Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach 1580460291, 9781580461504

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Fugal Theory of the Renaissance and Early Baroque
Chapter 1. Fugue in the High Renaissance
Chapter 2. Fugue at the End of the Renaissance, Part I: Italy and the Netherlands
Chapter 3. Fugue at the End of the Renaissance, Part II: Germany
Chapter 4. German Theory during the Thirty Years War: Fugue in Latin School Music Texts
Part II: The Genesis of the Modern Fugue: Italy and Germany in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
Chapter 5. Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640–1680
Chapter 6. Instrumental Fugue and the Emergence of Fugal Structure in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century
Chapter 7. Invertible Counterpoint and the Hamburg Circle of Theorists
Part III: German Fugal Theory of the Mature Baroque, 1680–1740
Chapter 8. Fugal Theory, 1680–1710
Chapter 9. Fugal Theory in German Lexicographic Texts
Chapter 10. Fugal Theory, 1710–1740: Mattheson and Fux
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Theories of Fugue Irom the Age of Josquin

fo the Age of Bach

——

Paul Mark Walker

Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach

From Johann Beer, Musikalische Discurse durch der Philosophie deducirt (Nuremberg: Peter Conrad Monath,

1719)

Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach

Paul Mark Walker

University of Rochester Press

Copyright © 2000 Paul Mark Walker All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2000 by the University of Rochester Press The University of Rochester Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY

14620, USA

and of Boydell & Brewer, Ltd. P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ISBN 1-58046-029-1 ISSN 1071-9989

Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 13 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book may be found under the OCLC accession number 43186555 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Designed and typeset by ISIS-1 Corporation Printed in the United States of America This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Contents List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Part I: Fugal Theory of the Renaissance and Early Baroque 1 Fugue in the High Renaissance

7

2 Fugue at the End of the Renaissance, Part I: Italy and the Netherlands

54

3 Fugue at the End of the Renaissance, Part II: Germany 4 German Theory during the Thirty Years War: Fugue in Latin School Music Texts

77 112

Part II: The Genesis of the Modern Fugue: Italy and Germany in the MidSeventeenth Century 5 Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

139

6 Instrumental Fugue and the Emergence of Fugal Structure in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

165

7 Invertible Counterpoint and the Hamburg Circle of Theorists

204

Part III: German Fugal Theory of the Mature Baroque, 1680-1740 8 Fugal Theory, 1680-1710

221

9 Fugal Theory in German Lexicographic Texts

273

10

Fugal Theory, 1710-1740: Mattheson and Fux

292

Conclusion

348

Notes

356

Glossary

413

Bibliography

448

Index

477

Tables 1.1

4.1

Uses of imitative counterpoint in works by Willaert and other contemporaries

Chronological list of Lateinschule music texts in which the

18

word fuga is found (only first editions or significant later editions) 132 4.2 Dictionary definitions of fuga within Lateinschule music texts 135 5.1 Relationship between tenor and alto voices in Bernhard's consociato and aequatio modorum 159 8.1 Chronological list of German treatises with discussions of imitative counterpoint, ca. 1680-1710 222 9.1 Chronological list of lexicographic works, 1701-1732 277 9,2 Terminology for imitative counterpoint in Walther’s Lexicon 284 9.3 Definitions of fugal terms in early eighteenth-century dictionaries 289 10.1 Contributions to fugal theory between 1713 and 1739 involving Mattheson and Fux 293

gr Eastman Studies ın Music (ISSN 1071-9989) 1. The Poetic Debussy: A Collection of His Song Texts and Selected Letters (Revised Second Edition)

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2. Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since

1945: Essays and Analytical Studies Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann

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China: Abing, His Music, and Its

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7. Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures,

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Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard

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12. “The Broadway Sound”: The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Edited by George J. Ferencz 13. Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach Paul Mark Walker Forthcoming 14. The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola Raymond Fearn 15. The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and

Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France

Richard Freedman

Acknowledgments The present book began its life as a Ph.D. dissertation, and I wish to thank

publicly all those, named and unnamed, who helped in the research and preparation both of that earlier effort and of its present, revised state. From

among the many libraries and archives in which I worked, several deserve

my special thanks for the extent of their assistance: the Deutsches Musikgeschichtliches Archiv, Kassel; the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, formerly East Berlin; the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, formerly West Berlin; the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester; and the Music Libraries of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Virginia. A Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst grant from the West German government afforded me the opportunity to visit most of the relevant European libraries and archives

during the academic year 1982-83.

