People heard the surname Rameau with some frequency in 2014, which marked the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of the composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). In classrooms and on radio broadcasts, a circumscribed set of associations comes to mind with each utterance of the name. Musicologists think of Rameau's discourses on triadic harmony and his theory of the fundamental bass (basse fondamentale). Keyboardists think of music composed by a literate organist and violinist from Dijon. Singers and dancers might also think of the many forays into choral music, ballet and opera that cemented Rameau's rise to artistic prominence during the French Enlightenment.

Yet Rameau – were he alive to say so – would surely remind us that the cement of his popular favour took a long time to dry. Its wetness haunted him into the middle decades of the eighteenth century, when Parisian commentators cobbled together chronicles of baroque music that stressed Rameau's complicated harmonies and his even more complex personal – and musical – politics. We write similar accounts even now. Ours concern fights among French moral philosophers, histories of Italian impresarios and new tales of opera gone wrong, all somewhere along the peripheries of Aristotelian ratio and Enlightenment reason. Today, Anglophone readers are familiar with the usual suspects in such histories. The philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784) are well known. Rameau, on the other hand, is no household name. He remains eclipsed by Vivaldis, Voltaires and other historical figures among whom he struggled to advocate for his musical aesthetics.

‘Rameau, entre art et science’ (Rameau, Situated between Art and Science) was thus a welcome celebration of a chameleonic figure in Western intellectual history. Over three days, the Parisian conference drew together an international group of scholars of music, codicology, dance and philosophy. Speakers addressed Rameau the performing artist and Rameau the lifelong student of music as rational science. Paper topics ranged over the entire history of Rameau's musical career, from the early 1710s to the early 1760s. Speakers also addressed Rameau's family history, his musical and intellectual legacy and his shifting fortunes in the court of public opinion.

On Thursday, 20 March sessions explored issues in manuscript studies and the analysis of Rameau's theoretical projects. Conference co-directors Sylvie Bouissou (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Institut de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musical en France (IRPMF)) and Pascal Denécheau (Ministère de la Culture and IRPMF) discussed the copyists of Rameau's music during the composer's lifetime. They examined the challenges confronting any modern musicologist who would hope to arrive at an unambiguous method of dating extant Rameau manuscripts. Denis Herlin (CNRS and IRPMF) presented research on a little-known production score of the 1754 version of the lyric tragedy Castor et Pollux, which saw its earliest runs in 1737. Now housed in the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the score reveals a number of emendations related to the many revivals of Castor et Pollux that took place between 1754 and the French Revolutionary years. Laurence Decobert (Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Institut de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musical en France) discussed the relevant Rameau research materials in the Fonds Decroix of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Thomas Soury (Institut de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musical en France) shed light on a collection of nearly one hundred Rameauvian musical manuscripts housed in Lille under the surname Raparlier. These sources remain crucial to the identification of several of Rameau's principal copyists, including Nicolas-Antoine Bergiron de Briou, Pierre-Montan Berton and others associated with the Académie Royale de Musique and the Concert de Lille.

Also on Thursday, Charles Dill (University of Wisconsin–Madison) traced connections between rationalist philosophy, historical linguistic theory and Rameau's peculiar approach to the theory and practice of musical modulation. Jean-Philippe Grosperrin (Université de Toulouse) examined Rameau's understanding of the theatrical genre known as pastorale héroïque. Béatrice Didier (École Normale Supérieure de Paris) surveyed an extensive body of early-modern periodical literature concerning Jean-Baptiste Lully's famous operatic monologue scene ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ from the lyric tragedy Armide (1686). She charted the monologue's significance for Rameau's operatic aesthetics and what might be called the birth of modern music criticism. Finally, Raphaëlle Legrand (Université Paris-Sorbonne) argued for a view of Rameau's theoretical ideas as rich tools for the analysis of the composer's own music. Legrand tested her hypothesis using harmonic examples from Castor et Pollux (1737).

