Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730–1792), an aesthetician and partisan of Jean-Philippe Rameau's harmonic theories, is most often remembered for his rejection of musical mimesis and for his separation of music and language. In doing so, he advanced one of the first – if not the first – aesthetic theories of musical autonomy. Yet despite this achievement, little has been written about how or why he came to this conclusion. This article provides a long-overdue reconstruction of Chabanon's claims for autonomy while simultaneously resituating him in eighteenth-century musical discourse. Through a sylleptic reading of his writings and the intertexts that underpin them, I show that Chabanon was an insightful critic of the French Enlightenment's aesthetic project. I accomplish this by reconstructing his argument about music's ability to provoke aesthetic experiences within listeners. As I contend, Chabanon's own encounter with this question articulates an aesthetic theory based upon music's materiality, grounded at once through the science of acoustics, novel theories of sensory experience and the musical theories that they engendered. Using his documented experience of Rameau's Pigmalion (1748) as a point of departure, I argue that Chabanon's transformation of musical aesthetics into an autonomous discipline helps to turn the early-modern subject into the modern listening self.

This article offers a fresh perspective on the study of the eighteenth-century musical dialogue between China and France, not as an episode of exotic encounter but as an intellectual movement that profoundly shaped how scholars conceived of music and the study of its theories within an increasingly integrated world. Taking Jean-Philippe Rameau's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's explorations into the origins of music as an example, I foreground the importance of Chinese music in the formation of their influential concepts of the corps sonore and of the unity of music and language respectively. While these two thinkers made two opposing claims about the origins of music, both used Chinese music as key evidence to support their arguments. Moreover, certain Jesuit missionaries, particularly Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, played a crucial role in the global transmission of musical knowledge that enabled French thinkers like Rameau and Rousseau to incorporate music beyond Western Europe. Ultimately, this article reverses the Eurocentric narrative that tends to trace the influence of ‘Western music’ on other parts of the world by showing how Chinese music exerted a major impact on musical debates in France. Situating the study of eighteenth-century music in a global context, I demonstrate what we commonly recognize as ‘Western music theory’ was shaped by knowledge from the East.

This article provides a new analysis, appraisal and aesthetic examination of Mozart's notated melodic embellishments. Whereas previous studies of Mozartean embellishment (including those undertaken by Frederick Neumann in the 1980s and Robert Levin in the 1990s) tend to focus on the local, individual gestures that make up the composer's vocabulary, this study examines broader issues in Mozart's art of embellishment – in particular, the larger-scale characteristics of his written embellishment models, including the rate at which figuration accumulates and the structural layout of that figuration within and between individual phrases. I then explore the aesthetic resonances of melodic embellishment in Mozart's oeuvre, touching upon topics including the relationship of embellishment to a movement's affect, the relationship of embellishment to the compositional persona encoded in a work, the use of embellishment to depict improvisation in operas, and the aesthetic of digressiveness in the composer's melodies.

In his own time Diogenio Bigaglia (1678–1745) was viewed as the equal of Venice's three great amateur musicians active during the first half of the eighteenth century (Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro Marcello and Benedetto Marcello), but he is largely forgotten today. Part of the reason is the secluded, uneventful life he led as a Benedictine monk at the abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore. This article analyses an impressive early work: a twelve-movement Dixit Dominus probably composed between 1700 and 1710. This work occupies the borderland between late seventeenth-century musical practice and the more progressive musical forms, styles and techniques introduced in the early eighteenth century. It survives in a late eighteenth-century copy by the Venetian copisteria of Giuseppe Baldan that probably passed via Domenico Dragonetti to Vincent Novello, who donated it to the British Museum in 1843. The music contains many attractive features, including an imaginative use of the instruments and dextrous counterpoint, pointing the way forward to the choral masterpieces of Bigaglia's maturity.

It is now well established that stock voice-leading patterns were an essential component of eighteenth-century compositional and improvisational practices both in Italy and abroad. In this article I focus on one of those patterns, which, as far as I am aware, remains unscrutinized: a dominant pedal point in the bass with a paradigmatic upper voice that descends chromatically from scale steps 5 to 2. In the first two sections, I deal with this pattern successively in eighteenth-century music pedagogy, with special emphasis on the teaching of the Neapolitan maestro Fedele Fenaroli, and in actual galant repertory, thereby exploring both its voice-leading and its syntactic possibilities. In the third section, I compare how this dominant pedal relates to other, already identified pedal-based patterns.