" Music had shown that it could now articulate, reflect and project a sense of an established secular order – hence allowing the absolutist polemics of Lully’s court operas – and yet also be the mouthpiece of a radical sense of often beleaguered individuality. By 1700 music had developed techniques capable of dividing and ordering time and of holding the attention of its listeners in ways that would have been impossible a century earlier. "

― John Eliot Gardiner , Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven