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The need to understand—so rare among
artists—was innate in Rameau. Was it not to satisfy that need
that he wrote his
Traité de l’harmonie, where he claimed to rediscover the
“laws of reason,” and desired that the order and clarity of
geometry should
reign in music? One can read in the preface to that same treatise that
“music is a science bound by certain rules,” but that these
rules must
be based on a general principle that can never be known unless we enlist
the aid of mathematics.
To the end, he never for a moment doubted the truth of the old Pythagorean theory that music should be reduced to a combination of numbers: it is the “arithmetic of sound” just as optics is the “geometry of light.” He put it all down in words, and traced the paths along which modern harmony was going to progress, including his own. He was perhaps wrong to write down all these theories before composing his operas, for it gave his contemporaries the chance to conclude that there was a complete absence of anything emotional in the music.
Claude Debussy
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