‘What is MUSIC?’ Charles Burney asks in his Preface to the first volume of A General History of Music (1776); ‘An innocent luxury, unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification of the sense of hearing. It consists, at present, of Melody, Consonance, and Dissonance.’Footnote 1 Nothing perhaps reveals one's personal inclinations more than the act of defining a term for someone else. Compare Burney's definition with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opening lines in the article ‘Musique’ (a revision of his article for Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie, printed in his 1767 Dictionnaire de musique and first translated into English by William Waring):
MUSIC, The art of combining the sounds in a manner pleasing to the ear. This art becomes a science, and even very profound, when we attempt to find the principles of these combinations, and the causes of the pleasure which they inspire us with. Aristides Quintilian defines music as the art of the beautiful, and pleasing in the voices and movement. It is not strange, that with definitions so vague and general, the ancients have given a prodigious extent to the art which they thus defined.Footnote 2
Both definitions aim to address what music means to us all, rather than to Rousseau or Burney alone. But Rousseau begins with a technical definition. In his mind, music is first and foremost a practical art; unearthing its meaning depends on a personal desire. Burney, by contrast, describes music first in economic and moral terms, before providing the technical components that characterize the musical practice of his time.Footnote 3 From this perspective, the value of music lies as much in people as in artistic forms, in collective uses as much as intrinsic qualities.Footnote 4
Charles Burney's publications on music are diverse, ranging from the travel writings that first brought him literary recognition (in 1771 and 1773) to the monumental General History of Music (1776–1789), with which he established himself as one of the most respected music scholars of the eighteenth century. Yet all of this work shares in the impulse to vindicate music as an object of public interest, to demonstrate its value – symbolic and even, implicitly, monetary. After all, as a traveller, antiquarian and writer, Burney had an investment in music not only as breadwinning craft (through his activities as organist, teacher and composer), but also as intellectual labour. He readily emphasized the physical strain of his travels and the economic cost of his hunt for documentation: accounting in 1773 for the necessity of a public subscription reaching at least five hundred people for the General History of Music, Burney boasted of ‘fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds kicked down in my rambles & Bibliomania, with a certainty of loosing Eight or 900 more, if I print two 4to Volumes, besides the Loss of Time, Ease, Sleep, &, perhaps, Reputation’.Footnote 5 Even the reputation he earned from the publication of the travels remained a fragile kind of capital, for not everyone readily granted the status of man of letters to a professional musician.Footnote 6 Burney's biographer Roger Lonsdale wrote sternly that, in 1769, he was ‘little more than a successful music-teacher, who had published some not very inspired music and who had at last had the good sense to bring to a close a rather chequered career as a composer for the theatre’.Footnote 7 Burney, then, had a personal stake in the vindication of music's general interest for the public.
Yet in promoting his work, Burney faced a quintessentially liberal predicament: how to appeal to the general public – or, at the very least, to the largest possible audience of music lovers (as opposed to music professionals) – even as he established himself as an authoritative voice whose views acquired a privileged status. In the words of Walter Benjamin – words that Adorno would recall when introducing the music critic's social aporia – ‘the public must always be proved wrong, and yet it must always feel represented by the critic’.Footnote 8 This is Burney's condition, the condition of the modern critic, trapped between universal and particular: the critical voice calls for distinction yet it must appeal to everyone. Recent scholarship has emphasized the myriad continuities between aesthetic and ethical–political questions in the eighteenth century – the ways in which the construction of aesthetic judgment in the Enlightenment dramatized the ethical dilemmas arising from modern accounts of the self.Footnote 9 Burney's vindication of music's value to the public, then, was an unavoidably political project – one that had been pursued by many thinkers in the British intellectual tradition: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke, Hume, Adam Smith and others.Footnote 10
Three factors have marginalized Burney's contribution to the history of aesthetics, however – two of which seem to follow from the practicality of his concerns. First, Burney's more philosophically inclined writings are fragmented and episodic in nature, the consequence of his preoccupation with his primary task, the general music history. Nevertheless, in this article I will seek to reconstruct his surviving reflections on the value of music, typically found in prefatory material such as dedications and introductions. My purpose is not to forge a cohesive discourse out of Burney's passing thoughts; indeed, in his accounts of his travels through Europe, Burney's method of inquiry was bound to yield intellectual transformations brought about by new encounters.Footnote 11 Even Burney's ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ (1789) – his most articulate statement about the purpose and nature of his profession – remains elusive in its conclusions. In her recent commentary on this text, Maria Semi finds Burney's discourse ‘tortuous’, if not altogether self-contradictory.Footnote 12 She notes with frustration that ‘in specifying the ingredients of musical composition he muddles compositive elements and aesthetic criteria’, making it virtually impossible for a present-day historian of aesthetics safely to attribute to Burney any of the positions supposedly held by his British philosophical contemporaries: that pleasure in music originates in the faculty of sympathy, an inner sense of harmony, some correspondence of music with the mind or the trace of natural language in musical expression.Footnote 13
Second, Burney made few explicit references to contemporary essayists when writing about such questions (Avison and Montesquieu are exceptions). It would not be impossible to read the list of compositional ‘ingredients’ that Burney proffers in his ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ (‘melody, harmony, modulation, invention, grandeur, fire, pathos, taste, grace, and expression’Footnote 14) as a recognition of what Adam Smith saw as ‘the power of music to excite and vary the different moods and dispositions of the mind’.Footnote 15 But Burney gave no indication that he had any specific theory in mind. This is not to say that Burney had no knowledge, whether direct or secondary, of aesthetic debates. On the contrary, he conversed with prominent figures of his time, including David Hume, James Harris, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, among others.Footnote 16 The sale catalogue of his ‘miscellaneous library’, with its 2,092 lots, demonstrates a keen interest in contemporary aesthetics and politics (as well as the classics, history, geography, astronomy, gardening, grammar and foreign languages).Footnote 17 He also maintained an extensive correspondence with Thomas Twining, who, in 1789, published an annotated translation of Aristotle's writings on aesthetics, prefaced with two essays on the concept of imitation.Footnote 18 In his text, Twining designates Burney as a ‘superior judge and master of the art’; Johnson, too, reportedly acknowledged Burney's superior understanding of the ‘Philosophy of Music’.Footnote 19
Third, Burney saw the competence of the music critic not only as distinct from the public, but also as opposed to ‘men of wit of all countries’. Such men, he claimed,
being accustomed to admiration and reverence in speaking upon subjects within their competence, forget, or hope the world forgets, that a good poet, painter, physician, or philosopher, is no more likely to be a good musician without study, practice, and good ears, than another man.Footnote 20
Fontenelle's ‘famous question’ (‘Sonate, que [me] veux-tu?’) illustrates, in Burney's mind, such misguided, if not deceitful discourse. In disqualifying the sophistic pronouncements of ‘men of wit’, Burney implicitly objects to a general faculty of aesthetic judgment, as conceived, for example, by Jean-Baptiste Du Bos: not all listeners have ‘ears capable of vibrating to the sweetness of well-modulated sounds’.Footnote 21 The perception of music, Burney argues, calls for practice and learning. This valorization of praxis engages the very heart of aesthetics as a discourse of the body, of how knowledge is made by the senses.Footnote 22 In Burney's analysis, it turns out that Fontenelle simply cannot hear the sonata's answer to his query, which is plain enough to a ‘real lover and judge of Music’:
I would have you listen with attention and delight to the ingenuity of the composition, the neatness of the execution, sweetness of the melody, and the richness of the harmony, as well as to the charms of refined tones, lengthened and polished into passion.Footnote 23
Despite his critical attitude toward mere dilettantism, Burney took a liberal stance on music's contribution to the ‘public good’ – by which one should understand more than a generous disposition toward others. Indeed, his brand of liberalism conceptually echoes the formal establishment of individual rights and collective duties in the political sphere, dividing everyday life into myriad distinct spheres and separating private from public, personal opinions from universal judgments and emotion from reason.Footnote 24 Consent, to Burney's mind, was the common basis of both music and politics – a principle apparent in his conception of musical expression, and in the correlation, noted in his travel journals, between musical styles and political regimes. In music, as in politics, consent did not mean democratic ideals, of course; in fact, musical excellence, in Burney's view, seems to have required musicians' voluntary submission to a leader's will, in combination with the ample resources of court culture. Rather, music's contribution to the public good lay, he believed, in its universality as an ‘innocent luxury’ – a leisure pursuit without any risk of moral depravation. Moreover, the universal occupations of musical performance and listening allow for individual distinctions to emerge: not all enjoy music in the same manner, with the same refinement.
