Listening to Disruption: Changing Acoustemologies in the Swiss Confederacy, c.1750–1815

Entering Les Délices, at the end of a conference devoted to the acoustic signature of an era of radical change, one could not help but wonder about the sound of this place. Here, in the heart of Geneva, in the parlour of the hôtel particulier where Voltaire lived from 1755 to 1760, it is the muffled sound of traffic through the open windows, the creaking of the parquet floor, the comings and goings of technicians – the room is filled with microphones and cameras – the murmurs of the audience and the rustling of programme notes that can be heard as the summer sky slowly turns a deeper blue. The eye has only a moment to rest on the earth-coloured bust that Jean-Antoine Houdon made of the best-known occupant of these premises before students of the baroque violin class at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis enter and start playing. Their sparkling interpretation of pieces by Gaspard Fritz, Antonio Caldara and Jean-Baptiste Senaillé – among others – makes one feel less transported to the past than connected to the place. This musical moment blends with the sounds of the city, as such performances already did for Voltaire, who heard music by some of the same composers here. What echoed off the walls was not only a selected repertoire but also the murmur of the town’s climate, of its inhabitants and of the guests it welcomed – or the outcasts it expelled. Surely, there is something we now know about this place, having listened to and within it, which fits in with the concept of acoustemology, introduced by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. All we are left wondering is whether the delights after which a French philosophe named his house could have been those of disruption. Voltaire, in any case, remained in the background during the