s and other degrading platitudes,
paralleled in our comparatively modern days by the Thalberg
arpeggios, repeating notes, Doehler trill, etc.

Two masters in music, Haendel 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 Haendel
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. Haendel'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 opera 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 firs