1 Burney, Charles, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London: Printed for the author, and sold by T. Becket, J. Robson and G. Robinson, 1776), volume 1, xiiiGoogle Scholar.

2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, A Complete Dictionary of Music: Consisting of a Copious Explanations of all Words Necessary to a True Knowledge and Understanding of Music, trans. Waring, William, second edition (London: Murray, 1779; reprinted New York: AMS, 1975)Google Scholar. For the French text see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), volume 5 : Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre, 915Google Scholar.

3 Burney's definitions of music varied. The ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ concisely defines music as ‘the art of pleasing by the succession and combination of agreeable sounds’ (in Burney, General History of Music, volume 3, v). The new Cyclopaedia, for which the editor Abraham Rees commissioned the music articles from Burney, commends and reproduces Rousseau's definition from the Dictionnaire de musique; see ‘Music’, in Rees, Abraham, The Cyclopaedia: or, A New Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London: Longman, 1819), volume 24Google Scholar. Burney proposes here his own translation of the article (slightly abridged) and elements of a critical commentary. The first few paragraphs of Rousseau's text bear traces of the article published by Ephraim Chambers in the original Cyclopaedia (London, 1728, volume 2, 607). As noted by Claude Dauphin in the critical edition of the Dictionnaire, however, Rousseau himself had provocatively objected to his own definition of music in the fourteenth chapter of the Essai sur l'origine des langues (completed c1761): music is not the art of combining sounds in a manner agreeable to the ear, but, thanks to melody, a moral art, meaningful and expressive; see Dauphin, Claude, ed., Le dictionnaire de musique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: une édition critique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 480nGoogle Scholar.

4 Vanessa Agnew has emphasized Burney, 's social appreciation of music in Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, in the context of both his European travels and his son's encounter with Polynesian music. Edward Green has opposed Burney's and Hawkins's ethical views, as betrayed by their distinct representations of Rousseau and his work; see ‘The Impact of Rousseau on the Histories of Burney and Hawkins: A Study in the Ethics of Musicology’, in Music's Intellectual History, ed. Blažeković, Zdravko and Mackenzie, Barbara Dobbs (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2009), 157–167Google Scholar.

5 Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 30 August 1773, in The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, ed. Ribeiro, Alvaro (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), volume 1: 1751–1784, 140Google Scholar. See also Lonsdale, Roger, Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 118 and 130Google Scholar.

6 For this social distinction see Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 131–133, which quotes, among other things, an excerpt from a 1776 letter by Thomas Twining. Twining recalls the disbelief of some that Burney would indeed be the true author of his books: ‘we have had no experience of such a phenomenon as a professor of Music, & an artist, that was a man of letters, & a good writer’ (132–133).

7 Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 79. On the status of music teachers (including Burney) see Leppert, Richard, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 56–61Google Scholar.

8 Quoted in Adorno, Theodor W., Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York: Seabury, 1976), 149Google Scholar. It is the thirteenth of Benjamin, Walter's ‘The Critique's Technique in Thirteen Theses’ in his 1928 essay ‘One-Way Street’, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Underwood, J. A. (London: Penguin, 2009), 36Google Scholar.

9 See in particular Caygill, Howard, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar; Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar; and Ferry, Luc, Homo aestheticus: l'invention du goût à l'âge démocratique (Paris: Grasset, 1990)Google Scholar.

10 For a survey of British aesthetic philosophy, especially in its relation to musical thought, see Semi, Maria, Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain, trans. Keates, Timothy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012)Google Scholar.

11 These accounts may be found in Dr. Burney's Musical Tours in Europe, ed. Scholes, Percy A. (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 2 volumesGoogle Scholar.

12 Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 142.

13 Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 143.

14 Burney, General History of Music, volume 3, v.

15 Adam Smith, Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts [1795], part II, paragraph 24, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Whightman, W. P. D. and Bryce, J. C. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982)Google Scholar. See also Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 100. According to Smith, music does not refer to anything outside itself, and therefore cannot be an imitative art except when it is made to resemble human voices and natural sounds. This does not mean that music is nothing but an abstract form. Music affects us, and as such, elicits ‘an original, and not a sympathetic feeling’: ‘it becomes itself a gay, a sedate, or a melancholy object’; or, more precisely, ‘it is our own gaiety, sedateness, or melancholy’. A piece with good melody will necessarily have expression. For this reason, Smith thought that expression, an intrinsic quality of instrumental music, could not logically constitute a separate criterion of its merit; he criticized Charles Avison on this account, and might have criticized Burney on the same account.

