 Rousseau’s polemical view of harmony as a hindrance to melodic development, as well as the consequent condemnation of French music, found a natural target in Rameau, who defended himself on various occasions (Rameau’s responses are collected in Scott 1998; on the debate, see Verba 2016: chapters 2 and 3). In his Traité de l’harmonie (1722), Rameau had already stated that melody is merely a part of harmony, and in his subsequent Nouveau système de musique théorique, he had attempted to ground the tonal system in the phenomenon of upper partial harmonics, the faint overtones that are produced whenever any note is struck. This means that there is strictly speaking no pure melody, as no note is ever heard in isolation from the harmonics it generates. The ascending series of upper harmonics, Rameau argues, contains the key to tonal harmony. In his Encyclopédie article “Dissonance”, Rousseau accepts that harmony may be partly grounded in the structure of the harmonic series, but presses Rameau on the origin of the minor third, an interval that is as crucial to tonal harmony as it is absent from the series. More important than these technical qualms is Rousseau’s fundamental methodological difference from Rameau. While Rameau’s musical aesthetics depends on a theory of music including mathematical and physical constructs inaccessible from the mere experience of listening, Rousseau considers such experience the ultimate judge of musical value, and holds that it points to melody as the part of music that is responsible for its emotional impact on the listener (see O’Dea 1995: 19–20). Insofar as it concerns the appropriate level of explanation of musical phenomena, the contrast between Rousseau and Rameau is not unlike the one between Aristoxenian and Pythagorean approaches to harmonics (see  §1.2).