Reviewed by: Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. A Translation with Commentary of Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1760) by Mark Howard Stephen Mantz Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. A Translation with Com mentary of Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1760). By Mark Howard. (Teorie musicali, no. 2.) Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2016. [xxv, 653 p. ISBN 9788870968460 (paperback). €40.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography, index. With the publication of Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science, Mark Howard provides the first translation into English of two treatises by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764): Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore, which were published together in late 1760 or early 1761 (Paris: L'imprimerie royale). The Code is a pedagogical work consisting of seven methods for learning music. It is arguably Rameau's most complete work on practical music, the culmination of his life's work as a teacher of performance and composition. The bulk of Howard's book is a commentary on this important treatise. In the introductory overview of the Code, Rameau reviews the seven methods (pp. 35–40): 1) teaching music, "even to the blind" (i.e. rudiments, p. 35); 2) the position of the hand on the harpsichord or organ; 3) the art of forming the voice (i.e. voice production); 4) harpsichord or organ accompaniment (i.e. a thorough-bass method); 5) composition; 6) accompanying without figures; and 7) improvisation. The sections on accompaniment and composition form the heart of the Code, comprising ten of its sixteen chapters. The Nouvelles réflexions is a brief essay on how the corps sonore (sonorous body) is the key not just to music but to all arts and sciences. Though an independent work, it appeared in print alongside the Code and served as a kind of "speculative" (p. 589) or theoretical supplement. The source for Howard's translation is the facsimile in volume four of Erwin Jacobi's Complete Theoretical Writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1969); however, because Howard includes the page numbers of the original edition in [End Page 624] the margins, the reader can easily use virtually any facsimile (or original) with the translation. I found it useful to consult the digital version of the treatises found in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86232474 [accessed 29 December 2017]). In his citations, Howard provides page numbers from both Jacobi's edition and the original print. Rameau includes many detailed musical examples in the Code, which are here transcribed into modern clefs and incorporated into the text. The original edition places the examples in a separately paginated, 33-page section; Rameau's labeling of the examples (e.g. "Example D1, page 1") refers to this section. He advises the reader to "separate the engraved examples from the book containing the Methods—especially when it concerns Accompaniment—in order to place them on the Keyboard stand while the methods are next to it. One can easily look from one book to the other that way" (p. 39). In the commentary, Howard corrects and painstakingly documents errors in the examples, but he incorporates the published corrections for errata in the text without notice. Rameau's writing in his treatises is notoriously awkward, dense and disorganized, and the prose of the Code and Nouvelles réflexion is no different. Couple this with the technical vocabulary of eighteenth-century theorists in general, and Rameau in particular, and the challenge facing Howard as the translator of these works becomes clear. It is a formidable task, which is certainly one of the reasons these works are only now being made available in English, more than 250 years after their publication. Howard strives for a balance of readability (idiomatic English) and fidelity to the original text. He is conservative in his approach, so the results can still be difficult to comprehend at times—perhaps inevitably so. Howard keeps the capitalization and italics in the original publication that convey Rameau's emphasis of specific terms and concepts...