Tendres Plaintes

 

 

Jean-Philippe Rameau produced some of the most remarkable expressions of the eighteenth century. Of these many wonders, Rameau’s expression of “tenderness”, I argue, represents the codification of irony in musical terms, embodying a fundamentally different way of listening.

 

As a condition, tenderness is characterised by restraint, by which it holds something back. As such, tenderness unavoidably expresses a kind of loss. The meaning of tenderness can be approached according to the nature of its loss; in other words, the meaning of tenderness is what it laments.

 

Moreover, not simply is loss inherent to tenderness as a mechanism of its meaning but so does the fabric of tenderness draw on the trope of loss: lament. The chapter provides a basic historical context to lament, examining lament as a tradition that deals specifically with the trope of loss, with particular focus on examples of Monteverdi (this is where the chapter begins), but also Lully, Diderot, Proust and the eighteenth-century visual tradition of Parisian street cries (see ‘Sound, Order, and Elitism’, chapter 1). The chapter culminates in a series of illustrations of tenderness in the orchestral music of Rameau in which tenderness is presented as a disorder of the trope of loss: a trope-of-a-trope.

 

In effect, tenderness constitutes an ironic expression in which something is stated whilst seemingly meaning something else. This expression is fascinating to consider since it constitutes a kind of meaning that is essentially generative—a kind of meaning, in other words, that draws on the experience of the listener (‘The Sense of Disorder’, chapter 2, discusses the role of subjectivity within musical meaning). Indeed, a claim of the chapter is that tenderness represents the codification of a different way of listening. What is meant by this is that, in so far as tenderness expresses other than it means, in hearing its expression one is essentially “hearing between the lines”. This is described in the chapter as a kind of distance from the present moment. In this sense, tenderness can be understood according to the way in which it plays “in time”, by which it is meant that its present expression is not really “present” at all but plays on its history, or, more accurately, imagines a future which is really a misreading of its past.

 

Rameau’s most extraordinary expressions go beyond tenderness, either transforming it upwards as in ‘Air pour les muses’ from Le temple de la gloire or, as is the case of the ‘Entrée’ from Les Boréades, inhabiting a realm of Grace reached by precious few composers.

 

The chapter is the heart of the dissertation, drawing together theories of musical meaning with its mechanisms, and situating this in a context of sensibility. It is a dense and unusual chapter which combines close analysis with affective observations, as well as poetics and sensibility. The fabric of the argument is very much the music, and, as such, recordings are suggested throughout (accessible below), and entire pieces are typeset where editions either do not exist or are generally difficult to locate. The chapter additionally examines the theoretical writings of Rameau (Traité), including the relation of tenderness to “the chords of supposition”, a contentious and advanced area of Rameau’s tonal theory.

 

Click the icon below the network to view the chapter (this will open a PDF in a new tab).

 

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Bibliography

 

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Bloom, H.: The Anxiety of Influence, 2nd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); first published OUP, 1973.

 

*——— ‘The Breaking of Form’, Deconstruction and Criticism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1979).

 

——— Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975).

 

de Bolla, P.: The Education of the Eye (California: 2003).

 

——— Towards Historical Rhetorics (London: Routledge, 1988).

 

Carter, T.: ‘Lamento della ninfa (1638)’, The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, ed. J. Whenham and R. Wistreich (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

 

Castiglioni, N.: Il linguaggio musicale dal Rinascimento a oggi (G. Ricordi & C., 1959).

 

Curtis, A.: ‘La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music to L'Incoronazione (1643)’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1989).

 

*Diderot, D.: Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. G. Monval (Paris: Plon, 1891). I refer both to Jacques Barzun’s translation in Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. J. Barzun and R. H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), as well as Marian Hobson’s edition, Rameau’s Nephew—Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. M. Hobson, trans. K. E. Turnstall and C. Warman (OpenBook Publishers, 2016).

 

Fenlon, I.: ‘Monteverdi’, The Musical Times, Vol. 126, No. 1710 (Aug., 1985).

 

——— Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

 

Ferris, J.: ‘The Evolution of Rameau’s Harmonic Theories’, Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Nov. 1959), pp. 231-256.

 

Foucault, M.: Madness and Civilisation (Routledge, 1989).

 

*Johnson, J.: Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1995).

 

Martin, N. J.: ‘Rameau’s Changing Views on Supposition and Suspension’, Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 121-167.

 

McClary, S.: Feminine Endings (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

 

Milliot, V.: Les Cris de Paris (Paris, 2014).

 

*Rameau, J-P.: Traité de l’Harmonie (Paris: J-B-C. Ballard, 1722).

 

——— Code de la musique pratique (Paris: 1760).

 

Proust, M.: The Prisoner, ed. C. Prendergast, trans. C. Clark (The Penguin Press, 2002).

 

*Rosand, E.: ‘The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament”, The Musical Quarterly, Volume LXV, Issue 3 (July 1979), pp. 346-359.

 

——— Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (University of California Press, 1991).

 

Tomlinson, G.: Monteverdi and the end of the Renaissance (University of California Press, 1987).

 

Vila, A.: Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998).

 

Walker, T.: ‘Ciaccona and Passacaglia: Remarks on Their Origin and Early History’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 300-320.

 

Zitin, A.: ‘Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 2013), pp. 555-570.

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