rolling enlightenment music discussion thread

"That my basic principles and those of my late father are anti-Rameau you may loudly proclaim."
-C. P. E. Bach

"there is neither measure nor melody in French music, because the language is not sensitive; that French singing is only continual barking, unbearable to all unprejudiced ears; that the harmony is brutal, without expression and feeling uniquely like schoolboys' padding"
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, Volume 10, p. 318

The French composer Pascal Boyé, a friend of Diderot, used the aria as ammunition for a treatise entitled L’expression musicale mise au rang des chimères (“Musical expression exposed as an illusion”). Citing the aria by the opening words of the French version premièred in Paris in 1774—“J’ai perdu mon Eurydice!” (I’ve lost my Eurydice!)—Boyé commented drily that the melody would have served as well or better had the text read “I’ve found my Eurydice!”

-Oxford History of Western Music, by Richard Taruskin

Over a century too early but
"Counterpoint ... is an enemy of music."
-Vincenzo Galilei