ABSTRACT
Music becomes more expressive, it seeks to follow the inflections of the voice rather than impose its own rhythms, and clearly for Brossard it becomes more moving and more attractive. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s technique is to enumerate the qualities of the Moderns in music and then to suggest that these qualities are ultimately secondary. When Sebastien de Brossard published his Dictionnaire de musique in Paris in 1701, the first dictionary of its kind in French, through his entries he gave a view into what the characteristics of modern music might be. Christoph Willibald Gluck prepared the ground carefully before he arrived at Paris on foot with a contract to supply six operas to the Royal Academy of Music. Previously performed in Italian in Vienna, his existing works are rewritten in French, and the musical scores carefully adapted to match the new words.