16 For Hume and Harris see Burney's Letters, 46 and 120–121. Adam Smith presented his ideas on imitative arts at a meeting of the Literary Club (to which Burney belonged, with Johnson, Reynolds and Boswell) in the summer of 1782; see de Marchi, Neil, ‘Smith on Ingenuity, Pleasure and the Imitative Arts’, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Haakonssen, Knud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If Burney was away, he would most likely have heard reports.

17 A Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Library of the Late Charles Burney, Doctor of Music, and Fellow of the Royal Society: Removed from his Apartments in Chelsea College, Which Will be Sold by Auction, by Leigh and Sotheby, Booksellers, at their House, no. 145, Strand, Opposite Catherine Street, on Thursday, the 9th of June, 1814, and Eight Following Days (Sundays Excepted), at 12 o'Clock (London, 1814). Burney owned works by Batteux, Beattie, Burke, Du Bos, Hobbes, Hutcheson, Locke, Machiavelli, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Necker, Rousseau, Smith, Voltaire and Young; reports and publications on the French Revolution; the initial issues of the Anti-Jacobin Review (July 1798–April 1801); and translations or editions of the classics (Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero, among others).

18 Twining began his work in 1778 (Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 248); see Twining, Thomas, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, Translated: With Notes on the Translation, and on the Original; and Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical, Imitation (London, 1789; reprinted New York: Garland, 1971)Google Scholar. For a commentary see Malek, James, ‘Thomas Twining's Analysis of Poetry and Music as Imitative Arts’, Modern Philology 68/3 (1971), 260–268CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 89–93.

19 Twining, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, 49–50, note s. Johnson's comment is reported in Miss Reynolds's Recollections of Dr. Johnson, quoted in Balderston, K. C., ‘Dr. Johnson and Burney's History of Music’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 49/3 (1934), 967CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, x.

21 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, x. Twining, who also served as Burney's proofreader, reproduces this very argument in Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, 49–50, note s, in his second dissertation on ‘the different sense of the word, imitative, as applied to music by the Antients, and by the Moderns’. In his Réflections critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719) Du Bos establishes the spectator's feeling – that is to say, the feeling that the work of art generally impresses on the spectator – as the only legitimate instance of aesthetic judgment. Just as one tastes a dish and knows whether the dish tastes good or bad, one ‘tastes’ a work of art and knows its value. See Luc Ferry, Homo aestheticus, 63–66, and Lontrade, Agnès, Le plaisir esthétique: naissance d'une notion (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004), 55–67Google Scholar.

22 This is the starting-point for Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic. ‘Aesthetics’, he writes, ‘is born as a discourse of the body’ (13). Eagleton's point of departure is Baumgarten's Aesthetica, which, he claims, opens up the ‘terrain of sensation’ to the ‘colonization of reason’ (15). Luc Ferry adds to Baumgarten's Aesthetica Lambert's Phänomologia to define a historical turning-point whereby the sensible acquires its autonomy; see Homo aestheticus, 90–110.

23 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, xi.

24 On liberalism as an art of separation see Manent, Pierre, Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme (Paris: Hachette, 1997)Google Scholar, and Walzer, Michael, ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’, Political Theory 12/3 (1984), 315–330Google Scholar.

25 Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, volume 5, 322–328.

26 Avison, Charles, An Essay on Musical Expression (London: Printed for C. Davis, 1752), 71–74Google Scholar.

27 Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or, the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (London: Printed for T. Becket and Co., 1771), 135–136Google Scholar.

28 Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces: Or, the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (London: Printed for T. Becket, J. Robson and G. Robinson, 1775), volume 2, 270Google Scholar.

29 Richard Kramer approaches the question of the performer as actor from the perspective of Diderot's writings on the theatre in ‘Diderot's Paradoxe and C. P. E. Bach's Empfindungen’, in C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Richards, Annette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6–24Google Scholar.

30 Rousseau's critique of social appearances and theatrical representation appears in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (especially the opening of the first part) and the Lettre à D'Alembert.

