There is no province in which this attitude is more evident than the field of music, about which I have not yet had anything to say. It is interesting and, indeed, even amusing to watch the development of attitudes towards music from the beginning of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, particularly in France, music is regarded as a fairly inferior art. Vocal music has its place because it heightens the importance of the words, religious music has its place because it contributes to the mood which religion is meant to induce...supposed drama and all art to have some kind of mimetic quality, that its function was imitation of life, imitation of the ideals of life, imitation of imaginary beings, ideal beings, not necessarily real beings, but still some kind of imitation, some kind of relationship to actual events, actual persons, actual emotions, something which was there in reality, which it was the business of the artist if necessary to idealise, but at any rate to represent as it truly is. Music, which had no meaning by itself – it was simply a succession of sounds – was clearly non-mimetic. Everybody saw that. Words had something to do with the words spoken in ordinary life, paints had something to do with colours perceived in nature, but sounds were very dissimilar to the sounds heard in rustling forests, or to birdsong. The kinds of sounds which musicians used were clearly much remoter from any kind of ordinary human experience than were the materials used by other artists.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray