the ocular harpsichord of louis-bertrand castel - Gewina

Castel's ocular harpsichord 59
of music to animals."^ For Chabanon, music stood so much apart from the
other arts that for this reason alone he judged Castel's colour music to be
nonsense, calling the ocular harpsichord a "ridiculous invention" and an "absurd
chimaera". The essence of melody consisted in the succession in time of the
tones, and it was the ear that caught the internal connection of a melody; there
was no indication at all that the eye could similarly appreciate a succession of
colours."*
Notwithstanding the opposing views of Rousseau and Chabanon regarding
imitation, there is, of course, a striking difference in the way Rousseau and
Chabanon looked at music, compared with the view of Rameau and Telemann.
For the latter music was basically chords, i.e. harmony, while for the former it
was above all song, i.e. melody. As Chabanon remarked: "The whole essence of
music is thus contained in the single word song or nieiody."^'^ Rousseau
compared the melody of a musical piece with the design of a painting and the
chords with its colours, but he thought the harmonic part to be just a form
prescribed by nature, while the melody of the music and the design of the
painting made their products into works of art. If there was nothing more to
painting and to music than combining colours and .sounds in ways agreeable to
the eye and to the ear, then both would have to count as natural sciences and
not as arts. "It is imitation alone which elevates them to that rank. And what is it
that makes painting an imitative art? It is the design. What is it that makes
music another one? It is the melody."'^
In Germany there was a similar development of an increasing emphasis on
music as a privileged language of the soul. In 1755 Moses MendcKssohn, a typical
Enlightenment theorist, seemed happy with the universality of harmony when he
discussed the music of colours in his Briefe iiber die Empfindungen. Mendelssohn
accorded that for the eye "a kind of harmony is reserved that is perhaps linked
to no lesser delight than the harmony of tones is". He attributed the concept
solely to Newton:
It is you. great Newton, to whom humanity owes this discovery [of colour harmony], and you
will be famous for it for many centuries. One has not yet succeeded in elevating this colour
harmony to its true level and transform it into the mother of as many delights as the harmony
'"Ibid., pp. 17-23.
118
Ibid., pp. 6-8: "invention ridicule"; 'absurde chimere".
119
Ibid., p. 15: Toute I'essence de la Musique est done renfermee dans ce seul mot chant ou
melodic."
Rousseau, Essai, p. 153: 'C'est I'imitation seule qui les eleve a ce rang. Or qu'est ce qui
fait de la peinture un art d'imitation? C'est le dessein. Qu'est-ce qui de la musique en fait un autre?
C'est la m^lcxlie."