Lesser-Known Composer of the Month: Jean-Fery Rebel

Wait, Who?

Jean-Fery Rebel belonged to the middle of three generations of musical Rebels.  His father and uncle were both musicians connected to the royal household of France, and his sister Anne-Renée, a singer, was married to Michel-Richard de Lalande.  He eventually ceded most of his posts to his son François, who eventually assumed directorship of the Paris Opéra.

Jean-Fery was a violin and composition pupil of Jean-Baptiste Lully and held a variety of posts over the course of his life.  In addition his forty years of involvement with the Académie Royal de Musique in various capacities, he was an instrumentalist at the Opéra, a member of the elite 24 Violons du Roi, and a musician of the royal chapel.  In 1718 his brother-in-law de Lalande retired and Rebel obtained his post as master of the king's chamber music.

Rebel was primarily an instrumental composer and was particularly associated with dance music.

Rebel was primarily an instrumental composer.  He was part of the first group of French composers to write sonatas, of which he published several, but he was most successful as a composer of dance music. He wrote dance suites and in particular produced innovative music for several choreographed "symphonies."

His reputation today rests almost entirely on one of them: his last work, the 1737 "simphonie nouvelle" Les elemens, a ballet based around the concept of the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water.  The overture, "Le cahos," a freeform orchestral movement depicting the primordial chaos of creation, opens with one of the most audacious gestures of the entire eighteenth century: the simultaneous and emphatically repeated sounding of the entire D minor harmonic scale.

Another notable example is the 1715 "Les charactères de la danse"  (see the video above),  which is less shocking but displays a similar fluidity in the way it slides seamlessly through an extensive catalog of contemporary French dance styles.

Aside from one unsuccessful opera and a lost set of lessons for Good Friday, his only vocal works are a small number of songs that appeared in the enormously popular collections of serious and drinking songs that proliferated in Paris in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.