Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers (Kabyles in contemporary parlance), whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical (and racial) classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s.

While Rameau alluded to contemporary notions of musical expression in his theoretical writings, he devoted little effort to explaining how music acted on listeners expressively. This article reviews Rameau's writings to establish and clarify his beliefs about this process, finding that they less resemble what we would think of as the leading edge of contemporary thought – exemplified by Dubos, Estève and the Encyclopedists – than they do the earlier descriptions of Descartes and Malebranche. Following long-standing philosophical tradition, the latter privileged the passion wonder (admiration) as the structural basis for all passions. Rameau in turn staged his theoretical discoveries and responses to music in precisely the same way, as an initial, constitutive experience of wonder that then merged mimetically with subtler passionate responses. He assumed similar responses for those who listened to music. We can attribute Rameau's preference for an old-fashioned explanation of the passions to several factors. Notably, according to the principles of his theoretical system, he needed to isolate and describe music as an object that acted on the beholder's mind, whereas later writers concerned themselves more with the beholder's sensory and emotional responses. Moreover, Rameau's argument was an effective response to conservative music critics, who attacked him for introducing overly sensual elements into music.

Quo vadis, eighteenth-century music analysis? This is the question I wish to pose in 2017, a year marking some notable anniversaries. It has been ten years since the appearance of Robert Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), a book that opened up a wide range of new perspectives on eighteenth-century music and simultaneously shook Anglo-American music analysis at a time when it was on the look-out for post-Schenkerian alternatives. Likewise, 2017 is the tenth anniversary of Giorgio Sanguinetti's presentation on Neapolitan partimenti at the European Music Analysis Conference in Freiburg, where he addressed an audience that was similarly looking for answers in a post-Riemannian vacuum (but already familiar with diverse approaches to schemata, or Satzmodelle). Thirdly, and on a personal note, 2017 also marks a decade since the publication of an article by Ludwig Holtmeier (‘Heinichen, Rameau, and the Italian Thoroughbass Tradition: Concepts of Tonality and Chord in the Rule of the Octave’, Journal of Music Theory 51/1 (2007), 5–49) that guided me through Fedele Fenaroli's partimenti by using the ‘rule of the octave’, a first encounter that profoundly and irreversibly affected the way I perform, hear, teach, conceptualize and contextualize eighteenth-century music. Finally, it should be said that all this happened fifteen years after Thomas Christensen described partimenti and ‘The Règle de l'Octave in Theory and Practice’ (Acta Musicologica 64 (1992), 91–117) in a forward-looking article that celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday in 2017.

Giuseppe Sarti's opera buffa Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode was one of the great operatic successes of the late eighteenth century. First performed in Milan in September 1782, the opera was quickly taken up by theatres in other cities. In 1783 it began a long run at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where it had been performed more than sixty times by 1790. The opera was produced everywhere from Barcelona to Copenhagen, from Rouen to St Petersburg, in languages including German, French and Danish. By 1800 Fra i due litiganti had been given more than eighty productions across all of Europe.