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Francois Couperin and 'the Perfection of Music.'

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Francois Couperin and 'The Perfection of Music.' By David Tunley. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. [viii, 172 p. ISBN 0-7546-0928-6. $94.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography, appendices.

This useful book, a concise monograph with extensive appendices, is an expansion and updating of the author's BBC Music Guide, Couperin (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982). It is aimed mainly at the needs of non-specialists, especially those who know basic music theory. In the United States undergraduate music majors will be particularly well served by it.

"The history of European music is essentially the history of changing styles" (p. 1). While not every musicologist will agree with his characterization of that "essence," David Tunley's opening sentence serves his purpose well. His survey of Francois Couperin's music is focused to a considerable degree on the composer's response to the new Italian sounds that flooded French music around the turn of the eighteenth century. The quoted phrase in his title, "la perfection de la musique," comes from Couperin's program for L'Apotheose de Lully (1725): "Apollo persuades Lully and Corelli that the bringing together of French and Italian styles must create musical perfection." (This is Tunley's translation on p. 89, slightly different from the one...

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