Many scholars in the humanities strive towards an accurate understanding of the historical meaning of words we use to denote cultural elements that are abstract concepts rather than material objects. The conference Music and Knowledge Making in the 18th Century – organized by Amparo Fontaine (Centre de Recherches Historiques, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso) as part of her Marie Skłodowska-Curie project ‘Harmony on the Edge: Musical Encounters Between Early Modern Europe and South America’ – addressed several of these ubiquitous but challenging terms, such as ‘music’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’. In everyday speech it is easy to assume that we know what these words mean, but the truth is that each one could have and has had many different meanings across centuries and cultures (sometimes even for the same author). Although trying to define them is a noble enterprise, it also shares the destiny of Sisyphus.

As the two-day conference clearly demonstrated, even when dealing with a seemingly coherent group of sources stemming from eighteenth-century Europe, alternative views emerged of what we mean by ‘music’, what pertains to ‘science’ and what constitutes ‘knowledge’. The event’s stated aim was to ‘discuss the varied approaches to music as both a source and a tool of knowledge in the Enlightenment’, thereby also addressing the relationship between the science of music, music as a science and the history of knowledge at large. And here, once again, it could be worth asking whether these subtle distinctions between source, tool, science and knowledge in discourses on music are something that we, as historians, introduce into our sources, as interpretative lenses, or whether they are something that we find embedded within the sources themselves.

Although probably produced as something of a diversion, I think Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 1675 text ‘Drôle de Pensée, touchant une nouvelle sorte de REPRESENTATIONS’ (Amusing Thought, concerning a New Type of Performance; transcribed in Horst Bredekamp, Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), 200–206) offers an interesting peephole into late seventeenth-century systems for categorizing knowledge. These defy our assumptions at least as much as Jorge Luis Borges’s famous ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ discussed by Michel Foucault in his Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gaillimard, 1966). In this little essay Leibniz is recommending a system of public presentations of belles curiosités in which art and nature, knowledge and demonstration would merge, following a logic akin to the one that resulted in the make-up of the Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities). Leibniz is imagining a sort of gigantic fair, where it is the idea of wonder – as already pointed out by Lorraine Daston and Chaterine Park (Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: MIT Press/Zone Books, 1998)) – that rules as a form of epistemic virtue, bringing together actual and potential knowledge in order to ‘make extravagance serve the establishment of wisdom’ (‘faire servir l’extravagance à l’établissement de la sagesse’; Leibniz, ‘Drôle de Pensée’, 205). In these contexts, music was an element integrated into the Wunderkammer, and it figures prominently in Leibniz’s fantasy. The philosopher mentions – and all on the same level – concerts, opera, the display of rare musical instruments, the speaking trumpet, and the experiment of breaking a glass with the voice. Music as a source and as a tool here are not clearly demarcated, nor is nature from art or science: items just stand one next to the other, conveying the idea that this huge display of wonders will inevitably enhance human knowledge. The fact of viewers sharing urban space with these phenomena, and the sheer coexistence of so many meaningful experiences, will make something happen.

This catholicity of approach, where for instance successful theories share the ground with unsuccessful ones, emerged in some way also during the two-day conference. Although the conference call seemed to privilege an understanding of the history of knowledge along the lines promoted by Lorraine Daston (‘The History of Science and the History of Knowledge’, KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1/1 (2017), 131–154), meaning it is closely tied to the development of the history of science, many speakers introduced elements of discussion far removed from that. For example, Rebecca Cypess (Yeshiva University) discussed the way in which women’s creative artistry had to be shaped so that their output could be acceptable in a society where musical professionalism and womanhood were not compatible. The process of self-fashioning that brought some of them to identify with figures such as St Cecilia or the Muses could be interpreted as an updating of social knowledge, one that cleverly allowed them to exploit some socially acceptable extraordinary female figures in order to shield themselves from criticism. David R. M. Irving (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats & Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) reflected on the emergence of the trope of the ‘European ear’ in European-language travel writing of the eighteenth century (noting a brief mention in the early seventeenth) as an embodied term that indicated a collective, often patronizing, listening attitude towards musics of other continents. This trope reflected the rise of new notions of ‘European music’ in the long eighteenth century. Leendert van der Miesen (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History) introduced delegates to a discussion about the ‘animal ear’ in that same period, focusing especially on debates regarding the hearing capabilities of fish and examples of how animals were categorized, such as the method suggested by Vicq d’Azyr, based upon their hearing faculties.