31 A detailed discussion of Rousseau's political philosophy of music exceeds the scope of this article, but has been the object of increasing attention. See in particular Wokler, Robert, Social Thought of J. J. Rousseau (New York: Garland, 1987)Google Scholar; O'Dea, Michael, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion and Desire (New York: St Martin's, 1995)Google Scholar; Scott, John T., ‘Rousseau and the Melodious Language of Freedom’, Journal of Politics 59/3 (1997), 803–829CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Harmony between Rousseau's Musical Theory and His Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59/2 (1998), 287–308Google Scholar; Strong, Tracy B., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 59–64Google Scholar; Simon, Julia, ‘Singing Democracy: Music and Politics in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65/3 (2004), 433–454Google Scholar, and ‘Rousseau and Aesthetic Modernity: Music's Power of Redemption’, Eighteenth-Century Music 2/1 (2005), 41–56Google Scholar; Waeber, Jacqueline, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “unité de mélodie”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 62/1 (2009), 79–143Google Scholar; and Strong, Tracy B., ‘Rousseau: nature, langage, politique’, in L'institution musicale, ed. Bardez, Jean-Michel and others (Sampzon: Delatour, 2010), 75–87Google Scholar.

32 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 53: ‘all the present composers of French comic operas imitate the Italian style, and many of them pillage the buffe operas of Italy without the least scruple of conscience, though they afterwards set their names to the plunder, and pass it on the world as their own property’.

33 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 53–54.

34 On the resistance to musical change, with regard to serious French opera and to oratorios in England, see Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, 32. See also Burney, General History of Music, volume 4, 607: ‘Music, during this period, seems to have been patronized in France with as much zeal as in Italy or Germany, though perhaps with less effect upon its cultivation. But the long and pertinacious attachment to the style of Lulli and his imitators in vocal compositions, the exclusion of those improvements which were making in the art in other parts of Europe, during the first fifty years of this century, have doubtless more impeded its progress, than want of genius in this active and lively people, or defects in their language, to which Rousseau and others have ascribed the imperfections of their Music.’

35 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 234–235 (on the king of Prussia disciplining his Italian troops): ‘in the opera house, as in the field, his majesty is such a rigid disciplinarian, that if a mistake is made in a single movement or evolution, he immediately marks, and rebukes the offender; and if any of his Italian troops dare to deviate from strict discipline, by adding, altering, or diminishing a single passage in the parts they have to perform, an order is sent de par le Roi, for them to adhere strictly to the notes written by the composer, at their peril’.

36 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 235.

37 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 235–236: ‘there is’, he added, ‘an air of chearfulness [sic], industry, plenty, and liberty, in the inhabitants of this place, seldom to be seen in other parts of Germany’.

38 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 248. The metaphor of social harmony is of course commonplace, and appears, for example, in Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (168) in an anonymous ‘letter to the author on the music of the ancients’: ‘there is no harmony so charming as that of a well-ordered life, moving in concert with the sacred laws of virtue’. On its place in British aesthetic and social thought see Caygill Art of Judgement, 49–50 (on Shaftesbury) and 61–62 (on Hutcheson). On its earlier influence on political thought see Daly, James, ‘Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69/7 (1979), 3–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Burney reports C. P. E. Bach's discourse in direct speech in Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 252.

40 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 93. On the army as a model for thinking about the orchestra in the eighteenth century see Spitzer, John and Zaslaw, Neal, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 515–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 344. Gluck, Burney reported, is ‘a great disciplinarian, and as formidable as Handel used to be, when at the head of a band; but he assured me, that he never found his troops mutinous, though he, on no account, suffered them to leave any part of their business, till it was well done, and frequently obliged them to repeat some of his manoeuvres twenty or thirty times’.

42 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 118. For this reason, Burney determines to stay ‘but a short time at Augsburg’.

43 In his depiction of Hamburg, his celebration of freedom and his condemnation of French and Prussian absolutism, Burney echoes a common topic of British liberal thought, beginning with the work of Shaftesbury. As the report of Burney's conversation with C. P. E. Bach indicates, however, civil freedom does not necessarily entail a progress in the arts, and Burney's endorsement of court patronage, if not political despotism, allows at best for a restricted scope of self-government. On the notion of freedom in eighteenth-century British thought see Meehan, Michael, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986)Google Scholar.

44 Quoted in Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 52, from Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756).

45 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 68Google Scholar. See Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 52–61.

46 The passage is quoted in full in a footnote; see Collier, Joel, Musical Travels through England (London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1785), 100Google Scholar.

47 Vanessa Agnew studies Bicknell's opposition to Burney's exploration of music's power to affect society in Enlightenment Orpheus, 137–165.

48 See Collier, Musical Travels through England, 45: ‘Tho’ I know Dr. Burney treats all Carillons with sovereign contempt, I confess I was much pleased with these, and taking out my tablets, followed them, and prick'd down the tunes they played, which indeed were full of pretty things.’ The phrase appears on two occasions in The Present State of Music in France and Italy: ‘the music, which had pretty things in it’ (80) and ‘There were many ingenious pretty things in his performance’ (226–227).

49 Collier, Musical Travels through England, 74.

50 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 99: ‘a rude, and barbarous flourish of drums and trumpets, at the elevation of the host’. Bicknell quotes the phrase in a footnote; see Musical Travels through England, 99. For Collier's Italianized name see Musical Travels through England, 7; Collier is later surprised in bed with a barber's wife, and the jealous husband castrates him (117–119).

51 Collier, Musical Travels through England, 80.

52 On Burney's complex relation to the court, fraught with a desire for social ascension and economic security on the one hand, and a compulsion to maintain scholarly integrity on the other, see Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 292–346.

53 Collier, Musical Travels through England, 99–100.

54 Collier, Musical Travels through England, xi: ‘I am entirely of my Cousin's opinion in this matter, notwithstanding I know that an ingenious gentleman, the author of “The Musical Lady”, has said, “John Bull was made to roar, and not to sing”. But it should be considered, that it is but of late days that John Bull has attempted to sing; that England has hitherto preferred the harsh trumpet to the soft violin; and that she still cultivates, as well in America as in Europe, the arts of ancient, more than of modern Rome’. The quoted text does not appear in printed versions of The Musical Lady, but recalls certain dialogues; see [Colman, George,] The Musical Lady, a Farce, as it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. S. Dehondt, 1762), 16–17, 32 and 36–37Google Scholar.

55 This patriotic and moralist rejection of Italian opera has a long history and evokes the writings of John Dennis at the beginning of the century. See McGeary, Thomas, ‘Opera and British Nationalism, 1700–1711’, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal 4/2 (2006) <http://lisa.revues.org/2067> (15 July 2012)Google Scholar. On the cultural politics of opera in eighteenth-century ‘Britain’ see Aspden, Suzanne, ‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of “English” Opera’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122/1 (1997), 24–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 On the correlation between luxury, the refinement of the arts and the moral decadence of modern societies, especially in Rousseau's early work, see Hamilton, James F., ‘A Theory of Art in Rousseau's First Discourse’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 94 (1972), 73–87Google Scholar; Galliani, R., ‘Le débat sur le luxe: Voltaire ou Rousseau?’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 161 (1976), 205–217Google Scholar; and Wokler, Social Thought, 374–434.

57 The phrase ‘innocent pleasure’ appears in Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 54 (see quotation below), but it is also a topic for the preface to the Present State of Music in France and Italy and the dedication of the General History of Music to the queen (where music is said to bring pleasure and innocence together). ‘Innocent luxury’ appears in Burney's definition of music in the preface to the General of History Music, as quoted above.

58 An Essay on Civil Government, or Society Restored, by Means of I. A Preface of Peace, II. A Reform in Mataphysics [sic], and III. A Political Code and Constitution, Adapted to the True Nature of Man, Translated from the Italian MS. of A. D. R. S. with Notes, by the Editors (London, 1793), 24–25. The catalogue of Burney's music library records an ‘Essay on Civil Government’ dated 1793 (lot 1005) that might be the same work; see Catalogue of the Music Library of Charles Burney, sold in London, 8 August 1814, ed. King, A Hyatt (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973), 40Google Scholar. I thank an anonymous reader for bringing this text to my attention.

59 An Essay on Civil Government, 7–10.

60 An Essay on Civil Government, 24–25.

61 For a history of this debate see Sekora, John, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Berry, Christopher J., The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jennings, Jeremy, ‘The Debate about Luxury in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68/1 (2007), 79–105Google Scholar.

