The French Path: Early Major-Minor Theory from Jean Rousseau to Saint-Lambert

Abstract

This article examines the contributions of pre-Rameauvian French writers in theorizing the early major-minor system, starting with an important document of early major-minor theory: the Méthode claire, certaine et facile pour apprendre à chanter la musique (1683, 6/1707) by the singing master and viol player Jean Rousseau (1644–1699). Rousseau’s Méthode claire was the first continental treatise to entirely replace eight- and twelve-tonality systems with their major-minor successor. Not only do its pedagogical precepts for solmization open a fascinating window onto early major-minor theory, but the theoretical reorientation it proposes reverberated through subsequent French treatises: in the innovative ways in which French writers strove to theorize growing tonal resources, in their privileging of certain scale types, in the orderings they imposed on the major-minor tonalities, and in their attempts to systematize key signatures. The article thus illuminates the pioneering efforts of a generation of theorists that includes Denis Delair, François Campion, and Monsieur de Saint-Lambert to adapt received notions of tonal space to a new, major-minor context.