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Page 81
Alessandro Scarlatti and his son Domenico, both celebrated in
their day, are the next to demand attention. The former was
born about 1650 and died about 1725. He wrote many operas of
which we know practically nothing. His son was born about 1685
and died in 1757. He was the most celebrated harpsichord player
of his time; and although his style, which was essentially one
of virtuosity, was not productive of direct results, it did
nevertheless foreshadow the wonderful technical achievements
of Liszt in our own times. It is indeed a great pity that
Domenico Scarlatti's work did not bear more direct fruit in his
day, for it would have turned Mozart, as well as many others,
from the loose, clumsy mannerisms of the later virtuoso style,
which ran to the Alberti bass and other degrading platitudes,
paralleled in our comparatively modern days by the Thalberg
arpeggios, repeating notes, D�hler trill, etc.
Two masters in music, H�ndel and J.S. Bach, were born the
same year, 1685; their great French contemporary, Rameau,
was born two years earlier and died in 1764; while H�ndel
died in 1759, and Bach in 1750. Bach was destined to give
to the world its first glimpse of the tremendous power of
music, while Rameau organized the elements of music into a
scientific harmonic structure, laying the foundation for our
modern harmony. H�ndel's great achievement (besides being a
fine composer) was to crush all life out of the then promising
school of English music, the foundation for which had been so
well laid by Purcell, Byrd, Morley, etc.
Jean Philippe Rameau was born in Dijon, and after travels in
Italy and a short period of service as organist at Clermont,
in Auvergne, went to Paris. There he wrote a number of small
vaudevilles or musical comedies, which were successful; and
his music for the harpsichord, consisting almost exclusively
of small pieces with descriptive titles, soon began to be
widely played in France. Much later in life he succeeded
in obtaining a hearing for his operas, the first of which,
"Hippolyte et Aricie," was given in 1732, when he was fifty
years old. For thirty-two years his operas continued to hold
the French stage against those of all foreigners.
His style marked a great advance over that of Lully, the
Italian, of the century before. Rameau aimed at clearness
of diction and was one of the first to attempt to give
individuality to the different orchestral instruments. By
some strange coincidence, his first opera had much the same
dramatic situation that all the early operas seemed to have,
namely, a scene in the infernal regions. Rameau's operas
never became the foundation for a distinctly French opera,
for at the time of his death (1764), Italian opera troupes had
already introduced a kind of comedy with music, which rapidly
developed into op�ra comique; it was reserved for Gluck,
the German, to revive grand opera in France.
As a theoretician, Rameau exerted tremendous influence upon
music. He discovered that the chord which we call the perfect
major triad was not merely the result of an artificial training
of the ear to like certain combinations of sounds, but that
this chord was inherent in every musical sound, constituting,
as it does, the first four harmonics or overtones. All chords,
therefore, that were not composed of thirds placed one above
the other, were inversions of fundamental chords. This theory
holds good in the general harmonic system of to-day. But
although the major triad and even the dominant seventh chord
could be traced back to the harmonics, the minor triad proved
a different matter; after many experiments Rameau gave it up,
leaving it unaccounted for.
Rameau was also largely instrumental in gaining recognition for
the desirability of dividing the octave into twelve equal parts,
making all the so-called half-tones recur at mathematically
equal distances from each other in the chromatic scale. In
1737 his work on the generation of chords through overtones
caused the equal temperament system of tuning to be generally
accepted, and the old modes, with the exception of the Ionian
and Aeolian, to be dropped out of use. The former became known
as major and the latter as minor, from the third, which was
large in the Ionian and small in the Aeolian.
H�ndel, as before stated, was born in 1685 (February 23), in
Halle, in the same year as J.S. Bach, who was a month younger
(born March 21). His father was a barber, who, as was common
in those days, combined the trade of surgery, cupping, etc.,
with that of hairdressing. He naturally opposed his son's
bent toward music, but with no effect. At fifteen years of
age, H�ndel was beginning to be well known as a clavichord
and organ player, in the latter capacity becoming specially
celebrated for his wonderful improvisations. In spite of an
attempt to make a lawyer of him, he persisted in taking music
as his vocation, after the death of his father.
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