Charles-Simon Catel's Treatise on Harmony and the Disciplining of Harmony at the Early Paris Conservatory traces the formation of the discipline of harmony at the early Paris Conservatory, focusing on the seminal 1801 treatise of the school's inaugural harmony professor, Charles-Simon Catel. By examining the forces that shaped Catel's text and the discipline of harmony more broadly, Michael J. Masci reconstitutes the contours of the dynamic "disciplinary network," forged by music theoretical and wider cultural forces alike, that determined the content and scope of the study of harmony in Paris. The institutional forces that bound the Conservatory to the Opera and French military accrued to Catel's authority as a music theorist while the internal hierarchies of the Conservatory would ensure the transmission of his ideas through the middle of the nineteenth century. This book continues in the model of recent partimento scholarship by excavating the catalog of figures and techniques that formed the foundation of the Conservatory's harmony course, expanding our understanding of practical harmony traditions beyond those of eighteenth-century Italy.
Michael J. Masci is associate professor of Music Theory at SUNY Geneseo, where he teaches courses in harmony, music analysis, and the aesthetics of modernism.
Contents Note on Figured-Bass Symbols Acknowledgments Introduction: Harmony as Discipline I. Institutional Power and Disciplinary Pretexts Chapter 1. The Institutional Authorization of Catel's Harmonic Theory and the Reconciliation of Fundamental Bass Theory with Figured Bass Practice Chapter 2. The Institutional Sources of Catel's (Contested) Authority II. The Cours d'Harmonie as Coordination of Disciplinary Technologies Chapter 3. Disciplinary Networks: Sources and Structures of the Cours d'Harmonie Chapter 4. Reconstructing the Theory, Pedagogy, and Method of the Early Cours d'Harmonie Chapter 5. Harmony's Boundaries and the Internalization of Disciplinary Norms III. The Transmission and Midcentury Revision of Disciplinary (and Generic) Structures Chapter 6. Tonalite, Modulation, and Alteration: Catel Reception at Midcentury Chapter 7. Tonal Redaction as Generic Convention in the Traite Complet Theorique et Pratique Conclusion Appendix A. Common Marches Appendix B. Common Broderies Appendix C. Common Cadences Bibliography About the Author
