ABSTRACT
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of intense intellectual activity and exchange. The ongoing “scientific revolution,” with its emphasis on rationality, experimentation, and systematicity, and the new ways of viewing the world that came with it, affected every area of scholarly interest, including music theory. This period marks more generally the birth of aesthetics as a separate philosophical specialty, as several important aesthetic concepts, including representation and expression, begin to take their modern forms. Music loses its status as an object of mainstream scientific study to take its place as one of the newly emerging “fine arts” in the modern system of the arts. The social context of listening changes, moving from church and court toward the concert hall. The Renaissance pre-eminence of vocal music gives way to the growing importance of instrumental music, thus increasingly changing the view of music from that of a rhetorical art to that of a language in its own right, a process that would be accomplished only by the end of the period.