From among the many mentors and colleagues who contributed in ways large and small to the gestation and development of this book, I wish to express my gratitude first and foremost to Professor David Fuller, my dissertation advisor, who taught me not just what it meant to be a musicologist but how to write and how to cook. Also deserving of special mention are the members of my doctoral committee—Jeremy Noble, James Coover, Stephen Manes, and the late James McKinnon—and Christoph Wolff, who lent his expertise as outside reader. Among the many others with whom I discussed particular portions of my work, Kerala Snyder and Alexander

Silbiger stand out for the value of their contributions. I am grateful also to Ralph Locke, senior editor of Eastman Studies in Music, and to Louise

Goldberg of the University of Rochester Press, both for their interest in my work and for their good humor and persistence throughout the editing and publishing process. It is as always to my wife, Diane, that I owe by far my greatest debt. Without her support and help during both good and difficult times it is doubtful that the present book would ever have seen its way through to publication. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my parents, who taught me by their daily example directness of thought, clarity of language, and integrity in all things. It is to them that this book is gratefully dedicated. Paul Mark Walker October 1999

To my parents Don and Iris

Introduction The idea of fugue—several voices entering one after the other with the

same brief melody, which they proceed to treat in a relatively structured fashion according to certain rules—can be said to have been born in the years around 1500. Its conception may have been due more than anything else to the change in compositional process, effected in the course of the fifteenth century, whereby the old method of “successive composition” (writing one voice at a time) was replaced by the “simultaneous conception” of a piece (writing all voices at once, a few measures at a time).! The way the composer conceived his piece naturally determined to a great extent the way he was inclined to introduce imitative counterpoint. For the Medieval composer, the principal technique was canon, which he called by the Latin word fuga. Canon is a linear way of thinking about imitative counterpoint: it carries the imitative procedure through from beginning to end of the piece but frequently introduces it into only some of the voices. The Renaissance composer, on the other hand, found that by conceiving all voices at once, he could exert much greater control over both the texture at any given point and the general shape and direction of the piece. With respect to imitative counterpoint, this vertical way of thinking meant that all voices now generally took part, the melody to be imitated comprised only a few notes, it was treated flexibly, and the imitative procedure usually broke down long before the end of the piece. Humanistic concerns about the text were also satisfied, since as the imitation proceeded, a theme that had been carefully crafted to fit a given textual phrase could be continually reshaped for reasons of part-writing or musical expression without sacrificing either melodic identity or good text declamation. The result of this revolution in compositional process was that by the 1520s, composers in northern Europe—especially Nicolas Gombert and Jacobus Clemens non Papa—had almost entirely abandoned canon in favor of a style that we today generally call the sixteenth-century motet style of pervading imitation. A piece constructed in this way proceeds as a series of imitative sections—called points of imitation today but fugues by many musicians of the period—which overlap to form a seamless composition. This style, first adapted to the Latin motet, gradually found its way also into the more serious efforts in secular vocal music and formed the basis for the first important instrumental genre to be based primarily on imitative counterpoint, the sixteenth-century imitative ricercar for keyboard. Certainly we can recognize in the Renaissance point of imitation the roots of the later Baroque fugue, and yet the differences between the two

far outweigh their similarities. The motets of Clemens and the fugues of

Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier lie at the two extremes of a fascinating de-

2

Theories of Fugue

velopment that has produced some of the most sophisticated and complex

compositions in all of Western music. Given fugue’s importance, one would expect its early history to be thoroughly studied and well mapped out. It is not. There are several reasons for our lack of knowledge. One is the complexity of the seventeenth century itself, when most of this development took place. Perhaps no century, with the possible exception of the twentieth, has produced music more experimental and diverse in character, and much remains to be learned and understood. Furthermore, fugal composition played virtually no role in opera, probably the best studied genre of the century, nor was it cultivated to any significant extent by such prominent composers of the time as Monteverdi, Schütz, Carissimi, or Lully, although these composers incorporated imitative counterpoint in their compositions to varying degrees. The paths from Clemens's motets to Bach's fugues lead us through so many diverse landscapes and into so much uncharted terrain that we still lack answers even to some of the most basic questions. Furthermore, scholars interested in the study of pre-Bach fugue have faced a methodological dilemma. We have tended to study later fugue by examining in detail certain select repertories of recognized master composers—generally including, if not restricted to, J. S. Bach—and deriving from these pieces the rules and precepts by which other fugues are then to be judged." This method serves the study of earlier fugal writing quite poorly. In the first place, although musicians before 1700 often used the word fugue in some fashion when referring to imitative counterpoint, the word seldom served as genre designation for an entire piece based on non-canonic imitation.? Second, there is no single composer whose fugal writing has been widely recognized as “the finest in existence" for the period before Bach. A representative body of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pieces called fugue or written by an acknowledged pre-eminent master does not exist, therefore, from which to derive defining characteristics of the genre.*

Instead, there are many composers who wrote many fine pieces in many

genres, all of which are easily recognizable as fugal or in some way important to the fugue's development: ricercar, imitative fantasy, canzona, capriccio, toccata, verset, and occasionally fugue itself, not to mention the fugal writing to be found in sonatas for instrumental ensemble or in sacred and secular vocal works. Until now, most studies of pre-Bach fugue have chosen to concentrate on one or another of the named genres, but the various genres have proven themselves bewilderingly diverse one from another, and we have found ourselves unable to bring the larger picture into focus.? Scholars who have tried to bring this larger picture into focus and to tie the various individual genres together have stumbled on another, greater obstacle. The most widely accepted yardstick by which we evaluate fugue— Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier—may be appropriate for later composers, most of whom grappled with that collection at some point intheir lives,

Introduction

3

but it can be applied to earlier composers only anachronistically. If we insist on judging the pre-1700 repertories by its standards, we discover not

only that nearly every fugal piece examined turns out to lack one or more of the *necessary" defining characteristics of the genre but also that our attention inevitably focuses on those characteristics that later became important, rather than on those considered important by the composer. The pitfalls of this methodology are readily apparent in Willi Apel's History of Keyboard Music to 1700, where one often encounters such statements as "[this ricercar of A. Gabrieli] can almost be called a fugue"* and “these pieces [fugues by J. Klemm] come quite close to what was later called a fugue.”’ Another indicator of this methodological problem is the familiar catch-all term "fugato," which is called into service whenever the scholar encounters “a fuguelike piece that in one way or another does not incorporate the usual features of a fugue."? Although for the most part modern scholarship no longer views the history of art and culture as a kind of Darwinian progression from the imperfect to the ever more perfect, that idea continues to haunt much writing about the early fugue. It is not hard to understand why the need to define and to delineate rules is so strongly felt. After all, the essence of fugue is, in the end, its rigor, a rigor born of rules and procedures that are almost purely musical. A fugal composition succeeds or fails to the extent that its compositional creativity is held in check by a tightly controlled contrapuntal framework. Igor Stravinsky might easily have been writing about fugue when he spoke of *the need for restriction," and argued that the composer's *personality" or creativity actually *stands out better when it moves within the definite limits of a convention."? If we do not understand the *limits of the convention"—the self-imposed restrictions—under which the composer of a particular fugue was working, then we are unlikely to appreciate the extent of his creative achievement. It is inconceivable that any fugue could ever be judged apart from the defining principles that are its raison d'étre. Before we embark on analysis of fugal works from this period, therefore, we would do well to try to reconstruct the rules and guidelines according to which the composers worked. Among the questions to be addressed are these: Is there a concept of fugal writing at any given time during this period and, if so, how is its rigor defined? When is a composer attempting to write something that reflects this rigor and thus might be recognized as fugal? When is he not? What are our own biases in defining fugal rigor and how do they compare with the biases of earlier times? The present book addresses these questions by looking at fugue's early development through the eyes of contemporaries who wrote about it. For despite the word's infrequent use during the period as a genre designation, and thus its relatively infrequent appearance on musical manuscripts and

prints, the idea of fugue—that is, fugue as a compositional technique—

remained very much alive. And despite the prejudices of some modern schol-

4

Theories of Fugue

ars,!° earlier writers have a great deal to tell us about early fugue. Their information falls into two broad categories. First, it tells us how at least some musicians thought about fugue: what it was, what it was not, how important it was, and where and how a composer should or should not use it (and thus where we who study the repertories should expect to encounter it). The earlier writers provide answers to these questions through their

explanations of terminology, their categorizations of the wider realm of imitative counterpoint, and their citing of pieces that exemplify the terminological distinctions. We in the twentieth century sometimes become im-

patient with the earlier emphasis on terminology and definition and prefer

to turn straightaway to the second type of information, namely, the practical, how-to-write-one guide upon which we can then base our analysis of a given fugal repertory. Although this second kind of information is also available in writings of the period, it is more often found toward the end of the Baroque period than at the beginning. If we think of these two kinds of information in broad terms as the intellectual and the practical, we might generalize that although both are present throughout the 200 years from 1550 to 1750, a shift in emphasis

from the former to the latter can be perceived as the period progresses.

Nevertheless, even the most intellectual of theorists had some sort of “real” music in mind. Contemporary compositions are therefore introduced into the present book wherever appropriate, to clarify a writer's words or to add a visual and aural component for the benefit of the modern reader. The theorists, however, remain central. An exhaustive study and synthesis of pre-Bach fugal compositions remains to be done but is the topic of another

book. It is the author's hope that the present book will stimulate and enrich

that study by adding to our own late-twentieth-century Bachian perspective the perspective of contemporary musicians who watched the development take place and in many cases participated in it themselves. Although the *best" musicians during this period were widely acknowledged to be at first the Franco-Flemish, then the Italians (later matched by the French), the dominance of German composers, and especially of Bach, in the writing of strict counterpoint and fugue has been recognized from that day to this. The present book mirrors this fact by focusing on German and, to a lesser extent, Italian theorists, from whom nearly all of our modern thinking about fugue ultimately derives. We will begin in late-sixteenthcentury Italy, move to Germany for the late Renaissance and early Baroque, observe the important interchanges between the two countries in the years after the Thirty Years War, and finally turn almost exclusively to Germany for the mature and late Baroque. French and English writers, many of whom had very interesting things to say about fugue, find themselves (alas!) almost completely removed from the picture, since in the end their contributions were overwhelmed by the predominant way of thinking about fugue developed in central Europe.

Part I

Fugal Theory of the Renaissance and Early Baroque

Chapter 1

Fugue in the High Renaissance Fugue before 1500 Fugue began its musical life as a genre designation. The earliest known reference to the word in a musical context appears in the Speculum musicae (early fourteenth century) of Jacobus de Liège, who included it as one of several types of discant along with the motet, the conductus, the cantilena,

and the rondeau.! The Latin noun fuga, meaning “flight” or “fleeing,” is

related to both the Latin verbs fugere, *to flee," and fugare, *to chase." Its vernacular equivalents are chace and caccia, nouns that likewise designate a chase or hunt. In the fourteenth century, all three terms—fuga, chace, and caccia—acquired the same musical meaning, namely a piece of music consisting either entirely or principally of two or more voices in canon? Musi-

cians chose to draw upon the analogy between canonic imitation and the hunt apparently because canon involves a second voice which *chases af-

ter” the first while the first “flees before" it. By the early fifteenth century, the two vernacular terms had largely fallen from use, and fugue became the term of choice for any piece in which all voices participated in the canonic performance of a single melodic line? Already by the middle of the fifteenth century, however, the word fugue had begun to take on new meanings. As canonic technique came more and

more to be incorporated into pieces that also included non-canonic voices,

musicians often continued to apply the word, but not—as in the case of the fourteenth-century caccia—to the piece as a whole; they reserved it instead for the canonic voices only. Such a use of terminology is illustrated by Guillaume Dufay's song Par droit je puis complaindre, a two-voice canon

over two non-canonic countertenor parts. Example 1.1 reproduces the song

as it appears in the Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Canon. Misc. 213, with a single texted part at the top from which the two canonic voices sing and the two contratenor parts notated below. The piece is headed “Fuga duorum temporum," a fugue after two beats, with an additional inscription accompanying the first contratenor part to indicate that this part is made *concordant with the fugue" (concordans cum fuga). We in the twentieth century use the word canon in precisely the same way. Canonic imitation may be the predominant compositional technique in Dufay's song, but

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Fugue in the High Renaissance

9

we would not call the entire piece a canon; the canon is in the upper two

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Also at this time, musicians began to use the word fugue to designate the compositional technique itself. Johannes Tinctoris, in his dictionary of musical terms written ca. 1472, defined it as “the sameness [idemtitas] of the voice parts in a composition. The notes and rests of the voice parts are identical in [rhythmic] value, name [i.e., hexachord syllable], shape, and sometimes even location on the staff."5 Here fugue is not a piece of music or group of voices governed by canonic technique; it is the technique itself, the quality of having made the voice parts identical. Our twentieth-century word canon likewise allows for such a meaning. When we say that *Bach employs canon in the Goldberg Variations," we mean that the technique figures prominently. Perhaps the best-known use of the word fugue in this sense is Josquin des Prez's Missa ad fugam, or “Mass by means of fugue.” Once composers around 1500 began to experiment in more systematic fashion with non-canonic imitation, they faced the difficulty of devising an appropriate terminology to describe what they produced. In its guise as a genre designation, fugue retained its original meaning: only if the piece was strictly canonic did it merit the designation fugue. The designation ricercar, rather than fugue, was most often applied to untexted pieces that, like the motet, proceeded as a series of points of imitation.* In its guise as a compositional technique, however, the word fugue was not used in any uniform way. Should it refer only to canonic technique? Should it refer to any sort of imitative technique? And if fifteenth-century composers could refer to only those voices that participated in a canon as fugue, should sixteenthcentury composers analogously refer to any given fugal section of a motet or ricercar—i.e., to a point of imitation—as a fugue? To complicate matters still further, other words began to enter the terminological picture. One of these was imitation, apparently first introduced in its Latin form by Bartolomeo Ramos de Pareja in 1482.’ Imitation clearly suggested itself because one voice copied or reproduced the notes of another, and many early sixteenth-century theorists used it more or less interchangeably with fugue There were yet others, including the Italian words replica, reditta (both meaning “repetition”), and risposta (“response”). This terminological confusion seems to have been a principal motivating factor behind Zarlino's pronouncements about imitative counterpoint. Certainly it forms a major portion of the chapters on fugue and imitation in his Istitutioni barmonicbe of 1558. Zarlino and Willaert

In Part III, “The Art of Counterpoint,” Zarlino divided the discussion of

imitative counterpoint into two chapters (nos. 51 and 52 in the original

1558 edition; 54 and 55 in the expanded 1573 edition), and he showed

10

Theories of Fugue

how all imitation was derived from two basic techniques, which he labeled with the Italian words fuga and imitatione.? Zarlino was the first theorist to distinguish between the two words, but he did not assign the former to the older canonic technique and the latter to the more innovative free imitation, as we might expect. Instead, he tried to recapture as much of the traditional fifteenth-century meaning of fugue as possible while at the same time updating it in accordance with the latest trends. To do so, he harked back to Tinctoris's original definition of fugue as the *sameness (in several respects) of the voice parts” and made “sameness” (or *identicalness") of the voice parts in rhythm and intervals the essential characteristic of his own fugue. In other words, if one voice replicated another in such a way that it reproduced exactly the rhythmic values and intervals of the first voice, the technique involved was fugue. This exact replication might last from beginning to end of the piece, as in a canon, or it might be broken off after only a few notes, as in free imitation. Zarlino called the former fuga legata, “bound or tied fugue,” and the latter fuga sciolta, “loose or free fugue.” The word consequenza could also serve as a synonym for fuga, although Zarlino never attached his newly created adjectives to it. The word canon should not, Zarlino warned, be used as a synonym; it meant *rule" or *law" and should be restricted to the verbal rule according to which many consequenze were to be realized. To the word imitation, Zarlino assigned the essential characteristic of approximateness of replication with respect to rhythm and intervals. For instance, the following voice might reproduce the major thirds of the leading voice as minor thirds, it might halve or double the note values, or it might alter an occasional note of the leading voice for the sake of the partwriting. The technique of imitation could also be carried from beginning to end, in which case it was called imitatione legata, or for only part of the piece, in which case it was called imitatione sciolta. Zarlino's system thus included four primary classifications of imitative counterpoint: (1) Fuga legata: the canonic technique in which the answering voice (which Zarlino called the consequente) reproduced precisely all the rhythms and intervals of the first voice (called the guida) throughout the piece. Whole steps were answered by whole steps, half steps by half steps, and semibreves by semibreves. Zarlino’s example is a canon at the octave.!° (2) Imitatione legata: the canonic technique in which the consequente reproduced only approximately the rhythms and intervals of the guida, but continued to do so until the end. For instance, in a canon at the second, major thirds might be answered by minor thirds. In an augmentation canon, semibreves might be answered by breves. The example is a canon at the third above.!! (3) Fuga sciolta: the technique in which the consequente reproduced exactly the rhythms and intervals of the guida but only for part, not all, of the piece. See Example 1.2.

