Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-Century Parisian Salon

Abstract

THE FRENCH OBSESSION with conversation in the eighteenth century spawned many commentaries and treatises which testify to polite society's elevation of conversation as an artform-a finely tuned mode of communication with its own rules of etiquette and forms of gamesmanship. As such, conversation became an indicator of certain esthetic attitudes and values which may be seen in other aspects of French culture of this period. Specifically, the French preoccupation with the art of conversation exists in a striking and revealing relationship to a particular musical style which until now has been discussed only as a vaguely analogous manifestation. This style, which will be the subject of further discussion, is the so-called style dialogue, a musical texture in which each of the instruments of a chamber music ensemble at some time or other is assigned to play the melody in a given composition. This differs from the prevalent earlier style in which a single melodic instrument was featured against a background of accompanying instruments. Dialogue style emerged in the 1760s and enjoyed enormous vogue especially in the quatuors concertants or string quartets published in France in the latter half of the century. My intention in this essay is to explore this historical phenomenonnamely, the rise of a new, conversational style of instrumental

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