There is little general consensus concerning what,
precisely, Rameau understood by sous-entendre—beyond,
that is, a broad agreement that the verb and its cognates enjoy a central
position in his music-theoretical lexicon. Rameau says, characteristically,
that the root (son fundamental) of a
triad is sous-entendu, or that a
dissonant seventh or added sixth is sous-entendue.
But what exactly do these locutions to mean?
The
existing literature confines its attention to the case of dissonances sous-entendues and gives three conflicting answers: (1)
such “implied” dissonances are purely theoretical constructs answering to the
systematic constraints of Rameau’s theorizing but that make no claim on
audition (Dahlhaus); (2) such dissonances are meant to be added by keyboardists
(or other musicians) realizing the continuo (Lester); (3) such dissonances are
“imaginary” in the sense of being psychologically real but acoustically phantasmal
(Moreno).
In attempting
to adjudicate this question, I present the results of two corpus studies, one
based on Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie (1722),
the other on Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie
(1751–1772). I argue on their basis that: (1) in focusing so exclusively on dissonances sous-entendues commentators
have artificial narrowed the semantic range of Rameau’s usage; and (2) that the
terms in question can be best elucidated when their original locus in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French grammatical treatises is recognized
and exploited. Along the way, I will suggest that our attempts to come to terms
with the sous-entendu have been
hampered by Philip Gossett’s formally correct but contextually misleading
translation of sous-entendre as
“imply”—a word that carries inevitable (but in this case extraneous)
Schenkerian overtones for American music theorists.
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