'Système comes from a Latin word whose Greek roots mean "to stand with" and which refers to a constituted group or organization. A technical term in music theory, and later in astronomy and philosophy, its first recorded use in French is in Pontus de Tyard's 1555 Solitaire second ou discours sur la musique. The subject is of considerable philosophic import. The proximity of music theory and philosophy for the ancient world and Middle Ages is echoed in Tyard, who finds in music "the image of all the Encyclopedia." Looking back to this text, one must be struck by the fortuitous resonance of music, the original context of "system," and the evocation of the circle of knowledge or encyclopedia in which the figurative derivations of "system" would play so great a role. Tyard specifically calls attention to the word système and indicates that it is a technical term that he does not expect his interlocutor to know. The definition comes a few pages later in the course of the discussion of diasteme ("a distance of two or more intervals"): "among reputable Authors the word System means several things, always however signifying a group or assembly, and signifying among Musicians an assembly of voices containing both intervals and Diastems" (90). The novelty of the word is underscored when, after pages of highly technical discussion of music theory, the Solitaire again feels called upon to define this term in particular: "System is the name for any group or assembly of intervals and sounds that produce a harmonious consonance… Nevertheless its true and most complete definition is a harmony composed of at least two consonances or chords" (155). Even at this early juncture, système is apparently thought of as containing a certain margin for greater and lesser degrees of order and internal organization. Much of the history of the term will take place in its variance between the simple aggregate and complex symmetry.

The work generally credited with bringing système into ordinary French, however, is Marin Cureau de la Chambre's Le Système de l'ame of 1664, a treatise presenting itself as defiantly scholastic in a Cartesian age ("I have never strayed from the principles received in the School [des Principes receus dans l'Escole]," [11]). The author spends a substantial part of his preface in justifying his use of the word système, "as extraordinary as it may seem in this context" (9). He sets up an elaborate analogy with astronomers who construct "the System of the World," or "order and disposition of the bodies which compose the world," observing that they do not take into account the "nature of those bodies," but simply their "situation, figure, size, and movements" (7). Cureau explains that he is similarly interested in the situation, figure, grandeur, and mouvemens of the soul, whose faculties are disposed as are the planets: "For the Understanding and the Will can be considered as the Planets and wandering or vagabond Stars; the Faculties attached to their organs are the fixed Stars; and each has its influence that it spreads throughout the body" (9).

In discussing the rather late appearance of "system" as a metaphor for mental or philosophical schemes, Walter J. Ong notes its relatively late application in cosmography, despite the antiquity of the term. The concept of the astronomical "system" is concomitant with the acceptance of the purely geometrical Copernican universe "in which no direction was more favored than any other," unlike the older Aristotelian or Ptolemaic cosmologies, which favored an up-and-down orientation and whose conceptual "wholeness" was so absolute that the notion of divisible, analyzable parts was inconceivable. Cureau's use of the term to evoke a cosmos containing fixed and wandering stars that extend their "influence" afar suggests a curious survival—doubtless an effect of the author's allegiance to l'Escole—even as the modern visualist understanding has reoriented the scheme. His universe is clearly the modern one, composite and analyzable. In particular, its availability to abstraction, through the separation of "Situation, Figure, Grandeur, Movements" from "le fond de sa Nature," places us well within the Cartesian era, whatever the professed beliefs of the author might be. Even so, the Thomistic distinction between natural and divine truths takes on the color of Weberian disenchantment, and Cureau strays into the proximity of philosophical skepticism in spite of l'Escole.

… dans l'incertitude où l'on sera toujours des veritables Principes de la Nature, il estoit de tous les Systemes de la Philosophie, comme de ceux des Astronomes, qui song tous bons bourveu qu'ils rendent raison de tous les Phaenomenes, & qu'ils ne choquent point la Religion ni l'experience. Car ce sont là les deux grans Luminaires qui nous doivent éclairer en cettie vie; l'un pour le jour des veritez eternelle, et l'autre pour la nuit & l'obscurité de la Nature. ([12])

The vérité whose discursive rehearsal would weaken it thus falls out of language; Cureau is left with an abstract "order and situation" bereft of value or substance and a series of indifferently useful "systems" that will not yield any final answers.

In his 1675 Remarques nouelles sur la langue françoise, Dominique Bouhours credits Cureau with bringing système out of astronomy into ordinary language. Bouhours seems to distinguish two or perhaps three levels of usage for système: a technical term in mathematics and philosophy (evoking in passing its connection with the Copernican universe), and a figurative expression with both accepted and non-standard uses. If "Aristotle's sytem" and "a system of tragedy" [le system d'Aristote, un system de tragédie] are tolerated by people who are sensitive to language [des gens habiles en notre Langue], while "the system of the Court, the system of German affairs" [le system de la Cour, le system des affaires en Allemagne] is not, it would appear to be a question of the quasi-philosophical context of the former remaining more easily permeable by the term's associations; something that the context of the "world," conceived of as the Court or Germany, resists.

