Eighteenth-Century Science and the "Corps Sonore:" The Scientific Background to Rameau's "Principle of Harmony"

There was nothing Jean-Philippe Rameau held more sacred in his music theory than the corps sonore. The corps sonore (literally the sonorous body) was Rameau's term for any vibrating system such as a vibrating string which emitted harmonic partials above its fundamental frequency. Its importance in Rameau's theory can scarcely be exaggerated. Rameau was convinced, the good Cartesian that he was, that music was governed by rational laws, and that these laws could be deduced with geometric rigor from a single principle. He believed the theorist's most critical task was to identify this unique principle and to demonstrate its musical consequences. And in all of his theoretical publications save his first, the corps sonore served as this principle. In treatise after treatise, Rameau would attempt anew to prove that the corps sonore was the single unique principle of music, how it alone bore all elements and rules governing musical practice. Indeed, this theme became something of an idle fixe in his writings. Nothing else so dominated his thought. Rameau's fascination with the corps sonore became by the end of his life an obsession; the corps sonore assumed cosmic proportions in his writings as a veritable icon, the progenitor of all the arts, sciences, and even religion. Notwithstanding these metaphysical excesses, Rameau always believed that the corps sonore was first and foremost a scientific verity, definable