But these distinctions, which the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ recasts as the individual's right to personal feelings, left Burney with a problem. For who can now legitimately speak for the public? Or, to put it another way, who can set forth the ‘common sense’ of which all might approve? This is, Burney asserted, the role of professional music criticism – an idea that is at best weak, at worst authoritarian. Burney's misfortune, I wish to argue, is that he established music's universal significance on principles that made private enjoyment accessible to virtually everyone, yet limited the public pursuit of music to but a few. Still – as Adorno noted of the modern music critic – to acknowledge this limitation is not to condemn altogether the intent behind it: Burney's intellectual trajectory is an invitation to take up his liberal project once again.
Musical Performances as Symbols and Enactments of Political Regimes
In Burney's writings musical expression is the consequence of an accord between musical form, social situation and inner feeling: the situation in which music occurs becomes a criterion by which to assess the quality of a composition. Rousseau paid particular attention to the fictional situation of dramatic music, especially the equation of musical form with the inner life of the character. His study of Armide's monologue ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ in the Lettre sur la musique française advocates tonal contrast and instability in setting a discourse of passion and interrogation.Footnote 25 Similarly, Charles Avison, commended by Burney as ‘the first, and almost the only writer’ to attempt music criticism in England, demanded that music ‘give aid to sense [that is, meaning]’; for this reason, Avison criticized cyclical forms in dramatic music (such as da capo arias or structures using ritornellos), since they involved repeating musical segments in whole or part, and were thus contrary to the succession and variety of human passions.Footnote 26
If this definition of musical expression had normative implications for composition, it also provided a framework for understanding performers' labour. For example, in his accounts of his travels, Burney reported on ‘the famous old Antonio Vandini, on the violoncello, who, the Italians say, plays and expresses a parlare, that is, in such a manner as to make his instrument speak’.Footnote 27 Instrumental music involved communication, and even a kind of acting. Burney famously described how, seated at the clavichord, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach could ‘absolutely contriv[e] to produce … a cry of sorrow and complaint … he grew so animated and possessed, that he not only played, but looked like one inspired’.Footnote 28 Burney's appreciation implicitly posited an agreement between performer and listener – a shared understanding of musical performance as fictionally situated, or, in other words, a self-contained world in which expression, from an almost primal to an ‘inspired’ utterance, transcended the everyday subject of enunciation.Footnote 29 If this description might be seen to confirm Burney's debt to Rousseau's theory of musical expression, its appreciation of theatricality and even illusion in musical performance complicates matters: that Burney acknowledged Bach's capacity to look like someone beside himself – to adopt the (outward) signs of passion – seems to celebrate the art of appearance in a way that contradicts Rousseau's avowed goal of liberating everyone from disguise.Footnote 30
In the end, Burney's and Rousseau's disagreement about art betrays differing political conceptions of music.Footnote 31 Burney's contractual idea of musical performance, with its emphasis on convention, had clear political implications, which emerged, for example, when he discussed the ‘pillaging’ of Italian opera buffa by French composers.Footnote 32 The imitation of Italian music by the French offered, Burney wrote,
an irrefragable proof of the superiority of that melody which is become the common musical language of all Europe: not like the French tongue, by conquest, or policy, but received every where, by the common consent of all who have ears susceptible of pleasure from sound, and who give way to their own feelings.Footnote 33
Music thus became for Burney a symptom of political regimes – in this case, of the state's foundation in the liberal principle of consent or illiberal modes of domination.Footnote 34 Burney's conclusions about Frederick the Great, the ‘rigid disciplinarian’ who (so he claimed) ruled through terror over music in Berlin, echoed his criticism of French absolutist abuses.Footnote 35 ‘Music’, Burney concluded of his Berlin visit,
is truly stationary in this country, his majesty allowing no more liberty in that, than he does in civil matters of government: not contented with being sole monarch of the lives, fortunes, and business of his subjects, he even prescribes rules to their most innocent pleasures.Footnote 36
Arriving in the free city state of commercial Hamburg, by contrast, Burney was able to celebrate private freedom – the freedom to circulate in a city ‘crowded with people who seem occupied with their own concerns’.Footnote 37 Indeed, the social life there pleased Burney as much as the music. At the house of the mathematics professor and musical patron Johann Georg Büsch, Burney naively recalled ‘[a most agreeable evening that] was productive of no musical event, or new discovery; for I had long been convinced, that there is no harmony more enchanting, than that arising from the coincidence of hearts, and accord of sentiments in society’.Footnote 38 In the context of this Hamburg conviviality, C. P. E. Bach, formerly in the employment of the Prussian king, became the exemplary figure of a liberal, newly liberated, musician – yet one who reportedly exclaimed to Burney:
But adieu music! Now, he said, these are good people for society, and I enjoy more tranquillity and independence here, than at a court; after I was fifty I gave the thing up, and said let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die! And I am now reconciled to my situation; except indeed, when I meet with men of taste and discernment, who deserve better music than we can give them here.Footnote 39
If Burney was concerned with individual liberty, he also expressed ambivalent feelings about social levelling. Burney's opinion on the distribution of authority in the orchestra, in particular, complicated his apologies for the freedom of civil society. In his mind, the martial structure of command provided a model for describing the best orchestral performances, typified by the orchestra at Mannheim – famously, an ‘army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it’.Footnote 40 Burney described Gluck similarly as ‘a great disciplinarian’ whose ‘troops’, though endlessly drilled, submitted without protest, in a kind of silent plebiscite: ‘there is a strong presumption, that when it is endured without murmur, by men not absolute slaves to their commander, they are convinced of its expediency.’Footnote 41 The parallel between Gluck the ‘great’ and Frederick the ‘rigid’ thus still highlighted the value of consent. But the representation of orchestral excellence as the product of military discipline highlighted the economic and symbolic resources necessary for professional musical performance. While opposing the Prussian king's monopoly on musical pleasures, Burney conceded that most cities lacked the means to support the arts adequately:
The fine arts are children of affluence and luxury; in despotic governments they render power less insupportable, and diversion from thought is perhaps as necessary as from action. Whoever therefore seeks music in Germany should do it at the several courts, not in the free imperial cities, which are generally inhabited by poor industrious people, whose genius is chilled, and depressed by penury, who can bestow nothing on vain pomp and luxury, but think themselves happy in the possession of necessaries.Footnote 42
In other words, Burney defended the superiority of Italian opera and galant music – both refinements of court culture – while praising a private life freed from the encroachment of despotism. This implicit accommodation of aesthetic self-determination within governmental despotism was hardly unusual: eighteenth-century thinkers from Voltaire to Kant entertained dreams of social progress shepherded by enlightened and benevolent despots.Footnote 43 With his suggestion that the fine arts attenuate the pain of subjugation, however, Burney perhaps comes closer to the contemporary Burkean conception of beauty as a ‘social quality’.Footnote 44 Later in the century, Burke was to argue that the French Revolution erred precisely because laws cannot be ‘supported only by their own terrors’ – by the sublime of power – but must also ‘engage our affections’: ‘to make us love our country’, Burke wrote, ‘our country ought to be lovely’.Footnote 45 The fine arts, these ‘children of affluence and luxury’ in Burney's phrase, flourish precisely at the intersection between material freedom and voluntary servitude. They are the surplus product of a powerful subject who has nonetheless abjured any political power.
Or perhaps Burney simply tried to have his cake and eat it too – an accusation levelled at him by several of his contemporaries. Among them, John Bicknell ferociously attacked Burney and the implicitly monarchist politics of his appreciation of Italian opera in a satirical parody, Musical Travels through England (published under the pseudonym of the late Joel Collier). Commercially successful, the satire went through several editions (1774, 1775, 1776 and 1785), adding and varying material to include lengthy quotations from Burney – among them his disparaging view of music in imperial cities.Footnote 46 Bicknell called into question the pertinence of the information found in such travel literature, criticizing the personal vanity of a project that demanded such general attention, with the ultimate aim of social advancement.Footnote 47 Italic font, in Bicknell's parody, is used to signal the formulas that mar Burney's writing, such as his regular recourse to the near-meaningless phrase ‘pretty things’; Bicknell reuses these formulas in unusual or odd contexts in order to highlight the banality and vagueness of Burney's discourse.Footnote 48
In Wolverhampton, Joel Collier – Bicknell's fictional traveller, who Italianizes his name as Coglioni or Collioni (colloquial for testicles) – attends a public procession celebrating a newly elected representative; the people of Wolverhampton audibly live on the fringes of civilization with their out-of-tune violinist, their English horn and their ‘fifteen performers on marrow bones and cleavers, all in blue aprons and blue night-caps’.Footnote 49 The account recalls Burney's report on ceremonial music in the mass during a religious festival in Augsburg, in which he heard ‘the rude and barbarous flourish of drums and trumpets, at the elevation of the Host’.Footnote 50 But it is the hero's complete reliance on hearsay, and his incapacity to distinguish common from elevated music, that leads him into trouble: moved with enthusiasm during the procession in Wolverhampton, Collier bursts into song. With its mythological imagery and gallant language, the ode he sings pertains to courtly culture – and Collier already hears the banks of the Thames resounding with Italian airs. But instead of showing appreciation, the elected representative makes him the target of the crowd's ire:
Scarce had I arrived at the conclusion of my song, before, instead of admiration and applause which I had so well deserved, I was saluted with a general hiss; the representative himself … exclaimed with a terrible oath, ‘This here man, gentlemen, is a ministerial tool, and all that he says is unconstitutional.’Footnote 51
Burney's toadying to the authorities – he dedicated his General History to the queen (1776) and worked under the patronage of the king to produce the Account of the Musical Performances in Commemoration of Handel (1785) – clearly gave Bicknell grounds for this implied accusation.Footnote 52 But Collier (unlike Burney, perhaps) learns a certain discretion: in the city of Worcester, he finds himself once more in the midst of an election, and with learned wisdom, retreats. ‘I fear’, he notes, ‘it is a serious truth, and my own experience has in some measure confirmed it, that the wild notes of liberty, and the quavering of Italian airs, can never be heard together in concert.’Footnote 53
Bicknell's satire is demagogic in its dismissal of art music. The ‘wild notes of liberty’, one is led to surmise, are nothing but John Bull's ‘roaring’ to the sound of harsh trumpets, or some such modern rendition of the ‘arts of ancient Rome’. In a footnote to his dedication, Collier commends England's recent attempts to sing, ‘notwithstanding … that an ingenious gentleman, the author of The Musical Lady [George Colman], has said, “John Bull was made to roar, and not to sing”’.Footnote 54 But the sentiment was evidently ironic: England's determination to sing stands for its misguided repudiation of republican values (opposed to the imperial, decadent and ‘modern’ Rome).Footnote 55 George Colman's farce ridicules a woman's infatuation with Italian opera. She ultimately bows to the authority of the young Englishman she has just married, however, and is compelled to mend her ways. Bicknell's satire borrows heavily from the play, from the mannered Italianization of names to the marrowbones and cleavers whose raw sounds sometimes ornamented public and private celebrations in England. In this play, as in Bicknell's satire, coarseness – reversing the refinement of Italian opera and its cosmopolitan connoisseurs – becomes the aesthetic manifestation of England's native freedom.
