Project Concerning New Symbols for Music - Classic Texts in Music Education

(orig Fr: Projet Concernant de Nouveaux Signes pour la Musique, 1742) Rousseau, one of the most influential thinkers of 18th-century France, marked his arrival in Paris by reading to the Academie des Sciences a paper in which he presented a new system of musical notation. His proposals were to form the basis of the 19th-century method of teaching music devised by Pierre Galin and his associates. Rousseau's own publication, here reprinted, is in an elegant and lucid prose whose style is admirably captured in Bernarr Rainbow's page by page parallel translation.