Rameau versus the Ramones. A short history (or two) of an endless dispute

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Représentation d'Armide de Lully à l'Académie royale de musique, 1761. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted. Paris, 1752. Jean-Philippe Rameau is nearly seventy years old and has spent two decades as France's most important composer. He has tried to found harmonic theory on scientific grounds, written operas that fill…