Against this ideological background, Burney's correlation of musical excellence with economic surplus, individual divertissement and political disempowerment were clearly distinct from populist and republican theories of music. Indeed, Burney's equation of music with luxury markedly differentiated his views from Rousseau's. So far as we can tell, the two men never exchanged ideas on this subject: Burney seems only to have solicited Rousseau's philological and musicological competence, and Rousseau, in his one letter to Burney (dating from 1776 to 1777), wrote solely about technical and music-historical issues. But Burney evidently did not agree with Rousseau's diagnosis of modern corruption and his attendant calls for political reform. In Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes and his Essai sur l'origine des langues, the artificiality of beauty and the complexity of the arts are symptoms of degeneration and alienation, not of progress.Footnote 56 Burney turned to other authorities to establish the political significance and public utility of music.
‘Innocent Pleasure’, ‘Innocent Luxury’Footnote 57
In the end, then, Burney decided that cultivating music, although inherent to humanity, was less a necessity than an occupation for times of leisure: one wants music not to survive, but to live well. Not everyone agreed. A political tract published in London in 1793 (which Burney may have possessed) saw real utility in the ‘amusement, consolation and pleasure’ that music provided ‘in the hours of fatigue or leisure’.Footnote 58 The notion that music could ‘impede the vicious and promote the virtuous sentiments’, as the essay put it, was, on the surface, consistent with Burney's ideas, but the argument took a different turn. Since the purpose of the essay was to propose social reforms by considering the general interest as opposed to the individuating principles of ‘liberty, property, security’ – foundational ideas that supposedly tormented men with the ‘desire of acquisition’ and ‘luxury’Footnote 59 – music performed the vital task of ‘teaching man to be happy’: far from being an optional embellishment of human needs, it belonged among those ‘productions’ of the ‘human faculties’ which each member of the ‘social compact’ has an equal right to share in.Footnote 60 From this perspective, music was a public activity – not merely a private pursuit.
While Burney did not explicitly refer to contemporary disputes about luxury, his discussion of music at the intersection of moral conduct and political economy reads as an important addendum to this debate.Footnote 61 Eighteenth-century thought on luxury had taken a polemical turn in 1714 with the publication of The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, in which Bernard Mandeville notoriously argued that the pursuit of self-interest produced the comfort, wealth and power of modern commercial nations. This idea ran counter to classical censures of luxury as a moral vice and a sign of broad-based social decadence – indictments that were famously to inform Edward Gibbon's account of the decline of the Roman Empire, as well as the demagogic dismissal of Italian opera by the pseudonymous Collier. (Burney owned in his library representative works of the traditional attack on luxury, including John Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times.Footnote 62) The idea of ‘innocent luxury’ thus amounted to a moral reformulation of Mandeville's scandalous observation that the pursuit of the superfluous proved useful to the public. For this purpose, Hume, in his widely read essay ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (1752), distinguished between ‘innocent’ and ‘vicious’ luxury:
as innocent luxury, or a refinement in the arts and conveniences of life, is advantageous to the public; so wherever luxury ceases to be innocent, it also ceases to be beneficial; and when carried a degree farther, begins to be a quality pernicious, though, perhaps, not the most pernicious, to political society … A gratification is only vicious, when it engrosses all a man's expense, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation and fortune.Footnote 63
Indeed, in Hume's mind, one could hardly call ‘luxuries’ those ‘indulgences … pursued at the expense of some virtue, as liberality or charity’; these were, properly speaking, ‘follies’.Footnote 64 Rather, luxury was, according to Hume, only what procures gratification even as one fulfils one's obligations (toward oneself, one's kin and others). Hume's argument thus had two targets: against the censors of luxury, Hume highlighted the economic benefits and civilizing effects of luxury; against the ‘libertines’, Hume defended the moral primacy of duty and generosity, and the boundaries it ought to set on gratification.Footnote 65
The public value of music as luxury, then, was almost a matter of calculation, a question of political economy. The balance tipped in the wrong direction when the public utility of luxury became nil or negative; musical spending should entail neither deficits nor bankruptcies. Burney likened the Duke of Württemberg to Nero for wasting the resources of his country in both musical and military establishments (note that both, even in this critique, are lumped together as the prerogatives of a sovereign prince):
It is, perhaps, upon such occasions as these, that music becomes a vice, and hurtful to society; for that nation, of which half the subjects are stage-players, fiddlers, and soldiers, and the other half beggars, seems to be but ill governed.Footnote 66
It was from this perspective that Burney endeavoured to justify the institution, in 1774, of a public music school in the Foundling Hospital in London, as the corrective to a deficit on the musical balance sheet. Indeed, he proposed that this establishment would substitute the exploitation of domestic resources (such as voices and instructors) for the importation of foreign musicians and the attendant transfer of wealth abroad – this for the ‘benefit’ and ‘honour’ of the nation.Footnote 67 Initially successful, Burney's proposal was ultimately rejected by the School's Court of Governors and Guardians ‘on the grounds that it was “not warranted” by the Act of Parliament which had established the Foundling Hospital’.Footnote 68
The moral and political propriety of musical pleasure constituted one of Burney's most continuous lines of thought from the 1770s to the 1790s. Burney's Preface to The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) takes up the matter with a misquotation from Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (book 4, chapter 8):
in [music's] defence, Montesquieu has said that ‘it is the only one of all the arts which does not corrupt the mind.’
Charles Avison's translation of the same sentence in the Preface to his Essay on Musical Expression reads slightly differently:
But some will ask, why should Music be pitched upon as preferable to any other entertainment? It is because of all sensible pleasures there is none that less corrupts the soul.Footnote 69
Burney transformed the negative turn of Montesquieu's phrase into a positive one (none versus the only one) and modified the modalization of the verb corrupt (from less to does not). The misquotation – whether intended or accidental – effectively salvaged music from any association with moral disorder. It made a more forceful case for the benefit of occupying leisure time with music, and promoted music from the low rank that some of the foundational thinkers of British liberalism, such as Locke, had assigned it.Footnote 70 In the strong words of Burney's dedication to the queen in his General History of Music,
Pleasure and innocence ought never to be separated; yet we seldom find them otherwise than at variance, except when Music brings them together.Footnote 71
In fact, Charles Avison had already used a strategy of selective quotation for the same purpose. While he translated most of Montesquieu's examination of music in De l'esprit des lois, he omitted the first paragraph and the title of this short chapter: ‘Explanation of a paradox of the Ancients in respect to manners’. The truncated text reads as a reasonable defence of music's social utility: in martial societies such as those of ancient Greece (according to Montesquieu), music's power to generate passions could successfully counterbalance ‘fierceness, anger, and cruelty’ with ‘a sense of pity, lenity, tenderness, and love’. If Burney had checked the quotation not only against Avison's but also Montesquieu's text, however, he probably realized the idiosyncrasy of his translation. Montesquieu attributed the importance of music in ancient polities to particular social circumstances rather than to political principles. As the opaque title of the chapter of De l'esprit des lois indicates, Montesquieu saw the place of musical institutions in Hellenic constitutions as a curiosity in need of explanation rather than vindication. In his first paragraph, he consistently distances himself (and, implicitly, the Moderns) from ‘all the Ancients’. In the end, he legitimizes government of and by music only in ‘particular circumstances’, and its utility for the present remains determined by the legislator's diagnosis of contemporary mores.
