Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment

by Thomas Christensen , Foreword by Ian Bent

• ISBN13: 9780521617093
• ISBN10: 052161709X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-12-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen is able to orient Rameau's accomplishments in the light of speculative and practical considerations of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. He shows how Rameau incorporates ideas ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists, Diderot, Rousseau and d'Alembert.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi
Foreword	xiii
Ian Bent
Acknowledgments	xvii
Introduction	1	(4)
Rameau and the Enlightenment	5	(16)
Rameau as music theorist	21	(22)
Precursors of harmonic theory	43	(28)
The generative fundamental	71	(32)
The fundamental bass	103	(30)
The corps sonore	133	(36)
Mode and modulation	169	(40)
Rameau and the philosophes	209	(43)
D'Alembert	252	(39)
The final years	291	(16)
Appendix 1 A note on harmonic and arithmetic proportions	307	(6)
Appendix 2 ``L'Art de la basse fondamentale'' and Gianotti's
Le Guide du compositeur	309	(4)
Select bibliography	313	(8)
Index of subjects	321	(2)
Index of proper names	323