2014, as Gina Rivera reminds us in her posting from November
2014, was the year Jean-Philippe Rameau got his turn in the recent spate of
composer celebrations. The 250th
anniversary of his death spawned a number of musicology conferences in Europe
(though none in the United States that I heard of) in which scholars and
musicians had an opportunity to take stock of the composer/theorist—or more
accurately, to take stock of the state of research on Rameau.
Not that Rameau had not been honored before. In 1983, the tercentennial of his birth,
French colleagues threw a very nice party, by all evidence, in his home city of
Dijon. The collected papers from that
conference still make for informative reading regarding all aspects of his
operatic life: influences upon his
style, sources for his operas, his librettists and collaborators, singers,
performance practice, staging and dance.<1> Tucked
away in a session or two were a few interesting papers on Rameau’s music theory
and aesthetics. But by the apologetic
tone of some of the papers (one, for instance, was entitled, “Rameau et
l’harmonie: comment avoir raison de la
musique?”) it did seem as if
musicologists were still figuring out how Rameau’s activities as
theorist/philosophe fit together with his better known work as a stage
composer.
It was thus something of a relief for me to see that many of
the conferences organized for Rameau this time around gave a more central place
to his music theories. Indeed in two of them, it was exclusively Rameau the
theorist who was discussed. Of course I am biased. I published my first scholarly book on Rameau
and his theoretical writings in 1993, and I have long argued that his work as a
theorist surely is as historically important as his creative work for the
stage.<2>
It was thus a great pleasure for me to be invited to speak
at four of these conferences. It was
really something of a surprise, too, for I had long thought in some of my less
charitable moods that no one in Europe really gave a hoot about my book; it had never received any reviews or commentary that I knew
of from across the Atlantic. Naturally I
was inclined to attribute this to the widely-voiced prejudice that most
continental musicologists just did not read much American literature. So it was something of a jolt, and perhaps a
consolation, that twenty years later I received the most complimentary
invitations from European colleagues, each assuring me that not only had they all
read and deeply admire my book on Rameau, they were eager to have me
participate in their conferences. How
could I say no?
Of course it was a risk to accept all four invitations, each
arriving within a few months of each other.
It had been, after all, twenty years since I’d been actively working in
the area of Rameau. Since then, my
research had taken me in many other directions. Would I have anything more to say that I had not already put into my
book? But there was an even worse
problem. We all know that European
academics have this infuriating habit of publishing just about all the proceedings
of any conference, whether or not the individual contributions merit such
publication. I realized quickly on that
I could not get through the Rameau year by simply recycling the same talk four
different times. I had really better
come up with four decent papers that could stand exposure to the sun. So I spent a busy summer in 2013 reviewing
many of my old yellowed notes from twenty years ago that still might be gleaned for
a paper or two. I also used the time to
catch up on the latest research on Rameau. There was a lot more out there
than I had realized.
The kickoff to the Rameau celebrations actually started
earlier than 2014. In September 2013,
colleagues at the University of Mainz hosted a small conference on the
reception of Rameau’s music theory in Germany.<3> It’s not as esoteric a topic as one might
first think. For it was German theorists
in the late 18th and 19th centuries perhaps more than
anyone else who absorbed and developed many of Rameau’s most pregnant
theoretical ideas: the fundamental bass,
the functional theory of the triple progression, and his adumbrations of
harmonic dualism. Scholars from Germany,
France and North America came together and presented a motley roster of papers
dealing with various esoterica of French and German music theory, all sutured together
by the writings of Rameau. There is no
doubt this was perhaps the most specialized of the conferences. But almost for that reason, I
think it ended up being the most coherent in retrospect. For my own paper, I was able to salvage a
huge notebook of notes I had taken while writing my Rameau book on the writings
of several Berlin-based music theorists who seemed to have digested a fair
amount of Rameau’s writings: Nichelmann,
Adlung, Marpurg, Kirnberger, and even C.P.E. Bach. I’m glad I trusted my instinct not to force
that material into my book back then, even if it took two more decades to see
it all in print. Material left on the
scholar’s cutting table still may find an afterlife.
In March 2014, our French colleagues got going with their
own three-day conference taking place in Paris (and for one lovely day in
between at the Fondation Royaumont in
Asnières-sur-Oise).<4> This was, I suppose, the “official” French
conference, given its broad scope and representation. The
leading French Ramists were there, and it was a pleasure for this American to
see the likes of Sylvie Bouisseou, Jean Duron, Catherine Kintzler, and Beatrice
Didier all in one place. But Americans
were well represented, too, with Cynthia Verba, Charles Dill, Rebecca
Harris-Warrick, and myself keeping the stars-and-stripes flying high. We
were treated over the three days of the conference to a lovely mix of papers on
Rameau’s creative work—both compositional and theoretical. Here it seemed no one felt the need to begin their
talk about Rameau’s theoretical work with an apology. The
conference was capped off by some memorable performances of Rameau’s
music: a lovely harpsichord recital at
Royaumont, and on the final night, a rollicking performance of Platée, directed
by William Christie at the Opéra-Comique.
