The European Enlightenment changed the tides of cultural and musical expression in its time, in ways that remain elusive for scholars today. Musicological perceptions of the movement have long been shaped by an established narrative of the Enlightenment as a Eurocentric wave of rationalistic and secular thought, with music as a passive recipient of its agency. However, the global turn in the humanities and new interdisciplinary approaches to the cultural history of music have recently inflected musicological discourse in ways that challenge pre-established notions of what constitutes agency, influence and the norms of eighteenth-century music and culture. These approaches, which move away from a focus on works and concentrate more on musicking as a lived experience and cultural practice, have shown that there is never a single narrative in music history, least of all with such a complex and nuanced movement as the Enlightenment.

With these contexts in mind, a group of musicologists met for a workshop at Dalhousie University on 15–17 July 2019, co-organized by Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) and David R. M. Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals–CSIC). The programme featured eight fifty-minute papers (followed by a ten-minute response), each covering a specific facet of music in the Enlightenment: society, philosophies, politics, exchange, education, popular culture, performance and technology. The purpose of the workshop was not only to provide fresh insights into these fields, but also to brainstorm and invoke other avenues of enquiry regarding the interactions of music and culture in the Enlightenment, with the final goal being the creation of a volume to be called ‘A Cultural History of Music in the Age of Enlightenment’, for the forthcoming series by Bloomsbury Academic, A Cultural History of Music. Consequently, the workshop became a spontaneous and experimental process of discussion and debate, contributing in various ways to the ongoing transformation of the tide of thought about music and the Enlightenment. It could be said that there was no better setting for changing tides – and for exploring global and trans-oceanic ideas – than in the historic seaport of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At the outset, Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University) precipitated the ‘rethinking’ process with a compelling presentation on music and technologies in the Enlightenment. Through case studies of musical glasses, technologies of notation, recording devices, musical automata and keyboard instruments, Cypess demonstrated how music technologies, in conjunction both with Descartes’ new philosophy of being and with Enlightenment aims of improving society through practical learning, activated values of personal expression and enlightened the individual about nature, science and other cultures – ultimately becoming effective vehicles of Enlightenment ideology. One particular example – Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's notation of birdsong, interpreted by Cypess as a technologizing of nature – stimulated an ongoing discussion throughout the conference about the contributions of Jesuits and other religious groups to the Enlightenment, countering its oft-projected image as an exclusively secular process. In my response (Lucia Denk, Dalhousie University) I expounded on the connection between Descartes’ philosophy and music technologies, and highlighted the agency of technologies not only in imitating or transcending nature, as Cypess illustrated, but in conceptually changing the laws of nature themselves.

Next Tomas McAuley (University of Cambridge) explored the relationship of music and philosophy, arguing that there were no specific philosophies of music in the Age of Enlightenment. Instead, music was studied via natural philosophy, ethics and epistemology, in a two-way relationship through which music, instead of becoming a mere object of speculation, actively aided philosophers in understanding broader philosophical issues. In one example, McAuley highlighted music's agency in natural philosophy through Newton's use of the musical scale to understand the nature of light in his Opticks (1704). Neil Robertson (University of King's College) responded with some counterexamples, emphasizing especially the crucial role of aesthetics in the French Enlightenment, with Rousseau's ideology marking the transition to Kantian conceptualizations of music.

Stephen Rose (Royal Holloway, University of London) then elucidated the nature of music education in the Enlightenment, showing how, in consonance with John Locke's Some thoughts concerning education (1693), empirical experience became more important than superimposed control. Music education became synonymous with physical embodiment, acquired not merely through reading notation, but through haptic connection with skilled teachers, facilitating the rise of private lessons in the Enlightenment. While contextualizing the acquisition of skills in music as a form of cultural capital, invoking Pierre Bourdieu, Rose also showed the shift from the seventeenth-century practice of imitatio to the eighteenth-century focus on innate talent, an idea that manifests a new concept of self-initiated musical expression. In his response, Gregory Hanlon (Dalhousie University) suggested restricting the term ‘Enlightenment’ to 1760 onwards (although the chronology for the workshop and its intended volume is generous, looking at a ‘long’ age of Enlightenment, from 1650 to 1790), while calling the preceding decades the ‘Age of Erudition’.

The theme of music's agency in the Enlightenment was further investigated through an analysis of music and politics by Rebekah Ahrendt (Universiteit Utrecht). Using the idea of ‘super-politics’, Ahrendt meticulously outlined the interactions between music and the law, demonstrating cases where musical works/activities, without themselves being intrinsically political acts, nonetheless affected political rulings and/or events. Examples included Lully's Psyché, the performance of which facilitated the building of an opera house by royal decree, as well as the querelle des bouffons (1752–1754), which diverted attention from the exile of the Parisian Parliament. Besides demonstrating the rising sense of nationalism in musical culture, evidenced in an Amsterdam ordinance forbidding foreign performers in its operas and theatre, Ahrendt illustrated how governmental restrictions, remarkably, precipitated cross-cultural exchange and musical creativity in the Enlightenment. In his response, Simon Kow (University of King's College) suggested broadening ‘super-politics’ to include Confucius's philosophy of government as a comparative perspective (and indeed one known to Enlightenment thinkers) and invoked the question of music's agency in absolutist versus constitutional monarchies.

