Jean Phillipe Rameau (4 results)

Sheet music. Condition: Fair. [box 10.11] Original Sheet Music. Notation throughout volume in pencil. Creasing to edges of pages. Scarce. Out of print.

4to. Musical score. Lou Harrison's copy, signed by him on the end paper. VG condition. First Edition Thus.

Condition: Very good. Firenze: Grafiche G. Spinelli & C., 1935. 1935. Very good. - Octavo. Program for the 1935 season of this music festival bound by an owner in three-quarters dark green calf & decorative dark green & tan boards titled in gilt on the spine, with the original printed wrappers bound in. The boards are bumped darkened around the edges with a light stain to the front board. The leather is rubbed. The spine is faded & chipped with a piece out of the head & the top half of the front joint is split. [204] unnumbered pages. Illustrated with a double-page color map of Florence, with portraits & stage designs in color and black & white & with pictorial ads. The inside wraps are lightly foxed, else the program contents are very good. This music festival presented choral and orchestral music, operas and ballets. Among the works presented in the 1935 season were Rameau's "Castor and Pollux"; Rossini's "Mose"; the ballet "Dafni e Chloe" starring Lorcia and Lifar, with choreography by Fokine and scenery by Bakst; Pizzetti's "Orseolo", Verdi's "Masked Ball" and his "Requiem" with Pinza, Caniglia and Stignani; Mozart's "Il Ratto dal Serraglio" and his "Requiem"; Rino Alessi's play "Savonarola, directed by Jacques Copeau, with incidental music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco; Bellini's "Norma" and Gluck's "Alceste". Conductors included Vittorio Gui, Tullio Serafin, Bruno Walter and Fernando Previtale. The program notes and synopses are printed in both Italian and English.Mario Castelnuovo- Tedesco [1895-1968], who became a well-known composer of film music, was considered one of the most significant Italian composers of his generation and was performed by such artists as Gieseking, Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Segovia. Although he was critical of Mussolini's regime, he knew how to take advantage of the opportunities it offered and he wrote the incidental music for "Savonarola" at Mussolini's request. He was a friend both of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the regime's principal opponents [both assassinated in 1937], and of Alessandro Pavolino, who later became a fanatical fascist leader.On the inside front cover of the book, the owner has penned an "Operatic Diary" listing 31 operas attended, with theatres, dates, composers and in some cases conductors.Rare.

8vo, 207 x 130 mms., pp. [iv], xxxvi, 236 [237 - 240 Approbation and Privilege], including half-title, ten folding engraved plates at end, title-page in red and black, fore-edges uncut, recent rebound in half calf, gilt spine, marbled boards. A very good copy. D'Alembert's first exposure to music theory was in 1749 when he was called upon to review a Mémoire submitted to the Académie by Jean-Philippe Rameau. This article, written in conjunction with Diderot, would later form the basis of Rameau's 1750 treatise Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie. D'Alembert wrote a glowing review praising the author's deductive character as an ideal scientific model. He saw in Rameau's music theories support for his own scientific ideas, a fully systematic method with a strongly deductive synthetic structure. Two years later, in 1752, d'Alembert attempted a fully comprehensive survey of Rameau's works in his Eléments de musique théorique et pratique suivant les principes de M. Rameau. Emphasizing Rameau's main claim that music was a mathematical science that had a single principle from which could be deduced all the elements and rules of musical practice as well as the explicit Cartesian methodology employed, d'Alembert helped to popularize the work of the composer and advertise his own theories. He claims to have "clarified, developed, and simplified" the principles of Rameau, arguing that the single idea of the corps sonore was not sufficient to derive the entirety of music. D'Alembert instead claimed that three principles would be necessary to generate the major musical mode, the minor mode, and the identity of octaves. Because he was not a musician, however, d'Alembert misconstrued the finer points of Rameau's thinking, changing and removing concepts that would not fit neatly into his understanding of music.