ABSTRACT
Adam Smith made as astute a contribution as anyone to eighteenth-century arguments about aesthetics. And one reason for drawing attention to his remarks on music is that they have been neglected in musical theory, which is still taken to be, in William Austin's words, 'a German speciality'. In Carl Dalhaus' history of music aesthetics, for example, Smith is not listed in the bibliography; neither is he mentioned in Peter Kivy's important study of eighteenth-century musical thought, The Corded Shell. Adam Smith had suggested that rhythm is a more 'primitive' musical quality than melody. It is not surprising, either, that the aesthetics of popular music should relate more obviously to eighteenth-century interests in oration, performance and gesture than to the nineteenth-century concern with structure. Adam Smith had suggested that one difference between singing and speaking was that the singing voice could meet the structural demands of the score in a way in which the speaking voice could not.