But Burney, in his 1771 Preface, sought to make a point about the present as well as the past. Against a conception of music as ‘a frivolous and enervating luxury’, Burney wrote in defence of music's usefulness to humanity in all the main domains of social existence, from the church to the state (‘military discipline’), from public to private spheres (the theatre and the family) and, finally, in times of labour as of leisure:
[music] alleviates labour and mitigates pain; and is still a greater blessing to humanity, when it keeps us out of mischief, or blunts the edge of care.Footnote 72
Burney also speaks of music's economic and philanthropic purpose – as a vehicle for raising money for the poor and orphaned, for softening the ‘pangs of childbirth’, or quite simply for making a living. What is unique about this disjointed catalogue of music's ‘humane and important purposes’ is its theoretical frame. Burney sought to establish music not as luxury, but as a multifarious necessity:
Music has indeed ever been the delight of accomplished princes, and the most elegant amusement of polite courts: but at present it is so combined with things sacred and important, as well as with our pleasures, that mankind seems wholly unable to subsist without it.Footnote 73
A synoptic reading of Burney's prefatory and dedicatory gestures suggests the uniqueness of this Preface in his work. Burney never returned to the subject of music's necessity for human subsistence in the openings of later works. The 1773 Preface to the second travel book struck a more personal, autobiographical tone: ‘music has, through life, been the favourite object of my pursuit’.Footnote 74 Only in passing did Burney mention that he was ‘unwilling to allow the knowledge of a science which diffuses so much blameless pleasure, through a circle of such vast extent, to be of small importance’ – and left the matter there.Footnote 75
When Burney returned to the issue of musical pleasure at the start of his two next publications, he theorized music exclusively as a luxury. Consider the dedication to the queen and the Preface to the General History of Music (1776) and the dedication to the king in the Account of the Musical Performances in Commemoration to Handel (1785), both of which were reviewed and perhaps even partly written by Samuel Johnson.Footnote 76 These dedications represent musical pleasure as the union of contraries – of ‘science’ and nature, of ‘corporal with intellectual pleasure’, of sense and reason.Footnote 77 Music is simultaneously ‘a passion implanted in human nature’ and the product of ‘rational nature’, which develops wherever leisure succeeds ‘the restless tyranny of painful want’.Footnote 78 It is a universal delight used ‘upon occasions the most opposite’ – religion and theatre, funerals and weddings, solemnity and mirth – but also an aristocratic and moral pursuit of refinement and civilization:
Music, an art of which the rudiments accompany the commencements, and the refinements adorn the completion of civility, in which the inhabitants of the earth seek their first refuge from evil, and, perhaps, may find at last the most elegant of their pleasures.Footnote 79
The king and queen themselves subsequently become the (characteristically gendered) symbols of music as a rational and moral pursuit, the king representing science; the queen, virtue.Footnote 80 The dedication to the king praises him as ‘a judge of music in whom all requisites concur, who hears [artists] not merely with instinctive emotion, but with rational approbation’, while the queen, to whom musical recreations provide but another fold in the cloth of purity and dignity of which her life is made, receives Burney's wish in the guise of a courtier's prayer:
May it long amuse your leisure, not as a relief from evil, but as an augmentation of good; not as a diversion from care, but as a variation of felicity.Footnote 81
In sum, Burney might be said to radicalize music as the epitome of ‘innocent luxury’. Insofar as one could afford to enjoy music without hindering the fulfilment of one's duties – or insofar as one was in a position to pursue pleasure without detriment to oneself and others – music, properly understood and practised, could keep one ‘in perpetual occupation’ (to borrow Hume's phrase), which is to say that it kept one both free from the pain of labour and protected from ‘sloth and idleness’; unproductive and unnecessary, music, in this condition, offered no other reward but that of the ‘occupation itself’.Footnote 82
Liberalism's Musical Problem: Universality, Freedom and Authority
The theory Burney sketched in the opening pages of his General History of Music – that music was a universal luxury uniting pleasure and innocence, from its primitive beginnings to its utmost refinement – may have provided a solution to the issue of music's social role, but it left Burney with another, more pressing difficulty. Even as the ‘innocent luxury’ of music-making provided an elegant demonstration of the natural identity of all human beings, it also attested to the inequalities among them. While Burney upheld a vision of music's universality, assuming that musical experiences are, on some level, the same for everyone, he also sought to account for the distinctions – the conflicts of taste and judgment – that remained. Pleasure in music, according to Burney the observer of human nature, was universal. Yet Burney the professional critic, in seeking to judge and classify, could only establish his authority by recourse to normative principles: common rules of aesthetic and social discrimination. The ‘dilemma of liberalism’, to borrow Richard Shusterman's phrase, comes about in the effort to reconcile these two sources of the collective self – pleasure and norm – so that a normative principle of aesthetic authority appears to be the true expression of the individual rather than a set of rigid and impersonal laws external to it; the problem, to quote Shusterman, ‘is how to establish or legitimate an authoritative standard for consensus beyond the individual, which will not be seen as an unjustified imposition on his freedom as subject’.Footnote 83 Burney's problem, then, was nothing less than that of liberalism itself. One solution, offered by Hume in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, is to agree that, for a variety of reasons (education and social circumstances, among others), only a certain category of people feels as everyone ought.Footnote 84 The critic thus emerges as the ‘real’ voice of the public, and the only voice with the authority to silence others.Footnote 85
Mary Wollstonecraft, in her 1790 review of Burney's General History of Music, took issue with precisely this blunt division of mankind into ‘practiced’ and ‘ignorant’ ears, and its socio-political implications. ‘What kind of music is most pleasing to mankind?’ Burney asked in his Preface, providing the following answer: ‘To practiced ears, such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance: to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common.’ Wollstonecraft, however, advocated a third musical category addressed to those who would be neither ignorant nor knowledgeable. Sensibility, for her, constituted a form of musical intelligence that did not require practice or labour and hence was not the property of a particular social class or professional group. The two categories established by Burney were not enough:
He might have gone further, and have said that people of taste and feeling, who are not professed performers, are most touched by strains addressed to the heart. The mere novelty of harmony will not interest them; and the ingenious contrivance alluded to, sometimes disgusts, as much as fine attitudes in an actor, which, so far from being the expression of passion, spring from study, to produce stage effect … What is then to make a sensible heart vibrate? Dr. Burney was aware of this objection, though he often loses sight of it.Footnote 86
With this, Wollstonecraft prepares the ground for her praise of ancient music's supposed ‘strict union with poetry’ – a guarantee of simplicity and intelligibility – and her promotion of this aesthetic in modern times, under the rubric of ‘national music’:
It may, perhaps, be made a question, whether this is not the only musical pleasure that can be felt by a nation at large: the style of national music, which Dr. Burney speaks too slightingly of, seems to say – yes, – and a heart of sensibility will sometimes beat with the crowd, though it understands a superior language.Footnote 87
Wollstonecraft thus imagined a community born from shared sensibility. In the process, she dismissed the vision of musical pleasure promoted by Burney as either arbitrarily privileging a professional minority or simply false. This critique draws attention to the distance Burney had gradually taken from his initial appreciation of music's appeal to ‘the rest of mankind’ – and not only ‘to the rich and luxurious part of the world’.Footnote 88
Read as a political discourse on musical pleasure, Burney's ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ (1789) begins – ironically given his rejection of the aims of the French Revolution, which began in the same year – with what amounts to a declaration of musical rights, clearly establishing the primacy of individual feelings and the concomitant duty not to infringe on those of others:
As Music may be defined [as] the art of pleasing by the succession and combination of agreeable sounds, every hearer has a right to give way to his feelings, and be pleased or dissatisfied without knowledge, experience, or the fiat of critics; but then he has certainly no right to insist on others being pleased or dissatisfied in the same degree.Footnote 89
Two aspects of Burney's opening sentence delineate his separation of musical discourses into private and public genres. First, Burney establishes hearers' diversity of feelings in music as an individual right, not as a matter of fact. The distinction, though it appears negligible, nonetheless prevents Burney from pursuing Hume's line of argument about taste, even though both writers begin their reflection at the same point: ‘the great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world’.Footnote 90 Indeed, in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Hume constantly appeals to the possibility of general agreement and the necessity of a single standard of taste to regulate and supplant its general diversity. (This is what separates him from the sceptic who is simply resigned to the impossibility of aesthetic accord.Footnote 91) Burney's recourse to the individual's right to feel differently rules out, a priori and on principle, the desirability of a ‘standard’, ‘rule’ or even a ‘decision’ about how one should feel about a piece of music.Footnote 92
Second, Burney also disqualifies personal feelings as a source of any public norm on the basis of the same individual right to feel. Reciprocity precludes the heart from making its reasons a law for others. In other words, the expression of emotions is intransitive; it belongs to each personally and to none in general. Accordingly, a hearer ‘does not extend his hatred or contempt of my favourite Music to myself’.Footnote 93 As a point of comparison, Burney's liberal vindication of toleration in aesthetic matters contrasts with Johnson's rejection of toleration in religious affairs, not in its effects, but in its principle. Boswell, in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., has his protagonist declare:
People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking; nay, with liberty of preaching. Every man has a physical right to think as he pleases; for it cannot be discovered how he thinks. He has not a moral right; for he ought to inform himself, and think justly. But, Sir, no member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what that society holds to be true. The magistrate, I say, may be wrong in what he thinks: but, while he thinks himself right, he may and ought to enforce what he thinks.Footnote 94
In practice, Johnson still concedes a distinction between private and public spheres, though he strictly constrains the former to the inner self (as an inalienable ‘physical right’) and confers to the magistrate the power to enforce censorship in the name of society. One might say, borrowing from Isaiah Berlin, that Burney instead defines aesthetic freedom in the manner of a Modern, which is to say negatively, as ‘liberty from’ the interference of others.Footnote 95 This is consistent with the apparent accommodation of musical liberty with political servitude in The Present State of Music in Germany: Burney is first and foremost concerned with showing that music defines humanity – not with the question of who should govern in order that one can truly exercise one's freedom.Footnote 96
Burney, then, comes close to the relativism of Hume's sceptic; in effect, a radically liberal and strictly subjectivist view of music makes the arbiter of taste a pointless figure. But the main part of Burney's ‘Essay’ consists in divining precisely who can legitimately speak of music with authority. At least five candidates emerge:
1 the ‘lovers of Music’, with ‘partial and capricious tastes’ (paragraph 6);
2 the ‘Prudent critics, without science’ (paragraph 5), or amateurs whose judgment depends on the existence of a canon and the ‘sentiments of a professor’;
3 ‘professors’ (paragraph 5), whose study and experience of a particular art limit the quality of their judgment to that art, so that a great instrumental performer, for example, might not have the proper feeling toward and respect due to ‘good singing’;
4 ‘composers and performers’ (paragraphs 5 and 6), who encompass, but also exceed, the previous category and sometimes divide into ‘sects’; together with the ‘lovers of Music’ and the ‘professors’, they properly constitute music's public sphere, as opposed to;
5 ‘men of wit’ (paragraph 15), who lack the study of composition, the practice of an instrument and the extensive listening that music, in all its various styles, genres and media (paragraphs 6 to 14), requires.