I must admit that I really did have to adjust my old
uncharitable prejudice that French scholars simply did not read any English
literature (let alone speak the language). Many of the younger French musicologists who attended and even spoke at
the conference clearly knew about much of the work going on over here, at least
based on my own conversations with them. I think when the proceedings of the Paris conference are eventually
published, we’ll be able to compare favorably the state of Rameau research in
France. No musicologist reading this
blog will be surprised to hear that the amount of published research on Rameau
has multiplied immensely in the three decades since the 1983 conference, what
with a whole new edition of Rameau’s complete oeuvre well under way, along with
wholesale revisions of his place in the history of opera and the
Enlightenment.
In August, yet another large Rameau conference was held at
Oxford University, under the direction of the ever amiable Graham Sadler.<5> In the pleasant confines of St. Hilda’s
College, some forty historians, theorists, and musicians gathered to talk more
Rameau—this time all in English. Even
though the Oxford conference was larger than the one in Paris, it somehow
seemed more laid back to me. I’m not sure there was too much difference in
thematic coverage; there were the papers
on editorial issues in his operas, dramaturgical questions about staging, dance,
and singing, and—of course—exegeses of his theoretical writings. Concerts, too, were a part of the fun, with a
memorable evening of harpsichord music performed by Davitt Moroney. But without the distractions of Paris, the
whole event seemed so much more intimate. Given that a many of us had
already overlapped in the earlier conferences, we were by now feeling like old
friends.
The last major conference for Rameau returned me to Paris in
December, where Rémy Campos and Nicolas Donin had organized a two-day conference
that took place at IRCAM.<6> This was perhaps the most unusual conference
of the Rameau year in that the organizers had the inspired idea to ask what
lessons might be learned from Rameau’s dual activities as composer and theorist
for contemporary music. It’s
not like we haven’t seen examples of composer/theorists in our own lifetime
among countless colleagues. But the
charge of the conference committee seemed more specific. Was there anything in Rameau’s own project of
theory and its relation to his compositional work that could be suggestive for our
understanding of contemporary music today? And what better a place to ask
this than the Mecca of modernist music in Europe: IRCAM? I
have to confess that as happy a question as it all seemed, the payoff at the
conference was mixed at best. The
participants seemed to be divided between two groups: historians who knew something of Rameau’s
music theory and music, but not a huge amount about contemporary music; and
composers who knew a good deal about contemporary music, but less about
Rameau’s. Thus the varied papers we
heard over two days in the bowels of that iron cavern at Bourbourg had a Janus-like
feel, some looking backwards and some forwards;
but rarely did any of them meet up.
It was still a
delightful two days. But at the end, I found
myself asking if the initial question of the conference might not be misplaced. Why do we presume that Rameau the theorist
necessarily has something to say about Rameau the composer—let alone to help us
understand what composers today might be doing? For sure, both his operas and treatises were written with the same quill
pen. But each was written for a specific
audience with very differing aims using almost irreconcilable media. It’s nice for us to think of ourselves as
organic wholes, with our lives and actions following coherent and inter-related
paths. But in fact is that how we really
work? As I left IRCAM after the final
session and walked across that grand plaza in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou,
full of noisy buskers, jongleurs, jugglers, sketch artists, mimes,
pan-handlers, hawkers, and hucksters, not to mention all the hundreds of gawking
passer-byers, it seemed so clear to me that we all can wear many differing
hats, and our various personae may not always have to be in close
collaboration. Maybe that was the case
of Rameau. 2014 opened many wonderful and
fascinating windows onto this remarkable artist from the 18th
century. But at the end, I still think
he survives as a complex, enigmatic, individual with many sides, perhaps not
unlike the mashup of music, drama, dance, poetry, and machinery that comprise so
many of his operatic spectacles. (Not
for nothing did Charlie Dill title his marvelous study of Rameau’s lyric
tragedies “monstrous opera.”)
Gina Rivera ended her meditative essay on the Rameau year by
bidding adieu to the many faded pastel portraits musicologists have long drawn
of our friend from Dijon. But I’ll turn
this around and suggest we might gaze now at a newer (post-modern?) picture of
Rameau that we can greet with a hearty “bonjour.” For all our intensive musicological forensics
over the past decades, Rameau has entered the 21st century as even a
more complicated, more challenging and more wonderful figure than ever. Today music historians and music theorists
now cohabit many of the same departments, conferences, and journal pages with
most of the suspicions and animosities that characterized our relation in the
past long faded. But if we still
occasionally scratch our heads wondering just what it is we have to say to one
another, I don’t think there is a more timely figure to turn to and ask than
Jean-Philippe Rameau. Just don’t expect
a clear answer.
Thomas Christensen is Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago (webpage HERE). He is editor of the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge UP, 2002, paperback 2005) and several forthcoming volumes.
<1> Jean-Philippe Rameau: Colloque international organisé par la
société Rameau, Dijon—21–24 Septembre 1983 (Paris: Champion, 1987).
<2> Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical
Thought in the Enlightenment. (Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
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