Decoding Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s monumental Code de musique pratique and its companion essay, Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore, are finally available in English translation (with extensive commentary) in Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. These treatises crown a lifetime of musical composition and theorizing and, like Rameau’s magisterial first treatise, Traité de l’harmonie (1722), are devoted to a wide range of topics including keyboard and vocal technique, accompaniment, harmony, composition, musical expression, and the corps sonore, demonstrating that Rameau was one of the premiere pedagogues of his time.

His supreme understanding of all aspects of music empowered him to write as a “Legislator on his Art,” one who codifies as laws his most refined ideas on music. That the Code held a unique status as a book of laws was entirely congruous with Rameau’s commanding persona. The work was the inevitable result of his lifelong desire to show definitively the ways in which harmony and the fundamental bass profoundly influence every theoretical and practical facet of music. The Code and Nouvelles réflexions constitute an encyclopedic survey of musical practices that provided an essential guide to mid-eighteenth-century French musicians. Numerous detailed examples, tables, and images richly supplement these works.

Howard’s commentary systematically complements each of Rameau’s chapters by addressing historical, analytical, performance-practice, and cultural issues, including the Code’s relationship to contemporary treatises and how the techniques Rameau describes in his method of composition were implemented in his keyboard and stage music. The Code and Nouvelles réflexions were long overdue for English translation and detailed analysis. The present book thereby restores to these treatises their rightful position among the most comprehensive and authoritative writings on music produced during the eighteenth century.