In painting this tableau of musical criticism, Burney effectively disqualifies the ordinary listener as the primary adjudicator of musical value; instead, the music critic rises to the position of authority. Like Adam Smith, then, Burney helped to establish the new behavioural and discursive regulations that redefined (good) music as art and (proper) listening as contemplation:Footnote 97
There is a degree of refinement, delicacy, and invention which lovers of simple and common Music can no more comprehend than the Asiatics harmony. It is only understood and felt by such as can quit the plains of simplicity, penetrate the mazes of art and contrivance, climb mountains, dive into dells, or cross the seas in search of extraneous and exotic beauties with which the monotonous melody of popular Music has not yet been embellished.Footnote 98
Consciously or not, the metaphor of musical criticism as a form of intellectual travel was partly self-serving: it set Burney apart from other music historians as the well-known author of two travel books. More to the point, the financial and physical resources implied by the metaphor also highlighted a key difference between the music critic and the layman – a difference of experience and practice that could have been articulated in terms of social class, but that Burney prefers to couch in the pejorative terms of a developmental geography (in a footnote Burney specifies that, by ‘Asiatics’, he means the ‘Chinese’ who, ‘accustomed to simplicity’, have been observed by ‘repeated trials’ to dislike ‘harmony’).Footnote 99
Competence – defined as practice, knowledge and experience (paragraphs 3, 10 and 14) – becomes the sign of a distinction that confers the right to speak, not for oneself, but for the public. What the musical ‘traveller’ acquired on the way to musical ‘civility’ (‘refinement, delicacy and invention’) amounts to ‘a tranquil pleasure, short of rapture, in which intellect and sensation are equally concerned’ (paragraph 2) – a pleasure whose analysis is the very object of the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’.Footnote 100 Burney advocates here the recognition of a distinct science of musical judgment based on the decomposition of ‘musical productions, both as to composition and performance’, into a series of qualities, ‘by a kind of chemical process’ (paragraph 3).Footnote 101 Only briefly sketched, this science requires at least two prerequisites, namely the broadening of one's perspectives and an empirical method of valuation. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri: musical criticism, Burney claims, requires a ‘liberal, enlarged, and candid mind’, which, like Horace, pays no dues to any particular master, but judges for itself, and will therefore see more than ‘a small angle of the art’.Footnote 102 Burney makes it his task to reason with ‘principles’ and ‘criteria’, holding as a model the work of Roger de Piles for ‘testing merit’ among painters. Invoking ‘De Piles's steelyard’, Burney most likely has in mind the Balance des peintres. In this table of marks, provided as an entertaining exercise at the end of de Piles's Cours de peinture par principes (1708), the critic evaluates the work of painters in four distinct categories (composition, drawing, colour and expression).Footnote 103 The quantitative conversion of qualitative judgments provided a comparative method in ascribing aesthetic (and market) value, and came to be used as a didactic tool for art education and collection displays.Footnote 104 In England, Jonathan Richardson, in his Two Discourses (1719), discusses at length de Piles's ‘Scale of Merit’ as the connoisseur's useful shorthand for judgments and observations; he further amplifies its scope to include the painter's technique, aspects peculiar to the painting's genre and the ‘advantage’ and ‘pleasure’ the painting procures, and illustrates his method of aesthetic judgment with a study of the portrait of the Countess Dowager of Exeter by Anthony Van Dyck.Footnote 105 The ‘Scale of Merit’ found other applications too: Mrs Thrale, whose salon Burney assiduously frequented from 1776 to 1784, evaluated her friends' qualities in such a manner (Burney fared rather poorly as regards scholarship, humour and wit, but received higher marks for good humour, religion, morality, manners and general knowledge).Footnote 106 That Burney provides no such quantitative table should not necessarily come as a surprise: as de Piles put it, the table has no persuasive power.Footnote 107 Connoisseurship, Richardson suggests, consists in ‘considering a Picture, or Drawing’ – in the art of describing, reflecting and reasoning, which the connoisseur may further refine in ‘the making of a dissertation’. The ‘Balance of Painters’, in this context, provides a ‘further exercise’ of judgment and a ‘shorthand’ for memory.Footnote 108
If Burney did not dwell further on the nature of critical judgment, it was, I surmise, because the General History provided, to his mind, an extensive illustration of his method.Footnote 109 With the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, Burney intended to clarify for his reader the didactic purpose of his General History of Music – a purpose that, he thinks, distinguishes it from treatises ‘on the art of musical composition and performance’ – namely, to ‘instruct ignorant lovers of Music how to listen, or to judge for themselves’.Footnote 110 In conceiving of the critic as a teacher mediating between scholars and amateurs, Burney conforms to the elitist trend that broadly characterizes the institution of criticism in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 111 Indeed, Burney had no qualms in claiming the public sphere for the critic, and one can read the ‘Essay’ as a kind of self-assertion. Opening with a quasi-dramatization of the relation between third-person (‘every hearer’, paragraph 1; ‘Mr. Avison’, paragraph 3; ‘he’) and first-person subjects (‘I’), the ‘Essay’ presents the narrator-critic (‘Burney’) as a conversationalist (with such phrases as ‘I believe’, ‘I mean’, paragraph 3; ‘I have long suspected’, paragraph 5). In the space of a few pages dedicated to a list of musical ‘criteria’ that ‘would admit of little dispute’, however, the first-person subject disappears, not to return. Instead, the narrator-critic appropriates the plural first person ‘we’, a collective subject primarily defined by its listening experience or absence thereof (‘we never have heard’, paragraph 11; ‘we grow nice and fastidious by frequently hearing’, paragraph 16) and partly determined, in the very end of the essay, by its opposition to other nations (Germany, Italy):
Novelty has been acquired, and attention excited, more by learned modulation in Germany, than by new and difficult melody in Italy. We dislike both, perhaps, only because we are not gradually arrived at them; and difficult and easy, new and old, depend on the reading, hearing, and knowledge of the critic.Footnote 112
The appeal to common experience and consensus is hardly unusual in the history of aesthetics. In ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ especially, Hume was at pains to establish the universal agreement that would delegate aesthetic judgment to a few, and, in the process, to appropriate the public voice in the name of common sense.Footnote 113 Is there any other way for a critic to speak for others than by ‘creating a persona that represents a united voice, a sympathetic sharing of voice, sentiment, and tongue’?Footnote 114 In Burney's and Hume's essays, the ‘first-person plural, the “we” that stands for common sense and consensus, that must silence the reader’ is an elided compact to which the reader may or may not assent in his or her inner self.Footnote 115 The power of the critic lies in the terms according to which he or she proposes to speak as the public.
But how could Burney's cooption of the public voice in the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ not constitute an encroachment on individual pleasure? The primary answer, I believe, is that Burney imagines the narrator-critic of the ‘Essay’ as a spokesperson – if not a kind of amplifier – for musical compositions and performances themselves. The most dramatic moment of the essay occurs when ‘I’, the narrator-critic, disappears behind the ‘I’ of the sonata, directly addressing Fontenelle's question, which ‘you’ (that is, ‘the lover and judge of Music’) had asked: ‘I would have you listen’ (see above for the full quotation).Footnote 116 What distinguishes this passage is not only that it ventriloquizes the sonata, but also that it gives a favourable impression of the sonata's interlocutor – a position with which the essay's reader (for example, the royal dedicatee of the General History) might identify. Burney's rhetorical strategy, then, does not merely consist in appropriating the public voice, but also in staging a conversation with nothing other than music itself. Here again, Burney does not dwell on how music comes to have its own voice; as noted above, it could be that, like Edmund Burke and David Hume, Burney thinks that a sonata produces the same effect on each person's senses, given the proper disposition of the listener; that, like Adam Smith, Burney finds in the autonomous order of musical productions the potential reflection of emotions we ascribe to it; or that the sonata's power of speech arises from an accord between the composer's intention, the performer's execution and the listener's understanding, as one might gather from Burney's musical criticism.
What the ‘Essay’ achieves is the redefinition of the role of the narrator-critic, from the analysis of musical productions to the art of ‘really’ listening. This might in part explain why Burney had surprisingly little use for the word ‘taste’ in this text (with a total of five occurrences) and why he submitted to Abraham Rees's new Cyclopaedia a separate article on ‘Taste, in Music’, which reproduced selected paragraphs from Rousseau's article on ‘Goût’ from the Dictionnaire de musique. In the latter, taste appears as a faculty distinct from both judgment and sensibility, which ‘enables’ the comprehension and expression of another's feelings and ideas – the perception of the poet's ideas by the composer, of the composer's ideas by the performer and of these ‘musical perfections’ by the ‘hearer’. Taste, as one might expect, appears in the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ as an element of composition and performance (paragraphs 3, 9 and 12); where the ‘hearer’ is concerned, the plurality of ‘tastes’ refers to the preferences of music lovers (paragraph 6), while ‘good taste’ (paragraphs 9 and 16) characterizes not only the performance of embellishments, but also critical listening. It could not be otherwise: if taste is the faculty that ultimately enables one to hear the sonata speak, then it is as absurd to ask whether a standard of taste exists as to ask whether a sense of hearing exists. The proof is uttered by the music. Functioning as an amplifier for the sonata, the narrator-critic is also the hearing-aid for ‘those who have not ears capable of vibrating to the sweetness of well-modulated sounds’.Footnote 117 In sum, the legitimacy of the music critic depends entirely on this act of ventriloquism: critical authority lies in this power to say what the music really is; recognized as such, this authority cannot infringe on the pleasure of the individual.
The reality of music, it should also be noted, was not the only kind of musical community Burney imagined. A fraction of music, only briefly mentioned in the ‘Essay’, escapes ‘cold criticism’, engaging the listener in a kind of spiritual travel:
there is a certain portion of enthusiasm connected with a love of the fine arts, which bids defiance to every curb of criticism; and the poetry, painting, or Music that leaves us on the ground, and does not transport us into the regions of imagination beyond the reach of cold criticism, may be correct, but is devoid of genius and passion. There is, however, a tranquil pleasure, short of rapture, to be acquired from Music, in which intellect and sensation are equally concerned; the analysis of this pleasure is, therefore, the subject of the present short Essay.Footnote 118
Music also communicated via a transcendent register – the ineffable background to the rule of reason – yet Burney remained largely silent on the matter, even when it clearly shaped his musical appreciation (as in the case of C. P. E. Bach's inspired performance in Hamburg). Indeed, in the Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, Burney went so far as to assert instrumental music's superiority to words when it came to communicating meanings that escape reason altogether: ‘[music] is itself the language of the heart and of passion’.Footnote 119 If, in the ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, the narrator-critic cannot account for this, it is because music subjugates the collective subject, or rather, transmutes the listener into a collective object (‘us’) that has, literally, no active voice to account for its experience. This revelatory kind of communal experience remains inexpressible.
My narrative about Burney's intellectual trajectory is thus one of social anxiety and philosophical resignation. It begins in 1771 with an ambitious affirmation of the importance of music to mankind and ends with the upholding of rational learning and social distinction as a source of community – with the caveat of a quasi-religious experience of music, in which meaning reveals itself to the transported listener. By the 1790s Burney's ‘liberal conservatism’ brought him closer to Burke, whose Reflections on the French Revolution he and his daughter Fanny procured for the royal family.Footnote 120 In a letter from 1792 Burney went so far as to fantasize that music was an occupation that could, among other arts and sciences, divert people from politics altogether, and contribute to preserving the established social order. This epistolary digression placed in sharp relief the politics of his published reflections from the 1770s and 1780s on how music could benefit from German political despotism and how music, as an ‘innocent luxury’, was a moral occupation for times of leisure (or, to be more precise, an amoral occupation, since, under the right circumstances, it temporarily effaces the world of the ethical–political).Footnote 121 Burney's advocacy of music as a public good relied on an paradoxical strategy of individual liberation and collective disempowerment consisting of (1) the establishment of a private sphere where everyone could exert their freedom to feel differently; (2) the ‘capture’ of the public voice by the music critic, not only in the name of a collective listening subject (‘we’), but also in order to make music audible to those unable to hear appropriately; and (3) the musical subjugation of an enthusiastic, transported but speechless community of listeners (‘us’). In the ‘Burneyan’ institution of the musical ear, the dichotomy between knowledge and opinion – and in the end, the difference between those who could afford to study music and those who could not – would ideally have regulated public discourse on music. Economic and technical inequalities reinforce the symbolic coup by which the music critic conjures a reality inaudible to the layman.
To many, Burney's philosophical misfortune will appear all too clear: musical freedom, though established in principle, comes at the actual cost of public servitude, if not self-delusion. In this regard, Burney's music history, like many constructions of the Enlightenment, unfolds as a bid for social control, if not authoritarianism. But the critique of the critic is itself an invention of the Enlightenment and thus to some degree consubstantial with criticism as an institution.Footnote 122 Even Adorno's call for a criticism ‘immanent to music itself’ takes up Burney's advocacy of ‘true’ listening – and Adorno's disqualification of some professional music critics for their lack of serious involvement with musical practice echoes Burney's objections against ‘men of wit’.Footnote 123 The historical ‘function of criticism’, as Terry Eagleton has argued, was on the one hand to oppose the tyranny of the absolutist state, and on the other to oppose the dominance and dogma of received criticism itself.Footnote 124 If Burney's misfortune is instructive, then, it is not simply because one might hope not to repeat his errors. His intellectual trajectory also brings to the fore the foundational importance not only of aesthetics and economics, but also politics in the historical development of musical institutions and ideas separate from governmental power, supported by individual pursuit and regulated by their own principles of authority. Consider the concert hall, the silent listener, the music critic and, well into the twentieth century, the avant-garde composer – who until recently could still hope for the general audience to learn to love what was frequently represented as objectively superior.Footnote 125 Were I to follow Burney, then, in giving a liberal account of myself as a music critic – as a musician, listener and writer – I would seek to answer three questions. First, assuming liberty is indeed what I value first and foremost, (why) can I achieve this end by making music? Second, if there is indeed a good reason for my music-making, what physical, economic, social and personal circumstances will shape its forms and my practices? Third, to the extent that I live under a regime that enables autonomous and plural musical institutions, what is the nature of the social compacts I form with others when making (and thinking about) music? Anchoring his answers in an understanding of human nature, Burney thought music contributed best to securing the good life when it occupied people in their leisure time. For that reason, he privileged a vision of music and music-making that was as inconsequential as possible – that represented music as an unnecessary social embellishment: ‘innocent luxury’ would neither harm nor transform society. Burney thus paid particular attention to the accord of the composer, performer and listener, and the sonorous reality this accord ought to endorse; as a music critic, he was the man who heard this reality. Burney's answers are not my own, but in giving an account of himself – revisiting, from Preface to Dedication, the purpose or end of music (as Isaiah Berlin speaks of the ‘ends of life’) – he turned musicians into political thinkers and converted political thought into music-making.Footnote 126 In this regard, Burney's philosophical misfortune might prove a useful stepping-stone.