Morning sessions on Friday, 21 March addressed Rameau's career as an exponent of his own published theoretical tracts. Thomas Christensen (University of Chicago) lectured on Rameau as a prescient historical figure with much to say to musicologists in our time. Isabelle Rouard (Conservatoire à Rayonnement Départemental d’Orléans) addressed the implications of Rameau's fundamental-bass theory for how we write the disciplinary history of keyboard pedagogy and of music theory pedagogy. Théodora Psychoyou (Université Paris-Sorbonne) presented the fruits of an intensive survey of the intellectual prehistory of Rameau's four-book Traité de l’harmonie (1722). Nancy Diguerher (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) described two little-known documents related to the original public lectures subsequently published as Rameau's mid-century treatise, the Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie (1750). Christophe Corbier (Université Paris-Sorbonne) examined the traditions of Hellenic music theory that played significant roles in Rameau's theorization of enharmonicism and chromaticism.

On Friday afternoon, Érik Kocevar (Institut de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musical en France) shed light on the family biography of Rameau, including Rameau's relationship to his father, sisters and brothers, as well as the family's record of confrontations and social skirmishes in and around Dijon. Rémy-Michel Trotier (Université Paris-Sorbonne) presented a sweeping multimedia tour through the harmonic fabric of Rameau's tragic operas or tragédies en musique. Conference co-director Graham Sadler (University of Hull) discussed the traditions of French Freemasonry that underlie both the dramatic plots of Rameau's late operas and the nature of Rameau's artistic collaborations with the dramatist and encyclopédiste Louis de Cahusac (1706–1759). Thomas Vernet (Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris) presented research on an amateur Rameau enthusiast active during the composer's lifetime: the literate diplomat and archivist Nicolas-Louis Le Dran (1687–1774). Ghyslaine Guertin (Université de Montréal) described the colourful afterlife of Rameau's operatic works in the age of the composer Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon (1730–1792).

The conference concluded on Saturday, 22 March with sessions devoted to the life of French institutionalized theatre over the course of the long eighteenth century. Bertrand Porot (Université de Reims) examined the early dramatic career of Rameau in the seasonal Parisian street theatres of the Saint-Laurent and Saint-Germain fairgrounds. Julien Dubruque (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) melded musical historiography with the historiography of French spoken theatre, investigating the ups and downs of Rameau's relationship with François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778). Vincent Dorothée (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art, Paris) posed some original questions about how Rameau's music for the stage might be seen to challenge both historical and modern aural and optic sensibilities. Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University) explored issues of catharsis, conclusion and the role of danced divertissements across Rameau's body of lyric tragedies.

In the afternoon session, Élizabeth Giuliani (Bibliothèque Nationale de France and IRPMF) surveyed the considerable recorded history of Rameau's instrumental and vocal oeuvre, encompassing stage works, vocal cantatas, sacred motets, chamber music and the composer's many original and transcribed compositions for keyboard. My paper (Gina Rivera, Harvard University) examined the life of Marie Antier (1687–1747), the first soprano to perform the role of Phèdre in Rameau's lyric tragedy Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Cynthia Verba (Harvard University) called attention to the radical aesthetics of the 2013 staging of Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) directed by Jonathan Kent for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Saraswathi Shukla (University of California Berkeley) discussed a later admirer of Rameau, the famed Dijonnais composer and harpsichordist Claude Balbastre (1724–1799), who performed Rameauvian operatic transcriptions on the keyboard in the tumultuous musical and social wake of the Parisian querelle des bouffons. Benoît Dratwicki (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) explored the biographies of several noted French vocalists who interpreted Rameau's music during the age of Christoph Gluck (1714–1787). Dratwicki drew parallels between the financial and social struggles of Gluckian performers – particularly the soprano Sophie Arnould (1740–1802) – and the challenges that greeted several of the fairground singers who performed in early Rameauvian theatrical productions.

As the first of several major conferences to honour the composer in 2014, ‘Rameau, entre art et science’ delved deep into new codicological enquiries as perhaps only a Parisian symposium launched at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France could. At the same time, the conference's impressive range of papers by scholars both European and North American spoke to the fact that scholarship on French baroque music has continued to blossom – particularly among younger generations of musicologists – since the 1970s. The fruits of these presentations are scheduled for future publication as part of the ‘Études et rencontres’ series of the École Nationale des Chartes.