Von Rameau und Riepel zu Koch

Certain central concepts of today’s thinking with regard to musical analysis were formed in the 18th century: Jean-Philippe Rameau and his concept of “Basse fondamentale” paved the way for harmonic theory. German theoreticians, especially Joseph Riepel and Heinrich Christoph Koch, laid the foundation for a theory of musical form. This study elaborates the historical distance of these early approaches.

Rameau’s “Basse fondamentale” did not yet really serve to describe tonal connections. It was instead devised as an ambitious attempt to combine the theory of the tonal system with practical compositional instruction in a system with a rigorous mathematical structure. The German theoreticians of the study – Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg and Johann Philipp Kirnberger besides Riepel und Koch – did not follow this development, instead holding on to the traditional separation of musica theorica and musica practica.

This fundamental difference between Rameau and his German recipients has been overlooked by research up to now. It has far-reaching consequences for the analytical approaches of the theoreticians examined. Whereas Rameau radically reduced compositional structure in his search for regularities, Riepel and Koch systematised the variety of individual formal design, thus reaching remarkable analytical insights which are now long-forgotten