The fathers of the Church took care of it after them, especially on the side of the form, by studying, according to Plato and Aristotle, the influence of music on the passions.
Rabelais, as great a philosopher as a prodigious scholar, devoted chapters to recalling this mystical and Pythagorean idea of the quintessence.
Finally, Descartes embarked vigorously on a study of musical phenomena, which unfortunately focused much more on the proportions of the phenomena themselves than on the true metaphysical logic of music.
After Descartes, Rameau was the first and only among modern thinkers who attached his name to an important discovery. It is to him that we owe the first effort to clear the virgin forest of series of chords by showing, by inversions, that there were in the old system many necessary repetitions, but his imagination went no further.
D’Alembert, in wanting to evade Rameau’s idea, has only written a bad book, unworthy of his genius.
I have reserved the name Kepler on purpose. Only, perhaps, this illustrious inventor glimpsed and almost touched with his finger the discovery so miraculously realized today by the young and learned author of a Revolution par THE MUSIC.
In wanting, according to Plato, to seek the harmonic reason of the worlds in the harmonic relations of sounds, Kepler, by a singular error, but in a way providential, was led to find his ASTRONOMIC LAWS, eternal glory of the human mind. He was so imbued with both his invention and the difficulties he found in making himself understood that he wrote at the top of his WORLD HARMONIC these prophetic words in which the superb resignation of genius bursts forth, sure of himself:
“The die is cast; I am writing my book. It will be read by the present age or by posterity, it matters little to me. It can wait for its reader. Did not God wait six thousand years for a beholder of his works?”
It is the tradition of these great events which Mr. Louis Lucas courageously followed with the thought which led philosophers of all ages to find the formal reason for musical science.
To turn an art, hitherto left to caprice in many of its parts, into a positive science with its invariable and logical laws, such was the problem to be solved.
It is understood that the reform in question here is purely didactic; it cannot claim to upset anything in the results obtained, in the works done, and even to be done.
In fact, by a coincidence which proves how truly divine the inspiration granted to the artists dinged by this name is, it happens that the musical laws being found, one would not find in all the works of the masters a real infraction of these rules that they did not know. Just as nature gives us only parasitic works without knowing what the laws govern it, so the instinct of inspired artists supplements with all eternity rules of which they always have the intuition while remaining untouched. The most cunning professor of prosody and versification would find nothing to reproach in the ode that the first of the shepherds let escape from his heart while contemplating the stars scattered in the celestial vault.
It is thanks to this lyrical instinct, the life of which begins with that of the people, an instinct that later became in artists like a marvelous second sight, that composers of all times always arrive at perfect results. When they believe they are creating an exception and freeing themselves from a rule by the omnipotence of genius, they are obeying a law that is not yet known to them, thus testifying without their knowledge that no accident can ever disturb this perfect and inflexible harmony which is the very essence of the moral world.
Far from being an attack directed against the musical treasures of modern times, the work of Mr. Louis Lucas, therefore, comes on the contrary to bring them a sanction and a new confirmation. It is less a musical work than an application of metaphysical logic to a science — which has remained entirely behind, or rather to be created on the existing bet of music.
It is the consecration of all the results obtained by the masters and, simultaneously, a justification and a logical classification.
The studious minds who have followed with enthusiastic curiosity the physiological works of Bichal and Broussais, the discoveries by which Lavoisier and a few others have transformed chemistry, and finally, the immense works of Vico and Herder, which have arrived by force of induction at reconstruct a new historical science, will understand what it took to discover this new scientific world. Perhaps we will find later, in physical-musical phenomena, as much wealth and unexplored mines as in geology before Cuvier!
Therefore, to confine ourselves to considering it from the didactic point of view, is it necessary to indicate here the advantages of this treatise which contains the very quintessence of music and is obviously intended to serve as a basis for the treatises that we will write now?
Music is still learned today as if to know arithmetic; for example, one was obliged not to know simple rules but to learn all the known results by heart. A REVOLUTION IN MUSIC tears education away from this routine today and overthrows the scaffolding of exceptions built with great difficulty on ingenious paradoxes. Until now, it took fifteen years to struggle against practical difficulties to create certainty of something serious and strong. In the future, on the contrary, the treatises, understood in a rational, logical sense, will allow everyone to study the composition of the higher musical sciences, and this study can take place in college through simple grammar and some demonstrations on the board. Genius and experience will do the rest.
In a word, the veil being torn, under the shelter of which the conservatories reserved, like a monopoly, the possibility of giving the key to the musical sciences. Mr. Lucas brings about its diffusion throughout the whole world. We will soon know music as we know geometry and languages.
As for its absolute importance and the action it is destined to have on the body of general knowledge, the book of M. Louis Lucas deserves no less to attract the attention of all thinkers. The sciences all need to advance in a particular proportion. The one who stays too late compromises the future of others. By dealing with music in a new way, we can find efficient aids for physics, which contains a whole part intended for acoustics. And yet physicians have gleaned little from the musical sciences, owing to the difficulty of meeting a great physicist and a good composer at the same time. All physical studies, even those of Savard, have gone no further, relative to music, than the elements of scales. An idea that paralyzed the work of Descartes and D’Alembert.
To discover the secret of their musical life, it was necessary to study the machine in its motion and not at rest or on the dissecting table; and, in music, it is in the composition itself that the movement is contained. Descartes and the physicists, not knowing even the first word of the composition, were paralyzed in their work, like a traveler who arrives before a deep river and lacks the means to cross it.
It was, therefore, not enough to be a physicist and a metaphysician, like Descartes and D’Alembert, to find the mysteries of Harmony, taking only the most elementary series of the resonant as a basis. It was also necessary to continue the study of composition in its consequences, a study that Descartes could not know because it existed little and that D’Alembert did not know at all because he had not given himself the bother to learn it.
Apart from the great methodical thought that presides over the development of this whole work, M. Louis Lucas has encountered curious facts with which he enriches science in his studies.
Thus, enharmonic is restored by indisputable documents borrowed from the greatest thinkers of antiquity, particularly from Plutarch in his Dialogue sur la Musique (2). By rediscovering, among many others, this curious detail that the ancients obtained their greatest effects of enharmonic by turning the pegs of lyres under the bow or the finger, a tactic rendered useless by the arrangement of our modern violins, M Louis Lucas shows us at the same time what a wealth of melodies we could ask for from this musical system of the ancients, which we still believe to be so poor, as if we wanted to disinherit them from half their greatness, not being able to sustain equal glories in them. Music and Poetry!
This book is full of thoughts. Although, by design, M. Louis Lucas has rejected from his work all the scientific comments which could hinder the development of the special ideas which he was above all to bring to light, one feels very well, when reading it, that there exists, because of this, a host of restrictions which the author reserves the right to present elsewhere. From the astrologers and alchemists of the Middle Ages, who often based their calculations on so-called tonal ratios, to the romantic Marsenne, to the profound Descartes and Rousseau himself, there has been no movement towards the metaphysics of music. a single aspiration that has not been collected and seconded there.
Whatever the momentary success of the REVOLUTION IN MUSIC may be, the future belongs to it unquestionably, even when, distrusting his busy or frivolous contemporaries, M. Louis Lucas would write like Beyle, on the cover of his book, that he dedicated only to his unknown friends.
THÉODORE DE BANVILLE
- La Republique de Platon, traduction de Grou, revue et corrigée sur le texte grec d’Emm. Bekker. (Paris, Leſbvre.) Page 327.
- Plutarch, Moralia, On Music.