Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment

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List of illustrations
Foreword by Ian Bent
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Rameau and the Enlightenment
2. Rameau as music theorist
3. Precursors of harmonic theory
4. The generative fundamental
5. The fundamental bass
6. The corps sonore
7. Mode and modulation
8. Rameau and the philosophes
9. D'Alembert
10. The final years
Appendices
Select bibliography
Index of subjects
Index of proper names.

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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.

Reviews

Ian Bent's foreward describes this intellectual biography as the first to survey the totality of Rameau's work, incorporating recently discovered materials, along with glimpses of his contemporaries, proponents and antagonists alike. The broad scope of the book's approach, balanced by an appropriate level of technical and theoretical detail, will be welcomed by theorists and scholars of music, 18th-century science, the Enlightenment, and the history of ideas

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