62 See the Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Library, lot 272. On John Brown's two-volume diatribe against the ‘Spirit of Commerce’ see Sekora, Luxury, 93–95.

63 Hume, David, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, ed. Copley, Stephen and Edgar, Andrew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 175–176Google Scholar. The essay was first published in 1752 under the title ‘Of Luxury’, which was changed in 1760 to ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’. For a history of Hume's thought on luxury see Cunningham, Andrew S., ‘David Hume's Account of Luxury’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 27/3 (2005), 231–250Google Scholar.

64 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, 167.

65 See Cunningham, ‘David Hume's Account of Luxury’, 237, 242.

66 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, 100–106.

67 See Kassler, Jamie Croy, ‘Burney's Sketch of a Plan for a Public Music-School (1774)’, The Musical Quarterly 58/2 (1972), 210–234 (229 for the quotation)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 136–144, which includes a discussion of Burney's perception of professional excellence in music as a sign of national greatness.

68 Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 152–153.

69 Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, book IV, chapter 8: ‘Mais, dira-t-on, pourquoi choisir la musique par préférence? C'est que, de tous les plaisirs des sens, il n'y en a aucun qui corrompe moins l'âme’, translated by Avison, Essay on Musical Expression, 17, misquoted in Present State of Music in France and Italy, 3. Burney owned a 1749 (Geneva) edition of the French text (Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Library, lot 1210) and a 1752 English translation ‘by Mr. [Thomas] Nugent’ (lot 1218). Avison's translation conforms to Nugent's for this sentence. It is impossible to know when Burney purchased these books, whether he was writing from memory and inadvertently altered the text, or whether his correction of certain words was deliberate. But the effet de sens produced by this textual discordance remains, independent of its author's conscious intentions.

70 Most famously, Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693)Google Scholar, section 197: ‘it wastes so much of a young Man's time to gain but a moderate Skill in it; and engages often in such odd Company, that many think it much better spared: And I have amongst Men of Parts and Business, so seldom heard any one commended, or esteemed for having an Excellency in Musick, that amongst all those things, that ever came into the List of Accomplishments, I think I may give it the last place.’

71 Charles Burney, ‘To the Queen’, in General History of Music, volume 1, iv.

72 Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, 6.

73 Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, 5.

74 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, iii.

75 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 1, vi.

76 Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 168 and 285.

77 Burney, Charles, ‘To the Queen’, iii–v; and ‘To the King’, in An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th, and June the 3rd, and 5th, 1784, in Commemoration of Handel (London: Printed for the benefit of the Musical Fund, 1785), no page numberGoogle Scholar.

78 The first quotation appears in the dedication to the queen, the two others in the dedication to the king.

79 ‘To the King’, no page number.

80 The relation between monarchy and the common good in Burney's thought, then, is more complex than Weber, William suggests in his study of the ideology of ancient music; see The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 219Google Scholar. Burney's borrowings of republican ideas hardly make him a political disciple of Rousseau, as Mary Wollstonecraft aptly perceived (see below). In a letter to Mrs. Waddington (12 July 1805), Burney also extended his praise to the Prince of Wales: ‘He is an excellent critic; has an enlarged taste admiring whatever is good in its kind, of whatever age or country the composers or performers may be; without being however insensible to the superior genius and learning necessary to some kind of music more than others’; quoted in Grant, Kerry S., Dr Burney as Critic and Historian of Music (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983), 45Google Scholar.

81 Burney, ‘To the Queen’, v.

82 I refer here, once again, to ‘Of the Refinement in the Arts’, 168 (‘In times when industry and the arts flourish, men are kept in perpetual occupation, and enjoy, as their reward, the occupation itself, as well as those pleasures which are the fruit of their labour’) and 177 (‘Luxury, when excessive, is the source of many ills, but is in general preferable to sloth and idleness, which would commonly succeed in its place, and are more hurtful both to private persons and to the public’).

83 Shusterman, Richard, ‘Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant’, The Philosophical Forum 20/3 (1989), 216Google Scholar; see also Marshall, David, ‘Arguing by Analogy: Hume's Standard of Taste’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28/3 (1995), 337–338 and 342, note 2Google Scholar.

