Music betrays the very paucity of the words its sets, or, rather it makes emphatic the severe limitations of a reason that valorizes a rationality divorced from embodiment. Reason’s poverty is unmasked. (And it can be no accident that wordless music rises in importance in western history, apart from the special and important exception of dance, which by definition privileges the body’s relation to music over that of the mind itself, at the precise moment in early modernity that language itself is more and more systematically institutionalized as the bureaucratic tool of would-be corporate and state power, beginning with the slow rise of  the literate classes from the ranks of the monastic clergy, and ending in the modern boardroom).

Richard Leppert, ‘Social Order and the Domestic Consumption of Music’ in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, eds. A. Bermingham and J. Brewer. London: Routledge. p.529.