Jean Rousseau (violist)

Jean Rousseau ( born October 1, 1644 Moulins, † June 1, 1699 in Paris) was a French viol player and music theorist.

Rousseau came about 1676 to Paris, where he lived first in the viola da gamba Bauer Michel Collichon (fl. 1666-1693 ). As Marin Marais he became a pupil of Monsieur de Sainte -Colombe and was after this, Nicolas Hotman and André Maugars to the second generation of eminent French viol player. While Marais and other instrumentalists were working for the French royal court before him, Rousseau worked as a teacher in private households. As a teacher and as a theorist, he was highly regarded. His textbooks method claire, certaine et et facile pour apprendre à chanter la musique (French " Descriptive, secure and easy method of learning to sing music ", 1678) and Traité de la viole ( 1687 ) published in several editions, the method also outside France. Here Rousseau designed a system of natural and transposing modes. As the first French music theorist, he was referring to the major-minor order. The Traité de la viole is one of the first French treatises on the viola da gamba. He appeared about the same time as Le Sieur L'Art de toucher le Danovilles dessus et le basse de Violle ( 1687 ). The two works shared the French gamba playing in two contrasting schools. While Danovilles writing was a pure textbook on instrumental performance, Rousseau wrote an introduction to the technique and an overview of the decorations also history of viol playing and described the Violeninstrumente the French Renaissance music. The Traité is considered therefore as one of the important sources of the 17th century the history of the viola da gamba. His aesthetic and technical access to the viola da gamba was significantly different from that of his contemporaries. While instrumentalists like Monsieur Demachy emphasizing the relationship to the lute and preferred the polyphonic harmony game, Rousseau emphasized the close of the viol sound to the human voice (as well as in the modern era of the cello sound is compared to her), for singing and melodic, simpler game.

Works

• Method claire, et facile pour apprendre certaine et à chanter la musique. Reprint of the 5th edition (Amsterdam 1720): Geneva 1976
• Traité de la viole. Paris:. Ballard 1687 facsimile reprint ed. Minkoff of Geneva in 1975 and Katzbichler: Munich / Salzburg 1980, ISBN 3-87397-105-4.

• Frenchman
• Gambist
• Music theorists
• Born in 1644
• Died in 1699
• Man