84 See Shusterman, ‘Of the Scandal of Taste’, 217–220, and Wieand, Jeffrey, ‘Hume's Two Standards of Taste’, The Philosophical Quarterly 34/135 (1984), 129–142 (especially 137–142)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Marshall, ‘Arguing by Analogy’, 335.

86 Mary Wollstonecraft (signed M), Review of ‘Dr. Burney's General History of Music’, Analytical Review 6 (February 1790), 131.

87 Wollstonecraft, Review, 133.

88 Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, 4.

89 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, v. William Weber has given an informative reading of this essay in The Rise of Musical Classics, 215–216. He correctly establishes Burney's ‘elitist principles’ (215) wherein the public sphere and musical taste must be ‘regulated by learned authority’ (221). It is hard to see, then, in what sense Burney showed any ‘sense of how public opinion and professional expertise could work together in shaping an informed order of taste’ (218).

90 David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Selected Essays, 133. The sceptic takes a similar view of diversity in aesthetic judgment (98–99): ‘You will never convince a man, who is not accustomed to Italian music, and has not an ear to follow its intricacies, that a Scotch tune is not preferable. You have not even any single argument, beyond your own taste, which you can apply in your behalf: And to your antagonist, his particular taste will always appear a more convincing argument to the contrary.’

91 In other words, the sceptic finds no way out of the unavoidable relativity of aesthetic judgment (Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 99): ‘If you be wise, each of you will allow, that the other may be in the right; and having many other instances of this diversity of taste, you will both confess, that beauty and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist in an agreeable sentiment, produced by an object in a particular mind, according to the peculiar structure and constitution of that mind.’

92 I refer here to the turning-point of Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (136): ‘It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.’

93 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, v.

94 Hill, George Birkbeck, ed., Boswell's Life of Johnson, revised and enlarged edition by Powell, L. F. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), volume 2, 249Google Scholar.

95 On the notion of ‘negative’ freedom see Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 121–131Google Scholar.

96 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 129: ‘liberty in this is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source.’ For a critique of the oft-assumed disjunction between individual and civic liberty, and the resulting opposition between negative and positive freedom, see Skinner, Quentin, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives’, in Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), volume 2, 186–212Google Scholar.

97 On Adam Smith's contribution to musical aesthetics see Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 152–157Google Scholar; Noiray, Michel, ‘Le son et le sentiment’, in Smith, Adam, Essais esthétiques, ed. Thierry, Patrick (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 123–138Google Scholar; Frith, Simon, ‘Adam Smith and Music’, New Formations 18 (1992): 67–83Google Scholar, reprinted in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 275–291; and Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 93–102.

98 Burney, ‘Essay on’, xi.

99 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, xi. On Burney's difficulty in accounting for direct observations of Polynesian polyphony from this Eurocentric perspective see Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 113–119.

100 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, v.

101 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, v: ‘In this manner, a composition, by a kind of chemical process, may be decompounded as well as any other production of art or nature.’

102 The Latin quotation is from Horace's first Epistle (1.1.14). It translates, according to John Davie, as: ‘there's no master I'm bound to swear loyalty to’, in Horace, Satires and Epistles, trans. Davie, John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65Google Scholar.

103 de Piles, Roger, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: J. Estienne, 1708)Google Scholar. See Steegman, John, ‘The “Balance des Peintres” of Roger de Piles’, The Art Quarterly 17/3 (1954), 255–261Google Scholar, and McClellan, Andrew L., Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33–35Google Scholar.

104 De Piles's table appears in Richardson, Jonathan's Two Discourses (London: Churchill, 1719)Google Scholar and was further discussed by the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1755; see Griener, Pascal, La république de l'œil: l'expérience de l'art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 100–105 and 281, note 55Google Scholar. The 1743 English edition of The Principles of Painting, on its title page, advertises the ‘Balance of Painters’ as ‘of singular use to those who would form an idea of the value of paintings and pictures’; see Puttfarken, Thomas, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 42, note 7Google Scholar. For its use in organizing the exhibit of ninety-nine paintings from the royal collection at the Palais du Luxembourg (1750–1779) see McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 35–42, and Teyssot, Georges, ‘“The Simple Day and the Light of the Sun”: Lights and Shadows in the Museum’, trans. Levine, Jessica, Assemblage 12 (1990), 69Google Scholar.

