“I said to music that I gave it the vastest scope to paint whatever it wanted, but I imposed two conditions on that: the first was that the diapason would remain in my archives; the second, that the range of the voice and its instruments would be limited to the planetary scale, like nations—except that I only imposed the second condition for a time, until Herschel had discovered a new planet, which would be the bass register of a new scale, and the tonic of a new octave.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798