Following these four presentations, which emphasized the direct impact of music on Enlightenment ideology, Elisabeth Le Guin (University of California Los Angeles) shifted the tides of conversation to music and ‘popular culture’, proposing evaluating ‘popular music’ – the definition of which she explored with care – through a musical device inherent in global transmission: the sesquialtera. In Le Guin's experiential demonstration, participants gained an embodied understanding of the sesquialtera’s polyvalent nature through engaging in rhythmic exercises. Le Guin showed how – amidst the circulation of cultural and musical practices between Europe, the Americas and Western Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the expansion of trading routes and colonialism – the sesquialtera serves as a marker of ‘popular musicking’ and ‘popular culture’ in the Enlightenment. In her response, Jacqueline Warwick (Dalhousie University) illustrated a point of convergence between popular music and early-music scholarship by comparing the sesquialtera’s rhythmic ‘heartbeat’ of trans-Atlantic exchange with the modern-day ‘groove’ of backbeat rhythm.

A vital question was raised concerning a broader view of music as sound: how was music perceived at the time, particularly in the context of performance? Highlighting music's power as a rhetorical device, Geoffrey Burgess (Eastman School of Music) showed how performance in the Age of Enlightenment was not the recitation of a completed ‘work’; rather, following the etymological meaning of the Old French parfornir/parfunir, the performer possessed the agency creatively to ‘complete’ the composer's sketch or blueprint, with much performance being ‘off the page’. Expanding upon these dissolved boundaries between composer and performer, Burgess reinterpreted Charles-Nicolas Cochin's eighteenth-century engraving of a royal performance of Rameau's La Princesse de Navarre as a depiction of ‘social performance’, consisting of the audience's attentive/inattentive (and even disruptive) interactions within the performance setting as well as the performers’ musical creativity. In her response, Jennifer Publicover (Early Music Society of Nova Scotia) connected Burgess's discussion of music and rhetoric with studies showing the overlap between music and language. She also introduced a neurological perspective, suggesting that neurotransmitters released through performing ‘off the page’ would have enhanced creativity in communal performance.

Cross-cultural transmission came to the forefront again with a presentation by David Irving on global musical transactions in the Enlightenment. Irving demonstrated how, amidst the backdrop of colonialism, cultural exchange of musical ideas powerfully transformed European concepts of music in both thought and practice. European observations of other musical cultures, including their aesthetic preferences, stimulated reflection regarding whether music's power was universal or culturally specific. Ultimately, Irving showed that this global exchange was a significant catalyst which saw the explicit emergence of the term and concept of ‘European music’ in the Enlightenment, setting a precedent for European self-comparison in subsequent stages of music history. In his response, Kevin Robb (Dalhousie University) highlighted the lop-sided nature of musical exchange given its inextricable ties to colonialism and European notions of superiority, while also asking more broadly whether musical exchange, with its impact on European ideas of aesthetics, also influenced the musical philosophies of other non-European cultures.

In the final presentation, Estelle Joubert provided a crucial point of convergence for all other topics, exploring a less commonly considered aspect of the enlightened self: the project of ‘la science de l'homme’. Analysing her case studies from a range of perspectives that drew on music psychology, incipient ideas of neuroscience, and the connection between music and human sympathy, Joubert set forth a counterargument to Kant's claim that the rational, autonomous being created an ordered civil society. For instance, operas such as Niccolò Piccinni's La buona figliuola promoted the concept that sentience and sympathy, not reason, were the prerequisites for human rights and human equality. Joubert ultimately showed how music and musical practices, far from being passive recipients of notions of self, instead actively enabled human subjects to acquire a new sense of individual identity. Unfortunately, the intended respondent to this paper was unable to participate in the workshop for health reasons.

While the workshop featured a stellar array of research, the presence of so many musicologists who also specialized in the performance of eighteenth-century music meant that a concert of ‘Music of the Enlightenment’ was a logical addition to the programme, and quite indispensable to the subject at large. In the cosy setting of the Halifax Public Library (simulating, perhaps, an eighteenth-century salon), the Halifax audience experienced a colourful journey involving musical works by Jean-Féry Rebel, C. P. E. Bach, Telemann, Alexander Munro and Marianna Martines, on period instruments (some provided by both the Dalhousie Fountain School of Performing Arts and the Early Music Society of Nova Scotia). Audience members not only were treated to the sonic beauty of the Enlightenment, but also were enthralled with the captivating descriptions the performers gave of their respective instruments as well as of the musical works themselves.

‘Rethinking Enlightenment Music History’ fostered many noteworthy intellectual breakthroughs, heightening participants’ understanding of music in this period. The presenters experienced an interdisciplinary blossoming of ideas for their volume, both through insights by respondents from varying academic disciplines, as well as through expansive discussion and spontaneous reflections. Thanks must go to the organizers, participants and supporting institutions for facilitating an experience that could be summed up as nothing less than enlightening itself.