Rameaus langer Schatten: Studien zur deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts. By Ludwig Holtmeier

Abstract

According to Ludwig Holtmeier, we have gotten the history of eighteenth-century harmonic theory all wrong. Historians of music theory have consistently cast Rameau in the leading role in the story of eighteenth-century music theory. But our one-sided focus upon the Frenchman’s theory of the basse fondamentale or the acoustical generation of harmony through the corps sonore has led to a highly skewed history that has obscured the accomplishments of many other theorists of harmony, in particular some German writers who resisted boarding the Rameau bandwagon. Worse still, perhaps, Rameau’s own work has been distorted by the singular attention that has been accorded to his systematic or “scientific” theorizing contained in a few of his most prominent publications. If we look more carefully into a number of several less familiar practical writings by Rameau, however (some of them never even published in his lifetime or under his own name), a differing and far more complex figure comes into view. With the long-awaited publication of his 2010 dissertation, Ludwig Holtmeier elaborates these arguments in great—one might even say tendentious—detail. But we can well understand why he does so, as the stakes are high. Rameaus langer Schatten: Studien zur deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Rameau’s Long Shadow: Studies on German Music Theory of the Eighteenth Century) has the potential of rewriting two centuries of historical scholarship on eighteenth-century music theory.