770s, appeared under the title Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution operée dans la musique par M. Ie Chevalier Gluck.

There is in fact quite a lot to be said for this choice of phrase. For some of the more important eighteenth-century developments in musical form and taste can very usefully be considered as part of the social and intellectual transformation which began with what Paul Hazard has aptly called ‘the crisis of the European consciousness’ about 1680, and which culminated in the 1780s in the French Revolution.

The writer who did most to involve the arts in that process of transformation was the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. He was not a systematic thinker, which has led some historians of thought to underrate his importance. His main achievement was to restate the constructive and positive world view of the Neo-Platonists in terms which established this view as the ‘common sense’ of the period. In this way, his conception of nature as the embodiment and exemplar of a harmony, which it was both an aesthetic pleasure and a moral inspiration to perceive, became a profound influence on the arts throughout the eighteenth century.

In his Inquiry concerning Virtue, Shaftesbury contrasted human and animal behaviour: