Christensen, Thomas — Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment

Cambridge, England/ New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hardcover. Black cloth boards with gilt spine lettering; navy dj, illustrated and yellow lettering, mylar cover; xviii, 327 pp; bw illustrations and music. "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."- DJ. Contents include: Rameau and the Enlightenment -- Rameau as music theorist -- Precursors of harmonic theory -- The generative fundamental -- The fundamental bass -- The corps sonore -- Mode and modulation -- Rameau and the philosophes -- D'Alembert -- The final years -- Appendix: A note on harmonic and arithmetic proportions -- Appendix: "L'art de la basse fondamentale" and Gianotti's Le guide du compositeur. VG-/VG- (Ex-library with stamps and labels on spine, inside front and rear covers, ffep and block.) .