My own contribution (Maria Semi, Università di Bologna) focused on the new poetics of knowledge – defined by Jacques Rancière as the literary procedures that enable a discourse to escape from being categorized as literature and to attain the status of knowledge – entailed by the constitution of music history as a scholarly genre. While the first specimens of music history do not seem to share a common root nor use the same narrative strategies, they all seem intent on avoiding their writings being categorized as literature or as a mere deposit of information in order to attain the status of proper knowledge. A similar process can be observed in the case of Pierre-Jean Burette’s writings, discussed by Philippe Sarrasin Robichaud (McGill University), where the study and translation of ancient Greek sources about music is mediated through the use of medical language and especially by the anatomist’s epistemological gaze. Scholarly language – in this case medical – acts as a medium for the discourse’s legitimization as knowledge. Through the practice of writing, artisans in particular (such as painters, chemists, clockmakers and instrument makers) pursued strategies for acquiring a new status in the eighteenth century. As highlighted in Paola Bertucci’s work Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), the figure of the artiste emerged at the beginning of the century as a bridge between the world of the artisan and that of the savant, as someone who could combine craftmanship with esprit. Jean-Philippe Échard (Musée de la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris) complemented Bertucci’s analysis with a concrete example, showing how knowledge was produced by the late eighteenth-century activities of Nicolas Lupot, violin maker, and Ignazio Cozio, violin collector and writer on the history of the instrument.

More aligned with the tradition of studies related to music and/as science, the contributions by Halley Barnet (St John’s College) and Elena Serrano (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona) showed how music had been a useful model ‘to think with’ in developing theories that could help bridge the divide between mind and sensation, or explain the physiology of passions. Nathan Martin (University of Michigan) demonstrated the role that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s theories played in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ‘sensationalist turn’ at mid-century, using archival research to distinguish Rameau’s voice from those of the philosophes (especially Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert) in his Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie (Paris: Durand [and] Pissot, 1750). Chladni’s innovative musical instruments, discussed by Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), would have surely been held in high esteem by Leibniz for his Parisian fantasy, mixing, as they did, wonder and knowledge through display. The aura of mystery that surrounded these ‘music-theoretical instruments’ was a secret as jealously kept as the artisanal knowledge of the renowned violin makers studied by Cozio. In the case of both violin making and Chladni’s instruments, the spread of knowledge was hampered by a still developing system of patent rights. The same mixture of awe and suspicion that Chladni’s instruments elicited could have been witnessed during Mesmer’s magnetizing sessions, a topic broached by Amparo Fontaine, who clearly demonstrated that the tuning of the world was not utterly hushed by the new acoustic theories of modern physics and that ancient themes, such as the harmony of the spheres, lingered on and kept on resurfacing in European culture.

It is not easy to force a coherent set of questions that address all these issues, if the coherence we are looking for is a Linnean one, with a pyramid structure depending on one single feature. But it could be easier if we tried to think along the lines drawn by Leibniz in his ‘Drôle de Pensée’, following him in the idea of considering several ways – all of equal value – in which music as sound, as an object and as an idea (or ideal) contributed to the knowledge-making of the time. We could also ask further questions, such as: who was entitled to speak about and deal with music, broadly conceived, and who was not? Whose voices were entitled to turn this talking about music or producing music/sounds into knowledge? And perhaps the process of de-linking certain topics from the history of music as a science, of stopping being obsessed with ‘modernity’ and of recentring topics in the more ecumenical history of knowledge would also help, not only in broadening our sources and geographical reach, but also in opening our ears to multiple epistemic values. This work of de-linking and recentring (or maybe decentring and provincializing) requires time, effort and dialogue with other disciplines.

Indeed, transdisciplinary dialogue – especially with historians and historians of science – was actively sought during the conference, with scholars including Rafael Mandressi, Silvia Sebastiani and Antonella Romano (all École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) being invited to chair specific sessions. However, the dialogue proved difficult. On the one hand, everyone is very cautious when entering ‘foreign’ disciplinary territory (as music might have been for some of the chairs), while on the other hand some major theoretical divides on issues such as theory and practice (which emerged powerfully during the conference) have different histories and levels of significance in specific disciplinary traditions, making it harder for dialogue to bear fruit. Yet far from promoting the idea of dialogue as being unfruitful, events such as this show we now need more transdisciplinary dialogue than ever. We haven’t been trained to talk to each other (and especially really to listen to each other; talking is easier) and it’s a skill that can only be improved through practice. As Daston has written of the necessity for a new narrative in her discipline: ‘I don’t know whether it is possible for the history of science to escape from its hall of mirrors, or whether the attempt would just worsen the vertigo. But we can’t just go on as before’ (‘The History of Science and the History of Knowledge’, 150). Mutatis mutandis, this is a challenge for musicologists too.