ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the different ways in which French writers in the second half of the eighteenth century conceptualized the effects of music on the emotions of listeners. It shows that when treating the emotional effects of music, these writers drew on and shaped notions that were contingent upon developments in the fields of philosophy and medicine in particular between 1750 and 1780. In the Encyclopedie, two entries deal directly with music: one by the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and another by the physician Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud. In modern times, according to Rousseau, the impact of music was restricted to bodily senses. Although Rousseau displayed the reluctance typical of medical thinkers to define precisely the interaction between the body and the soul, the implications of the more or less deliberate vagueness common to their writings were diametrically opposed. In a similar vein to Rousseau, Francois Arnaud conceived of the soul as affective interiority.