This study analyses reflections on music and considers ways in which it facilitates links between language and meaning.

"J.J. was born for music," Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of himself, "not to be consumed in its execution, but to speed its progress and make discoveries about it. His ideas on the art and about the art are fertile, inexhaustible." Rousseau was a practicing musician and theorist for years before publication of his first Discourse, but until now scholars have neglected these ideas. This graceful translation remedies both those failings by bringing together the Essay, which John T. Scott says "most clearly displays the juncture between Rousseau's musical theory and his major philosophical works," with a comprehensive selection of the musical writings. Many of the latter are responses to authors like Rameau, Grimm, and Raynal, and a unique feature of this edition is the inclusion of writings by these authors to help establish the historical and ideological contexts of Rousseau's writings and the intellectual exchanges of which they are a part. With an introduction that provides historical background, traces the development of Rousseau's musical theory, and shows that these writings are not an isolated part of his oeuvre but instead are animated by the same "system," this volume fashions a much-needed portal through which literary scholars, musicologists, historians, and political theorists can enter into an important but hitherto overlooked chamber of Rousseau's vast intellectual palace.

People chat about music every day, but they also treat it as a limit, as the boundary of what is sayable. By addressing different perspectives and traditions that form and inform the speaking of music in Western culture--musical, literary, philosophical, semiotic, political--this volume offers a unique snapshot of today's scholarship on speech about music. The range of considerations and material is wide. Among others, they include the words used to interpret musical works (such as those of Beethoven), the words used to channel musical practices (whether Bach's, Rousseau's, or Hispanic political protesters'), and the words used to represent music (whether in a dialogue by Plato, in a story by Balzac, or in an Italian popular song). The contributors consider the ways that music may slide by words, as in the performance of an Akpafu dirge or in Messiaen, and the ways that music may serve as an embodied figure, as in the writings of Diderot or in the sound and body art of Henri Chopin. The book concludes with an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy.

This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.

'...discusses virtually all the musical writings which figure in this tome of the Oeuvres completes and may even be read as a companion volume, providing a key to the understanding of its various texts...O'Dea's vividly textured and finely nuanced reading of Rousseau's musical imagination plainly does complement the Pleiade collection in two striking ways...it offers a general interpretation of the place of the philosophy of music in Rousseau's thought that is addressed to concepts which flit in and out of particular works, articulated in a voice whose clarity of tone is unmatched by a chorus of editors. Second, it pursues its case across a range of texts spread far beyond the limits of any collection of Rousseau's essays on music.' - Robert Wokler, French Literature This new study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggests that his early articles on music for the Encyclopidie give a unique insight into his thinking on aesthetics, affectivity and desire. Rousseau is shown as moving subsequently between two opposed tendencies. He celebrates the voice as the vehicle for the most intense moments of human experience but also frequently attacks the surrender to passion implicit in that celebration, denouncing the arts and arguing that women must be confined to the domestic sphere.