Rameau versus the Ramones. A short history (or two) of an endless dispute

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Représentation d'Armide de Lully à l'Académie royale de musique, 1761. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted. Paris, 1752. Jean-Philippe Rameau is nearly seventy years old and has spent two decades as France's most important composer. He has tried to found harmonic theory on scientific grounds, written operas that fill the Académie royale, and is convinced that music obeys laws as exact as those of physics. This year he hears an Italian troupe perform a comic trifle by Pergolesi in his own theater, and feels, perhaps with some reason, that he is being used as a target. The same year, in the same city, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is forty years old and has just premiered his own opera at the palace of Fontainebleau. He is a philosopher, an amateur musician, a theorist of language, and is convinced that European civilization has taken a wrong turn. Rameau's music strikes him as eloquent proof: too calculated, too…