Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-320) and indexes.

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.

"This is the first intellectual biography of the eighteenth-century French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau is widely recognized as the founder of tonal harmonic theory. Through his principle of the fundamental bass, Rameau was able to explicate the structure of tonal music with unprecedented concision and clarity, earning him in his day the popular accolade, "Newton of Harmony."" "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.