Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau appears as a pivotal figure in the account of music’s changing status: he is credited with clearly articulating its ability to express a message of its own, independent of verbal speech. This claim helps establish why music could come to be understood not as an ornament to language but as a medium with its own expressive force.

Music Beyond Accompaniment

The account places Rousseau’s intervention within a broader change associated with Romanticism. Music, once treated as an accompaniment to a message delivered in speech, came to be understood as capable of transmitting a message in its own right—one described as deeper than the verbal message. Rousseau is identified as the first to formulate this expressive potential clearly.

Speech and Musical Expression

Rousseau’s position is that music should be allowed to speak for itself rather than merely imitate the affective features of spoken language. The contrast turns on the possibility that speech deceives while music gives expression to truth directly. The passage uses this contrast to situate Rousseau in a wider argument about music, affect, and what may remain inaccessible to words; it does not attribute the later philosophical formulations in that argument to him.