ABSTRACT
A study of musical attention in late eighteenth-century Germany must be prefaced by an examination of the arguments advanced by Rousseau. Not only was he the first musician of the age consistently to invoke attention when negotiating the boundaries between aesthetics and technical issues, but, as philosophy, his writings link the problem to the Enlightenment's wider preoccupations with unparalleled clarity and conviction. The articles from the Dictionnaire de musique, the work in which Rousseau strove to bring his judgements on musical practice into line with the new philosophy he had been developing since the early 1750s are the most relevant of his writings. Although his thinking on music has recently been the subject of several monographs, and the opinions advanced in the Dictionnaire are today well known, it is seldom recognized that Rousseau consistently justified his praise or censure of works, genres and even musical cultures with reference to various forms of attention and distraction.
