Mentalité, tradition et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle

Mentalite, Tradition, and the Origins of the Musical Canon in Eighteenth-Century France and England. In the history of music "canon" denotes a repertory of old works that are immortalized by study or performance. A canon arose in music during the eighteenth century, much later that in the other arts, not on the level of ideas or of a cultural movement common to the arts in general. It grew instead ont of the expansion of the preexisting practice by which works had occasionally been encapsulated within repertories of recent music and associated with the ritual of a particular feast. These works were then mode self-consciously canonic by being thrust up into consciousness by political crisis in the context of social change. This happened in Britain during the deeply troubled times at the turn of the eighteenth century, and in France during the political crisis of the 1750s.Weber William. Mentalité, tradition et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 44ᵉ année, N. 4, 1989. pp. 849-873