This one-day conference, held under the auspices of the Boston University School of Music, the Boston University Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities, was organized by Deborah Burton (Associate Professor of Music Theory) to discuss the history and legacy of musical thought from the Enlightenment. Burton had invited an impressive range of music theorists and historians of music theory to the event, with papers from Thomas Christensen (University of Chicago), Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) and David E. Cohen (Columbia University), and short presentations by Cynthia Verba (Harvard University), Deborah Burton and David Kopp (Boston University).
James Winn of the Boston University Center for the Humanities set the tone for the day, addressing the audience with a reading from Dryden's ‘A Song for St. Cecilia's Day’, which weaves classical images of celestial harmony into a Pythagorean creation myth, envisaging the mathematical ratios of musical consonance as a primal animating force. He also reminded us that the model of the sciences ‘where new knowledge drives out old knowledge’ does not apply in the humanities. The topic of Rameau as theorist, composer and Enlightenment thinker was especially prominent in the day's proceedings. In addition to Rameau, speakers discussed other eighteenth-century theorists and schools of thought, such as Francesco Galeazzi and the traditions of practical theory and partimento. The foundations of Enlightenment musical thought as well as its present-day relevance also entered into the conversation.
Thomas Christensen's paper ‘Rameau, A Theorist for Our Times’ began with a wide-ranging meditation on the reception of Rameau's theory in the twentieth century, linking renewed interest in Rameau's music with renewed appreciation for his theory. Christensen documented the rehabilitation of Rameau's image after decades of Schenker-dominated music-theoretical discourse in which Rameau was typically assigned the role of ‘villain, or at least the seducer’. Christensen segued from there to Rameau's contemporaneous intellectual milieu, thoughtfully presenting the theorist not so much as creature of the Enlightenment but as a ‘brilliant and imaginative’ appropriator of its intellectual trends. He suggested that Rameau's frequent revisions of his theories reflected an imaginative and intellectually honest mind rather than a fickle one. He then proceeded through an impressive résumé of Rameau's pervasive influence on subsequent music theory, from d'Alembert and Rousseau to Fétis and Riemann to Nicholas Meeús, ranging from very general ideas – carving out territory for music theory between the prescriptive and the analytical – to specific ones such as the corps sonore and ‘solar model’ of harmonic function. The latter two concepts, for instance, are foundational to Riemann's theory of function and its immediate later nineteenth-century precedents. Christensen thereby smoothly retransitioned to the recapitulation of his main theme, Rameau's currency and the many resonances of his work in the music theory of today.
Giorgio Sanguinetti's ‘Choron, Beethoven, and Satzmodelle: A Developing Relationship’ took a different tack from the other long papers, integrating music analysis with text-based intellectual history. His argument concerned the significance of the partimento tradition for Beethoven's musical thinking. The centrepiece of the talk was the discovery of Beethoven's name on the subscription list for a three-volume collection of Neapolitan partimenti and theoretical writings compiled by Alexandre-Étienne Choron and published in France, and which included Neapolitan Nicola Sala's translations of Marpurg. Sanguinetti set the stage by contrasting the musical training typical of French, German and Italian schools of the era and their respective attitudes towards speculative and practical studies. He proposed a concept of ‘model’ after Choron's modèle to unite the modern concept of schema, the German Satzmodell and Italian partimento teaching. The second part of the paper took a tour through Beethoven's works, highlighting his use of typical partimento schemata in numerous works, especially those invoking improvisatory style (Op. 27, Op. 77), but also, for example, the first piano concerto (Op. 15), the first tutti of which, Sanguinetti asserted, is composed almost entirely out of models. His most persuasive examples were drawn from the late string quartets, in which period, he argued, models from the partimento tradition became a cipher for the nostalgic recollection of an earlier and simpler time.
David E. Cohen's ‘Some Observations Concerning Rameau's Theory of Harmony’ did what Cohen often does so inimitably well, mining a seemingly innocuous concept from theoretical treatises of an earlier era to reveal its pervasive influence on the history of musical thought. In this paper Cohen's target was neoplatonic numerological metaphysics as it is threaded from Boethius to Zarlino and thence to Rameau, specifically the concept of unity and how ancient conflations of indivisibility with the arithmetic unit are inherited by Rameau as confusions over the status of octave equivalence in the theory of harmony. Rameau was Cohen's starting-point as he developed his argument in reverse-chronological order. Drawing upon Christensen's Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Cohen demonstrated how Rameau's adherence to an overly strong doctrine of octave equivalence led him to self-contradiction. This doctrine was important to the essential feature of Rameau's theory, the equating of chord positions, but required logical contortions when, for instance, he attempted to establish the primacy of root position. Cohen then delved into what he cited as Rameau's source for this strong concept of octave equivalence, a torturous argument in Zarlino's Istitutioni harmoniche claiming that the octave (2:1) is the first interval, the representative of unity, and therefore the mother and cause of all intervals, according to the principle of ‘that which is first is always the cause of that which follows’ (Gioseffo Zarlino, The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of ‘Le Istitutioni harmoniche’, trans. Guy A. Marco and Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 7). Cohen suggestively proposed that Zarlino's logical fallacy remains part of our theoretical inheritance even today, in the form of a sometimes incoherent attitude towards octave equivalence.
The second part of the conference featured a panel entitled ‘The Legacy of Enlightenment Theoretical Traditions’, with three short papers, diverse in method and perspective. Cynthia Verba discussed a recent Glyndebourne production of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, commenting upon the bold re-imagining of the opera embodied by Glyndebourne's audaciously modern staging and sets. Verba argued that this adventurous production was actually uncannily true to what she regards as the basic force at work in Rameau's operatic writing: the strain between his forward-looking style and his faithful adherence to rigid conventions of the French tragédie en musique. David Kopp picked up the thread of Christensen's and Verba's commentaries on the currency of Rameau's music with a discussion of modern and historical concepts of key. He pointed out that there is some value, particularly to today's students, in breaking away from the twentieth-century Schoenberg/Schenker doctrines of monotonality, and entertaining an analytical practice like that of Rameau and his contemporaries, characterized by frequent changes of key. Deborah Burton discussed some findings from her research on the life of Francesco Galeazzi, speculating about his possible association with the Carbonari secret society, a possible explanation for why he was briefly jailed during the Napoleanic wars. She also noted the Enlightenment ethos of his Elementi teorico-practici di Musica, two volumes of which are edited and translated by Burton and Gregory W. Harwood as The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
