![]() Particular attention is given to explaining the aesthetic context of mid-eighteenth-century Paris and its relation to expression in instrumental music, including the concepts of mesure and mouvement. Included in this presentation is a stylistic analysis of his works, a corpus that features the traditional French harpsichord style as well as elements that were both modern and foreign. As part of this dissertation, I am providing a biographical account of Duphly, from his birth in Rouen to his life in Paris, and a chronological presentation of the contents of his books. Little information has been readily available regarding Duphly’s life, and up until now, no serious contemporary study has focused on this subject. I argue that these aesthetic changes are also evident in harpsichord music and can be observed in Jacques Duphly’s (1715–1789) four books of harpsichord music (1744, 1748, 1756, 1768), the focus of my research. The succeeding decades were marked by a significant aesthetic shift, induced and observed by both French and foreign musicians, composers, and philosophers. While seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century harpsichord composers and their works have been treated extensively, there is a definite lack of understanding and knowledge of the harpsichord music of the period following the death of François Couperin in 1733 and the publication around 1728 of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s last book written for solo harpsichord, Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin. Instrumental music, and more specifically harpsichord music of mid- eighteenth-century France, has been surprisingly sparsely studied by musicologists and performers alike. Closely related to these are a range of new aesthetic ideas and the musical styles associated with them. The middle part of the eighteenth century saw seismic shifts in philosophical and political thought. In addition to the interactive function of the Nephew’s musical reference, his medleys also serve as a dynamic three-dimensional model of human cognitive and physiological processes, thus setting philosophical dialogue to music and translating into sound Diderot’s theories of human experience and understanding. The Nephew’s imagined music then activates for these readers voluntary responses as well as involuntary reactions. His musical passages, I believe, are intended to demonstrate the influence of sound (and sight) on physical feelings and emotions. The Nephew transforms the dialogue into an interactive multimedia experience. reader’s sensibility) but also to intone-to give musical form to-Diderot’s ideas of human physiology and understanding (i.e. The Nephew performs music not only to touch readers through their many senses (i.e. In this essay, I argue that the title character, Rameau’s Nephew, performs a kind of ‘musical dialogue’, which brings to life Diderot’s musical metaphors for human physiology, emotion, and cognition, present in his other writings. Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau contains many intriguing passages that reference music and musical matters-from mimed performances and popular folk tunes to musical theories and broader aesthetic debates on the imitative functions of music.
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