(Fr. basse fondamentale; Ger. Fundamentalbass).
A term used by Rameau in his Traité de l’harmonie reduite ŕ ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722; Eng. trans., 1971) to denote the imaginary bass line produced by linking together the roots of chords in a progression; it differs from the actual sounding bass line (the basse continue, or basso continuo) wherever chords are presented in Inversion. Rameau saw the fundamental bass as the generator of the Harmony, and for him the strength of a harmonic progression depended on that of the fundamental bass: he wrote that ‘it should proceed by consonant intervals, which are the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th and the 6th’.
The English expression ‘fundamental bass’ – a direct translation of Rameau’s ‘basse fondamentale’ – was used by Pepusch (1730), Holden (1770) and other 18th-century writers, and has remained in use since that time. The original French version was also adopted into English at an early stage, for example by John Holden in his Essay towards a Rational System of Music (Glasgow, 1770).