Description
Book SynopsisCharles-Simon Catel's Treatise on Harmony and the Disciplining of Harmony at the Early Paris Conservatory traces the formation of the discipline of harmony at the early Paris Conservatory, focusing on the seminal 1801 treatise of the school’s inaugural harmony professor, Charles-Simon Catel. By examining the forces that shaped Catel's text and the discipline of harmony more broadly, Michael J. Masci reconstitutes the contours of the dynamic “disciplinary network,” forged by music theoretical and wider cultural forces alike, that determined the content and scope of the study of harmony in Paris. The institutional forces that bound the Conservatory to the Opéra and French military accrued to Catel’s authority as a music theorist while the internal hierarchies of the Conservatory would ensure the transmission of his ideas through the middle of the nineteenth century. This book continues in the model of recent partimento scholarship by excavating the catalog of figures and techniques that formed the foundation of the Conservatory's harmony course, expanding our understanding of practical harmony traditions beyond those of eighteenth-century Italy.
Table of ContentsContents
Note on Figured-Bass Symbols
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Harmony as Discipline
I. Institutional Power and Disciplinary Pretexts
Chapter 1. The Institutional Authorization of Catel’s Harmonic Theory and the Reconciliation of Fundamental Bass Theory with Figured Bass Practice
Chapter 2. The Institutional Sources of Catel’s (Contested) Authority
II. The Cours d’Harmonie as Coordination of Disciplinary Technologies
Chapter 3. Disciplinary Networks: Sources and Structures of the Cours d’Harmonie
Chapter 4. Reconstructing the Theory, Pedagogy, and Method of the Early Cours d’Harmonie
Chapter 5. Harmony’s Boundaries and the Internalization of Disciplinary Norms
III. The Transmission and Midcentury Revision of Disciplinary (and Generic) Structures
Chapter 6. Tonalité, Modulation, and Alteration: Catel Reception at Midcentury
Chapter 7. Tonal Redaction as Generic Convention in the Traité Complet Théorique et Pratique
Conclusion
Appendix A. Common Marches
Appendix B. Common Broderies
Appendix C. Common Cadences
Bibliography
About the Author
