ABSTRACT
It may seem obvious to anyone who has read Jacques Attali's 1977 book Bruits or parented teenagers that in Paris during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries music qua noise was on everyone's mind, reaching into aspects of social life that are at times surprising. Indeed even Boileau's cats made their appearance, and in doing so suggest the potency of the noise metaphor for opera criticism. As people listen to immaculate modern performances on compact discs, they never quite know the disruptions – the poor performances, the stage noises, the whistling audiences, the claques and rivalries – that were commonplace. Critics like Saint-Evremond, who focused on music's physical properties much as Crousaz did, regarded the enjoyment of music for its own sake as appealing to the lowest possible cultural values. What such individuals protested was the actual, discernable presence of music, relatively negligible in Lully's composition but inevitably the emergent feature within any new opera.