105 Richardson, Two Discourses, 55–72. Burney owned a copy of this work (Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Library, lot 1504).

106 See Scholes, Percy A., The Great Dr. Burney: His Life, His Travels, His Works, His Family and His Friends (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), volume 1, 327Google Scholar, and Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lunch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Balderston, Katharine C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1942), volume 1, 328–331Google Scholar. Mrs Thrale toys with the idea of making a ‘Scale of Novel Writers’ before making two separate scales for her male and female friends on the model of the ‘Scale of Beauties’ found in Joseph Spence's Crito, or a Dialogue on Beauty, by Sir Henri Beaumont (London, 1752), 43–45.

107 de Piles, Roger, The Principles of Painting (London: Osborn, 1743), 294Google Scholar: ‘This I have attempted rather to please myself, than to bring others into my sentiments … All I ask is, the liberty of declaring my thoughts in this matter.’

108 Richardson, Two Discourses, 71–72.

109 For a survey of Burney's critical vocabulary see Grant, Dr Burney as Critic, 17–47.

110 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, vi.

111 See Patey, Douglas Lane, ‘The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Nisbet, H. B. and Rawson, Claude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), volume 4, 3–31 (especially 22–30)Google Scholar.

112 Burney ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, xi.

113 For the analysis of the ‘voice’ in Hume's essay see Marshall, ‘Arguing by Analogy’, 336–337 and 342, note 27.

114 Marshall, ‘Arguing by Analogy’, 336.

115 Marshall, ‘Arguing by Analogy’, 336.

116 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, xi. My italics.

117 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, xi.

118 Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, v.

119 Burney, General History of Music, volume 1, 85: ‘And there is, again, some kind even of instrumental music, so divinely composed, and so expressively performed, that it wants no words to explain its meaning: it is itself the language of the heart and of passion, and speaks more to both in a few notes, than any other language composed of clashing consonants, and insipid vowels, can do in as many thousand.’

120 Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 356. On ‘liberal conservatism’, a twentieth-century oxymoron with some interpretative utility, see ‘Tocqueville, Burke, and the Origins of Liberal Conservatism’, The Review of Politics 60/3 (1998), 435–464Google Scholar. On Burke's ambivalence as regards social change and traditional hierarchy see Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar.

121 See his letter to Mrs Crewe in 1792, quoted in Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney, 370: ‘I sh^d think I did the world a signal piece of service, if, one night or other, when its inhabitants were all fast asleep, I could, by the wave of a magic wand, wipe away every idea of that kind [that is, ‘democratic’ ideas], smack smooth out of their brains, or send them down forever to the bottom of their dimenticatos; & in their room, pour into their precious noddles, with a large funnel, the love of Music, poetry, & the fine arts, or other good-humoured, amusing, & improving pursuits, ingenious or scientific, as they please. Let them study mathematics, optics, metaphysics, & all the ics & tics in the world, except Politics. How good-humoured & happy they w^d all come down to breakfast, the next morning?’

122 On Shaftesbury's and Addison's efforts to define the ‘true Critick’ see, for example, Marshall, David, ‘Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the Public Taste’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Nisbet, H. B. and Rawson, Claude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), volume 4, 631–657 (especially 645–656)Google Scholar.

123 See Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 149 and 152. On ‘structural listening’ as the critical process whereby music comes to ‘speak’ see Leppert, Richard, ‘“Music Pushed to the Edge of Existence” (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope)’, Cultural Critique 60 (2005), 92–133 (especially 118)Google Scholar.

124 See Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984)Google Scholar: criticism emerges first as a ‘terrain of cultural consensus’ (39) against the repressive regime of the absolutist state, but its history unfolds in a series of tensions, ambivalences and conflicts – against coffee-house dogmatism, Grub Street or political partisanship, for example. The distinction between genuine and ‘false’ criticism is a critical commonplace.

125 The social critique of ‘classical’ music has become a commonplace of the musicological literature, which is the reason I do not rehearse it here; in addition to Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 205–242, on the ‘Beethoven Paradigm’, see, for instance, Small, Christopher, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), especially 87–93 and 110–119Google Scholar, and Cook, Nicholas, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19–38Google Scholar.

126 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 118.