The bicentenary of the death of the Spanish Jesuit mathematician and writer on music Antonio Eximeno (Rome, 9 June 1808) prompted the Institut Valencià de la Música to organize, in the town where he was born on 26 September 1729, a course devoted to this important figure. This was the third in a series of events dedicated to historiographical matters, and its title, which translates as ‘The Boundaries of Discourse on Music in Enlightenment Europe’, reveals that the meeting was conceived not in terms of a routine celebration, but rather as an occasion for rethinking the peculiar contribution of Eximeno to eighteenth-century musical theory and aesthetics. Six musicologists from Italy and Spain were the main speakers at this event: Paolo Gozza and Elisabetta Pasquini (Università di Bologna), Michela Garda (Università di Pavia-Cremona), Amaya Sara García Pérez (Universidad de Salamanca), Carmen Rodríguez Suso (Universidad del País Vasco) and Miguel Ángel Picó Pasqual (formerly of the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Valencia), who is Eximeno's most recent biographer. The audience consisted of fellow musicologists and music students, as well as historians and scholars of aesthetics, the presence of the last group testifying to the interest that this initiative had generated.

Eximeno's two essays on music were published in 1774 and 1775 respectively. His novel Las investigaciones músicas de Don Lazarillo Vizcardi was written much later, between 1802 and 1806, and was eventually published in 1873, at a time when his whole output was being rediscovered and interpreted under nationalist premises – premises that today are regarded as untenable. The first essay, Dell'origine e delle regole della musica, colla storia del suo progresso, decadenza, e rinnovazione (Rome, 1774), raised strong controversy with the Franciscan Padre Martini, in the course of which Eximeno wrote his second essay, Dubbio … sopra il Saggio fondamentale pratico di contrappunto del reverendissimo padre maestro Giambattista Martini (Rome, 1775). After a reconciliation with Martini in 1776, Eximeno apparently abandoned his study of music. As Elisabetta Pasquini showed, Martini could not support a musical system whose theoretical basis he considered insufficient, and whose author overtly argued against that millenary tradition of mathematical speculation on which rested the deeper conviction of the Franciscan, who was a defender of the ecclesiastical music tradition. In spite of this, however, a modern sensibility can be recognized in Martini's Saggio di contrappunto: this is not merely a collection of authoritative music examples, but an essay in which music analysis, biography and history converge towards a historical interpretation of musical works.

A study of Eximeno's writings – as Michela Garda pointed out – reveals that the Jesuit had assimilated much of the Enlightened (Rousseauean) way of thinking about music. Eximeno described music as an art related to language, whose capacity for signifying it enhances, and which is thus a means for expressing (and relieving) human feelings. Like language, music is instinctive, that is to say, it is generated by nature and therefore naturally simple (even if it is not completely deprived of harmonic substance): complex – in other words, contrapuntal – music can only be the result of a historical process of involution. For recovering musical (good) taste, the artificial constructions of mathematical speculation must be demolished. But Eximeno did something more than merely manipulate resonant keywords, considering as he did traditional musical theory from the premises of rational criticism: ‘Ora però che i Filosofi si prendono la libertà di giudicar d'ogni cosa, voglio anch'io esaminare con qual fondamento si crede la Musica parte della Matematica’ (nowadays philosophers feel free to judge everything, and I too want to examine on what basis music is thought to be a part of mathematics) (Dell'origine e delle regole della musica, 61). Eximeno substitutes the mythological foundations of traditional knowledge with the narration of a history of decadence and recovery of music, whose European boundaries he enhances through his incipient interest in folksong and exotic song. But Eximeno felt so confident in his radical criticism because he considered ‘la teorica della Musica come cosa di poco momento, e di niuna conseguenza per il Pubblico’ (music theory as something of little relevance and of no consequence for the public) (Dell'origine e delle regole della musica, 7): the weapons of criticsm can be freely deployed because of the social and political irrelevance of the topic! An example of a ‘small’ Enlightenment, as Garda put it. In any case, it was precisely these characteristics of Eximeno's works that amplified the controversy, and the suspicion can be raised whether the provocative style of the essays formed part of a strategy to open a space for the Jesuit in the Roman literary milieu. This assessment stimulated a rich debate on historical matters, which uncovered other possible backgrounds for Eximeno's writings. Feelings of group identity could have reinforced the controversy, as suggested by the publication of Dell'origine e delle regole della musica just a few months after the Jesuit order had been suppressed by Pope Clemente XIV, who, like Martini, was a Franciscan. More generally, the experience of exiled Spanish Jesuits in Rome should provide a frame for a deeper understanding of Eximeno's activity there.

Amaya García examined Eximeno's criticism of mathematical speculation in music, showing how he set himself apart from the mainstream of music theory and of the incipient science of (musical) acoustics by criticizing such writers as Rameau, D'Alembert and Leonhard Euler. Eximeno rejected Euler's proposals from the Tentamen novae theoriae musicae (St Petersburg, 1739) – he was clearly not acquainted with more recent research by Euler and Daniel Bernoulli on acoustics – because he found them highly speculative and divorced from musical practice. The opposite course, empirical observation, did not lead to a satisfying mathematical rationalization, moving him to refute Rameau's attempts at unifying the whole tonal system under a single natural principle. In any case, this did not stop Eximeno taking advantage of the basse fondamentale theory for managing the harmonic aspects of his system. Furthermore, Eximeno's own approach appears to be no less rigid or arbitrary, conceivable as it is as an axiomatic system founded on two ‘experiments’ that can only prove to be a projection of his own prejudices.

Miguel Ángel Picó brought to the meeting fresh biographical information, such as the finding of a manuscript autobiography attached to a copy of Dell'origine now in Buenos Aires, and the identification as works of Eximeno of many papers published in the Diario de Valencia from 1798 to 1802, when the Jesuit was residing in his home town. This concern of the late Eximeno with music theory forms the basis of Lazarillo Vizcardi, a novel that Carmen Rodríguez Suso interpreted as a kind of roman à clef in which the confrontation between different characters – among whom Padre Martini and other historical figures can be recognized – depicts the struggle of modernity against tradition. According to Rodríguez Suso, Eximeno's musical experience in Italy allowed him to condemn the backwardness of the Spanish musical establishment – still tightly connected with ecclesiastical institutions – and particularly the use it made of traditional knowledge as a means of excluding uninitiated musicians from the most important posts.

A wider context for Eximeno's writings was described by Paolo Gozza, who considered the concept of imitation as applied to music by such different thinkers as Batteux, Adam Smith and Diderot. This allowed him to trace a path that leads musical expression from the imitation of an idealized ‘belle nature’ in Batteux to the distorted expression of an unresolved conflict, both moral and socio-political, in Le Neveu de Rameau. Imitation is thus one of the conceptual tools that helped to make possible a shift from conceiving music's purpose to be the representation of God's mind to thinking of music as a means of representing the human mind, imitating either its emotional states in song or its inner processes in instrumental music (as Adam Smith argues so beautifully). It would be easy, if unfair, to underrate Eximeno as a mere follower of French writers and as a weak music theorist in the more original parts of his writings. A more balanced judgment should recognize his ability to assemble most of the newer ideas on music of his day, if perhaps in an excessively idiosyncratic construction, thus contributing to the common task of rethinking, within the boundaries of public debate, the European musical tradition.