Titre :	Straying From Nature : The Labyrinthine Harmonic Theory of Diderot and Bemetzrieder's Leçons de clavecin (1771)
Type de document :	TEXTES
Auteurs :	Matthew RILEY
Année de publication :	2002
Note générale :	The Journal of Musicology , Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2002), p. 3-38.
Langues :	Anglais (eng)
Catégories :	Effectif général clavecin Personnes concernées BEMETZRIEDER, Anton ; DIDEROT, Denis Lieux concernés France Période concernée 18e siècle Mots-clés étude analytique
Résumé :	In a letter of 1751, the philosopher Denis Diderot claimed that of all the imitative arts, music's expression was the most "arbitrary." This view cuts directly against the grain of most mid 18th-century philosophical and theoretical reflection on music, which insisted that its expression was specifically not arbitrary but "natural." Diderot expanded on his critique of the natural in music in a later work, the Leçons de clavecin et principes d'harmonie, written in collaboration with Anton Bemetzrieder. The target is Jean-Philippe Rameau's theoretical notion of the corps sonore and its resonance, from which Rameau had attempted to derive all the materials of contemporaneous musical practice, with the aim of grounding music in nature. Diderot and Bemetzrieder outline an alternative harmonic theory in which the domain of the natural is sharply circumscribed. They replace the deductive, hierarchical ordering of Rameau's theory with a conception of music as a series of more or less elaborate "digressions" from nature, resulting in a structure which can be profitably compared to an idea commonly invoked in the philosophical discourse of Diderot and his contemporaries: the labyrinth. While Diderot and Bemetzrieder's theory falls far short of Rameau's in its ability concisely to explain the diversity of contemporaneous harmonic practice, in its broader philosophical thrust it is, for its day, a radical conception, and its critique of Rameau is arguably more far-reaching than the much better known and more openly polemical attacks on the theorist by Diderot's philosophical colleagues, d'Alembert and Rousseau.
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Straying From Nature : The Labyrinthine Harmonic Theory of Diderot and Bemetzrieder's Leçons de clavecin (1771) [TEXTES] / Matthew RILEY . - 2002.
The Journal of Musicology , Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2002), p. 3-38.
Langues : Anglais (eng)

Catégories :	Effectif général clavecin Personnes concernées BEMETZRIEDER, Anton ; DIDEROT, Denis Lieux concernés France Période concernée 18e siècle Mots-clés étude analytique
Résumé :	In a letter of 1751, the philosopher Denis Diderot claimed that of all the imitative arts, music's expression was the most "arbitrary." This view cuts directly against the grain of most mid 18th-century philosophical and theoretical reflection on music, which insisted that its expression was specifically not arbitrary but "natural." Diderot expanded on his critique of the natural in music in a later work, the Leçons de clavecin et principes d'harmonie, written in collaboration with Anton Bemetzrieder. The target is Jean-Philippe Rameau's theoretical notion of the corps sonore and its resonance, from which Rameau had attempted to derive all the materials of contemporaneous musical practice, with the aim of grounding music in nature. Diderot and Bemetzrieder outline an alternative harmonic theory in which the domain of the natural is sharply circumscribed. They replace the deductive, hierarchical ordering of Rameau's theory with a conception of music as a series of more or less elaborate "digressions" from nature, resulting in a structure which can be profitably compared to an idea commonly invoked in the philosophical discourse of Diderot and his contemporaries: the labyrinth. While Diderot and Bemetzrieder's theory falls far short of Rameau's in its ability concisely to explain the diversity of contemporaneous harmonic practice, in its broader philosophical thrust it is, for its day, a radical conception, and its critique of Rameau is arguably more far-reaching than the much better known and more openly polemical attacks on the theorist by Diderot's philosophical colleagues, d'Alembert and Rousseau.
Permalink :	https://bibliotheque.cmbv.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=18148