Music Classification in the Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Music historiography recognizes the philosopher Rousseau, basically, for his participation in three events during the eighteenth century. The first event was the dispute caused by the development of the notion of the fundamental bass by Jean-Philippe Rameau; the second, the creation of an encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert where the writings of Rosseau were the main contribution to music as an area of knowledge; and finally, the event known as Querelle des Bouffons (1753) where Rousseau discussed the relative merits of the Italian comic opera and the French tragic opera. This work attempts to illustrate, by focusing on the history of science, how Rousseau developed his arguments in documents related to the events mentioned above and, principally, in defining his entries in the Dictionnaire de musique, allowing us to identify his conception, or conceptions, of music as an area of knowledge.