Rousseau's articles on music for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie , and to a lesser extent his Dictionnaire de musique, have rarely attracted the scholarly attention they deserve. As a result, the pivotal role that Rousseau played in the early French reception of Rameau's theory of harmony has never been fully appreciated. Far from being a quarrel over musical aesthetics, Rousseau's dispute with Rameau raised fundamental questions about the composer's theory of harmony. Rousseau interrogated the empirical adequacy of Rameau's theory, the soundness of its foundations, the logic of its derivation, and its pretension to universality. Over the course of his criticism, Rousseau came to regard tonal harmony as a historically-induced particularity of Western music to be explained through historical inquiry. In this respect, he anticipates a range of ideas that historians of music theory have associated far more readily with Francois-Joseph Fetis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115640 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Martin, Nathan, 1978- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Schulich School of Music.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003129877, proquestno: AAINR66663, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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