Maryam Moshavar’s research focuses on the history of music theory and its intersections with philosophy and aesthetics, the interfaces of music and poetry, and phenomenology.

In his 1748 “Memoir on Mathematical Subjects” Diderot asks whether the soul can be “secretly guided” by the perception of rapports between musical sounds, and be influenced in its aesthetic judgments by “a kind of secret and natural trigonometry.” The subject of the sensory perception of rapports, in part reminiscent of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s contested claims about the geometrical affinities of the musical ear, is one that brings together a cross-current of epistemologies of rationalist as well as empiricist origin. In question, from an empiricist standpoint, is the ontological and epistemological status of abstraction and geometric figuration in perception, and the possibility, as Alain Cernuschi (2000) has pointed out, of envisioning a correlation between the object of perception (the object of physico-mathematical observation) and the object of reflection in which sonorous musical events are constituted. Though the question of the perception of rapports in the sensory domain, and the impact of such perceptions on aesthetic and musical experience is a lingering one in Diderot’s writings, d’Alembert’s verdict, hidden in the 1752 edition of his Elémens de musique but emerging to the forefront in the preamble to Volume VI of the Encyclopédie in 1756, appears definitive and without appeal. In this paper, Moshavar returns to the public face of d’Alembert’s refutation that brings Rameau’s principle of the fundamental bass to a checkmate from the standpoint not just of its physics, but also of its practice and aesthetics, and consider the conception of music theory that is left behind, from the “point of view,” in d’Alembert’s words, “under which science envisions its object.”