In France, the word “revolution” was first applied to music during the eighteenth century, as the term slowly shed its astronomical meaning to take on a historiographic one. Revolution no longer meant a heavenly body’s completion of one rotation around its path, rather, it came to be defined as an abrupt change or rupture from the past. This new definition assumed history to be a process of continual improvement.[2] Thus, historical revolutions did not return to a point of origin, but arrived at a completely new, and better result. Michel-Paul-Gui de Chabanon, an amateur musician and writer, seems to be the first writer to consistently apply the word revolution to French music. According to him, musical revolution occurred when an individual genius—in his opinion, composer Jean-Philippe Rameau—caused a sudden change in aesthetics.[3]
Explanation:
The American media seems to foreground the affinities between music and politics during election years. The Rolling Stones, Adele, R.E.M., and many other musicians have publicly confronted the Trump campaign for using their music without permission during rallies. The visceral and almost pre-conscious elements of music make it an ideal outlet for the passionate ideologies that boil over during heated political debate. Yet the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has warned, “To argue that the French Revolution marks a break in music history appears to be a hardly justifiable construction, sacrificing empirical reality to methodological principal [through an] equation between political and cultural history.”[1] He was skeptical of music historians who casually located the roots of nineteenth-century Romantic musical aesthetics in French revolutionary operas or a spirit of revolution in the instrumental compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven. Historical research from the past two decades has shown that significant changes in musical practices and institutions occurred in France from 1789 to 1794. The time is ripe to ask again whether the political Revolution of 1789 coincided with a musical revolution.
