Rameau's Experiments in <em>Génération harmonique</em> and His Material Mangle

Abstract

Rameau's Experiments in Génération harmonique and His Material Mangle Abigail D. Shupe (bio) In Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1737 Treatise, Génération harmonique, he instructs the reader to conduct the following experiment: Suspend a pair of [tongs] from a fairly thin string, each end of which you apply to each ear. Strike it. You will distinguish at first only a confusion of sounds____But as the higher sounds become extinguished imperceptibly as the sound diminishes in strength, the lowest sound … begins to predominate in the ear.1 [End Page 26] Rameau asks his reader to conduct this and six other experiments in order to demonstrate the natural origin of harmony. At first glance this experiment with kitchen utensils and twine seems unrelated to Rameau's theory of the fundamental bass. However, when placed in the context of the history of scientific instruments and experimental practice, Rameau's invitation figures as part of a trend in treatises from this period toward experimentation with diverse materials.2 In a certain sense, the materials and nature of the experiment connect Rameau's work with Sir Isaac Newton's 1704 treatise Opticks. While Rameau almost certainly did not read Opticks, his experiments somewhat align Génération harmonique with this treatise and other works of French Newtonianism, a trend marked by enthusiasm for Newtonian science in the 1730s.3 Rameau's experiments provide an opportunity to study his work from the perspective of historical materialism, focusing less on his theoretical principles and more on his physical objects, instruments, and practices. This perspective aligns with recent trends in the history of science. Scholars including Simon Schaffer and Andrew Pickering have studied how material culture shaped and was shaped by scientific knowledge.4 Rather than creating a historical narrative based entirely on scientific developments, these methods focus on how new scientific knowledge emerges from complex networks of relationships between people, social dynamics, existing knowledge, and accessible materials.5 As Alexander Rehding has written, this approach focuses less on tracing a history of discoveries and more on the "process of experimentation" [End Page 27] and "material conditions that made [discoveries] possible in the first place."6 When applied to Rameau, this approach treats his experiments as emergent and dependent upon Rameau's particular relationships with scientists, his personal and professional goals, and his access to scientific and musical instruments.7 Focusing on Rameau's materials and practices reveals his experimentation to be performative, following Pickering's performative image of the history of science.8 By studying his work from a performative perspective, Rameau's experiments come into view as a new type of scientific and musical performance that possessed unique power to persuade his readers of its validity. Rameau's descriptions call readers' attention to the doing of science, and to the relationship between his actions and his materials. In this new performative context, experimental activities transform everyday objects and musical instruments into what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger calls "epistemic things,"9 which shape and are shaped by their roles in producing knowledge. As machines of scientific knowledge, ordinary objects take on new functions. During the period in which Rameau wrote Génération harmonique, scientific instruments and machines may have bolstered scientific claims. Rather than empiricism, per se, it is the relationship between Rameau and his materials that gives Génération harmonique its special claim of scientific truth, as well as its connection to the broader scientific community. Rameau's experiments reflect the unique combination of human and non-human agency that Pickering theorizes: "The [machine] and its skilled operator come together as a single unit of machinic capture,"10 as machines "capture" certain natural phenomena that humans can harness and manipulate. When Rameau devised his experiments, he entered into a human-machine dialectic between resistance and accommodation.11 Initially, he likely encountered resistance from his materials as they reacted in unanticipated ways, or seemed not to cooperate with his intentions. The notion of material resistance derives Pickering's [End Page 28] concept of material agency, in which materials have the capacity to resist. Rameau then likely accommodated that resistance by refining his chosen objects and the...