Jean-Philippe Rameau 1683-1764. Een kennismaking Ignace Bossuyt Leuven 2013, 256 p. ISBN 978 90 5867 9529. Documerntation PDF (Dutch) Site de l'Editeur This is the first monograph dedicated to Rameau in Dutch language. M. Bossuyt is Professor Emeritus in Musicology at K. U. Leuven.   Building the Operatic Museum : Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-Siecle Paris William Gibbons University of Rochester Press Coll. Eastman Studies in Music, 2013, 280 p. Focusing on the operas of Mozart, Gluck, and Rameau, Building the Operatic Museum examines the role that eighteenth-century works played in the opera houses of Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. These works, mostly neglected during the nineteenth century, became the main exhibits in what William Gibbons calls the Operatic Museum -- a physical and conceptual space in which great masterworks from the past and present could, like works of visual art in the Louvre, entertain audiences while educating them in their own history and national identity. Drawing on the fields of musicology, museum studies, art history, and literature, Gibbons explores how this "museum" transformed Parisian musical theater into a place of cultural memory, dedicated to the display of French musical greatness. William Gibbons is assistant professor of musicology at Texas Christian University.   Dramatic Expression in Rameau's Tragédie en Musique: Between Tradition and Enlightenment Cynthia Verba Cambridge University Press feb. 2013, 275 p. Cynthia Verba's book explores the story of music's role in the French Enlightenment, focusing on dramatic expression in the musical tragedies of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. She reveals how his music achieves its highly moving effects through an interplay between rational design, especially tonal design, and the portrayal of feeling and how this results in a more nuanced portrayal of the heroine. Offering a new approach to understanding Rameau's role in the Enlightenment, Verba illuminates important aspects of the theory-practice relationship and shows how his music embraced Enlightenment values. At the heart of the study are three scene types that occur in all of Rameau's tragedies: confession of forbidden love, intense conflict and conflict resolution. In tracing changes in Rameau's treatment of these, Verba finds that while he maintained an allegiance to the traditional French operatic model, he constantly adapted it to accommodate his more enlightened views on musical expression. Cynthia Verba is Director of Fellowships for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She has published articles and reviews in the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the American Musicological Association, The Journal of Musicology and the Journal of Modern History. While her earlier book, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1765, closely examines the arguments in Rameau-centered debates, her current research has shifted focus to Rameau's musical practice, particularly his concept of musical expression and how it manifests itself in his tragedies.