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 first four harmonics or overtones.  All chords, therefore, that were not composed of thirds placed one above the other, were inversions of fundamental chords.  This theory holds good in the general harmonic system of to-day.  But although the major triad and even the dominant seventh chord could be traced back to the harmonics, the minor triad proved a different matter; after many experiments Rameau gave it up, leaving it unaccounted for.

Rameau was also largely instrumental in gaining recognition for the desirability of dividing the octave into twelve equal parts, making all the so-called half-tones recur at mathematically equal distances from each other in the chromatic scale.  In 1737 his work on the generation of chords through overtones caused the equal temperament system of tuning to be generally accepted, and the old modes, with the exception of the Ionian and Aeolian, to be dropped out of use.  The former became known as major and the latter as minor, from the third, which was large in the Ionian and small in the Aeolian.