Rameau and the Fundamental Bass

Rameau reduced chords to roots, making harmony a science with rules and demoting figured bass to a tool.

Related

BaroqueFigured BassRoman NumeralHarpsichord

Figured bass told the hands what to play but not why. Rameau assigned every chord to a root and made the roots move by rule, and harmony acquired a grammar of its own.

Time and place

Paris, 1722. Rameau published the Traite de l'harmonie, whose title promised to reduce harmony to natural principles. He had earned his living as a keyboard composer and organist, turned increasingly to theory, and in the 1750s argued with Rousseau over whether melody or harmony mattered more.

What happened

Rameau proposed the fundamental bass. The bass you hear, he argued, is only a surface; the true bass is the root of the chord, and an inversion is the same chord with another note underneath. Seventh chords and their inversions were thus sorted into a few types, and chords moved by fifths, thirds or step to form progressions that could be predicted. He explained consonance through string lengths and the harmonic series, tying the legitimacy of harmony to nature. The system demoted figured bass from a tool of performance to a way of writing, and made the chord itself the object of analysis.

What changed

Harmony became an independent discipline, and teaching moved from filling in voices at the keyboard to analysing functions on paper. Composers could describe a passage by function, theorists later developed Roman numerals, and tension and resolution inside a key acquired a vocabulary. The quarrel with Rousseau also fixed a question that lasted two centuries, whether melody or harmony is primary. Figured bass did not vanish, but it fell from the centre of composition training to a skill of accompaniment and realisation.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Rameau's Suite in E minor, where the dance basses are clear enough to follow roots moving by fifth and by step. Then Les Sauvages, whose bass repeats one progression while the melody changes above it, the division between root and tune laid bare. Finally La poule, a hen-calling motive over very simple harmony, ornament and harmony each on their own level. Sing the bass as you listen, then count how often the chord above it changes; Rameau's fundamental bass lives between those two layers.

Related

This turn belongs to Baroque; see Figured Bass, Roman Numeral and Harpsichord.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry Rameau — Traite de l'harmonie checked, not quoted
• Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press) — theory checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.