A similar hesitation regarding the appropriate use of système can be seen in turn of the century dictionaries. Incorporating the examples from Bouhours in its definition of système, Richelet's 1680 dictionary gives literal (astronomical) and figurative meanings (as "state or constitution"), noting that the latter are not yet established. The Academy dictionary of 1694 recognizes only the philosophical use of système as a "supposition of one or more principles from which one derives consequences and on which one establishes an opinion, a doctrine, a dogma, etc." Although the definition emphasizes système's philosophical use, the examples ("the system of Ptolemy, the system of Copernicus; he has founded a new system") show an interesting conflation of philosophy and astronomy. Système has become entirely abstract, referring not to the physical disposition of the universe envisioned by Ptolemy or Copernicus, but rather to their concept of it, their premises and arguments. For Richelet, "C'est la figure du monde," the "figure of the world," a phrase which takes on its own metaphoric vibration: système is not only the world's "(con)figuration" but also a figurative world, an abstraction, a sign. Furetière's 1720 dictionary turns out to take the most conservative approach of the three, noting only that système comes from the Greek term for "composition" and has narrow technical uses in astronomy, medicine, and music.

Nevertheless, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the figurative uses of système had proliferated. Littré gives a phrase from Bossuet concerning the "nouveau dogme, ou, comme on parle à present, du nouveau systême de Luther" ["the new dogma, or, as they say these days, Luther's new system"]. As his aside indicates, Bossuet is clearly making a concession to popular jargon; that he would use the word at all, however, shows that it is not entirely beyond the pale. His reference to the "systême de Luther" further indicates a certain trend—still present today—to associate "system" with a set of beliefs that one does not hold oneself, even that one finds inimical. The connotation is not absolute; the index to the 1720 edition of Bayle's dictionary gives instances of use that all appear to be in the neutral sense of any philosophical set of beliefs or theoies ("le système des atômes," "le système des causes occasionnelles," etc.).

Nevertheless, the negative implications became attached to the term, which tends to crop up in theological tracts from the first half of the eighteenth century. A 1733 pamphlet, Le sisteme des anciens et des modernes, apparently seeking to attract readers' attention through the use of trendy vocabulary, uses the term rather loosely ("l'ancien Systême de l'éternité de l'Enfer" ["the former system of the eternity of Hell", 14). In an anonymous tract from 1735, Le Systême du melange dans l'oeuvre des convulsions, the negative connotations of système are clearly in evidence, as is the ease with which the term permits a slide to the visual metaphor of a linked chain leading "au fanatisme & à la corruption des moeurs" ["fanaticism and moral corruption"].

The philosophes often used système negatively to characterize scholastic thought and other objects of their enlightened disdain. In such an instance, a satirical poem of Voltaire's, God convokes various theologians and philosophers, and requests that they answer a simple question: "Dites-moi qui je suis? & comment je suis fait?" ["Tell me who I am, and how I am made?"]. Following a parody of Thomistic doctrine, the narrator summarizes,

Chacun fit son sistême & leurs doctes leçons
Semblaient partir tout droit des petites maisons.

If the word système evoked a certain hostile alienness or unreality in the first part of the eighteenth century, it may be in part through association with the disastrous financial schemes of the Regency and the monetary système of John Law. Harshly alluded to in Les Lettres persanes, reflected in the normative and economic confusion of Manon Lescaut, the disruption spread by the système shook social and political institutions and fed into a general sense of ontological unease.'

'I don’t like to say too many negative things about music and musicians playing music because I know how damn hard it is.'

'One of the initial consequences of the CD player was a propensity to have music playing in the background, always. The CD player was only fractionally as demanding of one's attention as the increasingly needy-seeming turntable. once you cleared the creepy hurdle of getting used to "digital black"—recorded silences on CD being an altogether different creature than vinyl LPs' louder, more textured silences—the reward was a greater dynamic range, the upshot of which is that it became possible to listen to more radically quiet music. One could listen to recordings of works by Morton Feldman and not have the troubling suspicion that there were sounds buried in an LP's grooves that the needle failed to uncover, faint attacks obscured by a brush fire of surface noise. But as listening became a more rationalized experience through the digital time display and a more ambient experience through the longer, uninterrupted playthroughs of quieter, more abstract music, concerts began to make stronger claims on my imagination. I was ready for music in which my experience of time was more subjective and more immersive, and in which I found myself confronted with an imperative to listen deeply.'

'“Sunglasses were sort of the new wave,” Rollins said. “A lot of the new guys coming out were wearing sunglasses.”'

'Reading accumulates to what end?'

Duncan Law's notes on Being and Time

The Picturing Relation

'When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound… I don't need sound to talk to me.'

'When silence, generally speaking, is not in evidence, the will of the composer is. Inherent silence is equivalent to denial of the will…'