Conclusion

Western art music developed at the most fundamental level out of the desire to elaborate on and heighten the body of Gregorian Chant that lay at its heart. As this development unfolded, musicians settled on a scheme to slow the chant down, place it at the bottom of, or later within, a polyphonic texture, and adorn it with their own musical ideas and inventions. Such a long-note cantus firmus served as the foundation of sophisticated composition for an astonishingly long time; indeed, thanks to Johann Joseph Fux, one could say that it has never entirely disappeared from compositional engagement. By the end of the fifteenth century, musicians had been laying out their most sophisticated music, whether improvised or composed, on top of and surrounding such a cantus firmus since at least the high Middle Ages, and this music thus had its structural foundation largely determined for it at the pre-compositional stage. The musicians’ goal, then, was to adorn this foundation with all of the variety they could provide....

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century

It is on the ricercar that most treatments of pre-Bach fugue have focused. The genre’s focus on serious fugal counterpoint can be traced to the year 1540, at the point when Gombert’s experiments had borne fruit, in a publication of ricercars by Willaert and others active in Venice. The central early contributions to the genre came from Venetian organists, both Italian and northern, including J. Buus, A. Padovano, and especially, beginning in the 1560s, Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli. Thanks to the absence of text, composers explored a wide range of structural possibilities within the point-of-imitation model, including the return of thematic material later in the piece, such contrapuntal devices as augmentation, diminution, inversion, and inganno, and even the basing of an entire piece on only one theme. Later in the century other, more southerly Italian cities, including Ferrara, Rome, and Naples, also saw important ricercar cultivation.

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century

This chapter begins with a consideration of the vocabulary for fugal writing used by sixteenth-century authors, compares and contrasts this with the standard vocabulary used for the classic tonal fugue, and explains the book’s approach to the use of all of this terminology. In addition, the modal system as applied to polyphonic composition in the sixteenth century is laid out. Finally, the modern concept of “tonal types,” as described for English-speakers by Harold Powers, is recommended as the best way to talk about mode for the purposes of this book.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet

This chapter explores fugal writing in the genre that contemporary writers indicated was the “home” of fugue: the motet. Beginning with the establishment by Jean Mouton and others of the classic Renaissance motet—based on serious counterpoint within a point-of-imitation structure—in the first two decades of the century, the fugal motet received its most important features at the hands of Nicolas Gombert in the 1530s when he expanded the use of imitation beyond a single thematic statement in each voice to feature a texture based on multiple returning statements. This approach then formed the basis for motet writing by Thomas Crecquillon and Jacobus Clemens non Papa around mid-century and later by Francesco Guerrero and G. P. da Palestrina. By century’s end, composers had grown weary of fugue’s use in vocal music, such that it plays a lesser role in the motets of Lassus, but English composers contributed their own efforts in the 1580s and 1590s.

Introduction

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely acknowledged as the single greatest master of fugue of all time, to the extent that his contributions have come for a great many to define the genre. For no musicians does Bach loom larger than for organists, who as a result of the centrality of his music in their repertoire engage above all other musicians regularly and significantly with fugues. Indeed, fugues abound in the non-Bachian organ literature as well, from the ...

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance

Not until the 1580s did composers begin to establish the canzona alla francese as an instrumental counterpart to, rather than an intabulation of, the French chanson. The center of this activity was Brescia, and imitation played a surprisingly important role. Despite the rather light, playful manner of its earliest manifestations, the genre had by century’s end begun to acquire serious contrapuntal rigor at the hands of Giovanni de Macque and others. This chapter concludes with a consideration of the fugal works of Giovanni Gabrieli, in which one begins to see the breakdown of division between ricercar and canzona through hybrid thematic material and stylistic fluidity.