ABSTRACT
To an extent not hitherto realized by musicologists, Christoph Nichelmann's ideas resounded through much of the Berlin literature for the next quarter of a century; not the least important consequence of his essay was a bitter polemic it sparked with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. If musical life at the court of Frederick the Great was constrained by the Monarch's notoriously conservative tastes, the same cannot be said for the music literature of the time. The Berlin writings ranged widely over all questions of Schreibarten, national styles, aesthetics, performance, theory and pedagogy, and provide telling documentation of the many competing musical forces pulling at German musicians at mid-century. Bach's over-elaboration in the melody, Nichelmann complains, is unnecessary and detracts from the expressivity of the underlying harmony. Bach clearly shows he understood the acoustical premises of Jean-Philippe Rameau's theory, for he acknowledges the existence of harmonic overtones in most vibrating bodies.
