Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/54



Rameau was as everyone knows not merely a composer of genius. He was also a great theorist in the technical side of his art. The work that he has left under this head alone would suffice to keep alive his name. Before writing the most richly and nobly harmoinsed music that our soil has produced, he devoted a long period of his life to the study of the abstract and theoretical science of harmony, to the investigation of harmonic properties, and to making a synthesis of those properties by connecting them with the general causes and initial facts from which they are derived. From the beginning of his artist's life he had felt on this subject a reformer's vocation. The doctrine that he had been taught struck him as confused and inadequate. It had not seemed to him to be at all in agreement with the practice of the succession of great masters for more than a century past, and in particular of Lulli. It took no account of their most striking features when compared with the masters of the preceding age, namely the preponderating and quite natural importance that harmony had assumed in their style of writing. Of all the various elements which go to make up musical utterance, harmony had become, with them, both the fundamental and the dominating element, the element on which all others rest and which regulates their use, at any rate in a great degree. Rameau saw in this transformation of the art not a simple fact, but a decisive step forward, the arrival at actual truth. He considered that by giving this place to harmony, by taking it as foundation and guide, he was doing what was needed for music to give it a wonderful increase