Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, Series Number 4) - Softcover

Christensen, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052161709X ISBN 13: 9780521617093

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. The author examines Rameau's accomplishments in the context of the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century.

Review:

"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." The Diapason

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 052161709X
• ISBN 13: 9780521617093
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348