Refiguring the Early Modern Voice

Neither Tomlinson nor Cowart questions the larger Cartesian framework, though. [...]Tomlinson's adumbration of the Lullian recitative as "habituation" may well open up a space for envisaging a new, albeit somewhat passive type of listener.\n And like the celebrated philosopher, he believed the penchant of Greek musicians for what he called "excessive transport" to reside in the fact that "all they put their effort into was to touch the heart and the senses, which is quite a lot easier than to satisfy the intellect [esprit]." According to Luc Ferry, the "birth of taste" is directly correlated with Cartesianism's attempt to ground the quest for truth (and, implicitly, freedom) in a radical shift from tradition as the basis of certainty to a form of subjectivity affirming itself through self-reflexive doubt.21 Yet for Perrault the pursuit of certainty and the "modern liberty to move on" entailed a far less unequivocally Cartesian type of subject.