Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment PDF Download

Author: Thomas Christensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052161709X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen orients Rameau's accomplishments in the light of contemporaneous traditions of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. Rameau is revealed to be an unsuspectedly syncretic and sophisticated thinker, betraying influences ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents and manuscripts (many revealed here for the first time) help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists: Diderot, Rousseau, and d'Alembert." "This book will be of value to all music theorists concerned with the foundations of harmonic tonality and it should also be of interest to scholars of eighteenth-century science, the Enlightenment, and the general history of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Thomas Street Christensen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Author: Cynthia Verba
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019938102X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
"Prompted by controversial views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a vigorous philosophical debate about the nature of music. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness, and dealth with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of 'Music and the French Enlightenment', Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published." -- rear cover.

Author: Cynthia Verba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Verba's fresh approach to understanding Rameau's role in the French Enlightenment focuses on dramatic expression in his musical tragedies.

Author: Cynthia Verba
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Around the middle of the eighteenth century the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants - Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert - were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was both a participant and increasingly a subject of controversy. The discussion centred upon three different events occurring roughly simultaneously. The first was Rameau's formulation of the principle of the fundamental bass - a principle which explained the structure of chords and their progression. The second was the writing of the Encyclopedie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert with articles on music by Rousseau. The third was the 'Querelle des Bouffons', over the relative merits of Italian comic opera and French tragic opera. The philosophes, in the typical manner of Enlightenment thinkers, were able to move freely from the broad issues of philosophy and criticism, to the more technical questions of music theory, considering music as both art and science. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness and dealt with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. This book traces the development of the ideas discussed and reveals the vigour with which they were debated. It reconstructs the link between music theory and criticism that has been lost over time. It also presents extensive passages from the debate in English translation for the first time. In explaining fully the various aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, as well as musical issues involved, it will be of relevance to Enlightenment scholars of many disciplines.

Author: Albert Cohen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400853540
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This book describes a colorful period in French social and cultural history, during which music and science combined to provide the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the Age of Enlightenment with an enormous vitality. Investigating the place assigned to music in France's preeminent scientific institution, the Paris Academy, the author shows the role played by the scientific movement in the evolution of musical thought prior to the Revolution. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Georgia Cowart
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 9780835718820
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France were witness to dramatic changes in all aspects of social and cultural life. During this era, a new and modern spirit of critical inquiry arose, a change in ethos that had a major effect on all the arts. French Musical Thought, 1600-1800 is a diverse collection of essays offering new perspectives and insight on musical opinion during one of the most fascinating periods in French history. The essays in this volume, the authors of which include musicologists, historians and literary scholars, illuminate clearly the relationship of critical thought in music to contemporary developments in philosophy, art, literature and politics. In the final analysis, scholars contend that music aesthetics, criticism and theory can be understood only against the backdrop of a dynamic cultural milieu.Contributors: Claude V. Palisca, Jane R. Stevens, Louis E. Auld, Gloria Flaherty, Robert M. Isherwood, Albert Cohen, Barbara Russano Hanning, David Allen Duncan, Charles Dill, Georgia Cowart.

Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611681278
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
Jean-Jacques Rousseau the writer-philosopher was a practicing musician and theorist for years before publication of his first Discourse, but scholars have neglected these fertile, inexhaustible ideas because they were either unavailable in a critical edition or viewed as standing outside the aegis of his system of thought. This graceful translation remedies both those failings by bringing together the Essay with a comprehensive selection of the musical writings. Many of the latter are responses to authors like Rameau, Grimm, and Raynal, and a unique feature of this edition is the inclusion of writings by these authors to help establish the historical and ideological context of Rousseau's writings and the intellectual exchanges of which they are a part.

Author: Simon Trezise
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521877946
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
This accessible Companion provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to French music from the early middle ages to the present.

Author: Julian Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190233281
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that it can, arguing that music renders an account of modernity from the inside, a history not of events but of sensibility, an archaeology of experience. If music is better understood from this broad perspective, our idea of modernity itself is also enriched by the specific insights of music. The result is a rehearing of modernity and a rethinking of music - an account that challenges ideas of linear progress and reconsiders the common concerns of music, old and new. If all music since 1600 is modern music, the similarities between Monteverdi and Schoenberg, Bach and Stravinsky, or Beethoven and Boulez, become far more significant than their obvious differences. Johnson elaborates this idea in relation to three related areas of experience - temporality, history and memory; space, place and technology; language, the body, and sound. Criss-crossing four centuries of Western culture, he moves between close readings of diverse musical examples (from the madrigal to electronic music) and drawing on the history of science and technology, literature, art, philosophy, and geography. Against the grain of chronology and the usual divisions of music history, Johnson proposes profound connections between musical works from quite different times and places. The multiple lines of the resulting map, similar to those of the London Underground, produce a bewildering network of plural connections, joining Stockhausen to Galileo, music printing to sound recording, the industrial revolution to motivic development, steam trains to waltzes. A significant and groundbreaking work, Out of Time is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music and modernity.