Fugue in the High Renaissance

11

(4) Imitatione sciolta, the technique in which the consequente neither reproduced exactly the rhythms and intervals of the guida nor carried the imitative process through to the end of the piece. See Example 1.3.

Examples of Imitative Counterpoint That Are Free [Sciolte]. Secondo essempio

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Both fugue and imitation were possible in contrary motion, and for these

imitative techniques Zarlino combined Greek and Latin to create his own expression per arsin et thesin.' In the same way as for ordinary fuga and imitatione, identicalness of both rhythm and intervals among the voices distinguished fuga per arsin et thesin from the freer imitatione per arsin et thesin. He did not address the question of duration; that is, he made no mention of legata or sciolta for these two types of imitation. Zarlino pointed out that fugue was possible only when the imitation took place at a perfect interval, i.e., unison, fourth, fifth, or octave. Such a statement would have been superfluous seventy-five years earlier. Because Tinctoris had insisted that the hexachord syllables of the imitating voice be

3

Fugue in the High Renaissance

13

identical to those of the leader, no other intervals of imitation were possible. There were only three hexachords, the “natural” (on C), the “hard” (on G), and the “soft” (on F), and therefore a given sequence of syllables (say, ut-re-mi-fa) could only be expressed in three ways (i.e., C-D-E-F, G-A-B-C, or F-G-A-B flat), although each could be transposed to any octave. It was the replacement of the hexachord system by the octave solmization system that made it necessary for theorists to specify the rela-

tionship between interval of imitation and exactness of imitation. Thus

Ramos de Pareja, who first introduced the octave solmization system in 1482, was also the first to associate fugue with the perfect intervals." Nevertheless, a perfect interval does not guarantee exactness of replication. For instance, an augmentation canon at the octave would have to be described, according to Zarlino's criteria, as imitation rather than fugue, since its note values would not be exactly reproduced by the answering voice. Furthermore, any imitative counterpoint written at the fourth or

fifth can be melodically exact only so long as the voices remain within the

bounds of their respective hexachords. For example, if the two voices be-

gin on C and G, and the first voice moves beyond the bounds of the natural

hexachord to B natural, the second voice will answer not with F sharp but with F natural, and the imitation will be inexact. Thus, if Zarlino's insistence on exactness vs. inexactness of replication is to be strictly maintained, it must be conceded that his technique of imitation can take place at any interval, perfect or imperfect. The possibility of imitatione at the perfect intervals and Zarlino's understanding of that possibility have been the subject of divergent interpretation from the late sixteenth century to our own day. The principal cause of this disagreement is the following passage: La onde; si come la Fuga si puó fare all'Unisono, alla Quarta, alla Quinta, alla Ottava, overo ad altri intervalli; cosi la Imitatione si puó accommodare ad ogni intervallo dall'Unisono c dalli nominati in fuori [italics mine]. Per ilche, si potrà porre alla Seconda, alla Terza, alla Sesta, alla Settima & ad altri intervalli simili.

The meaning of the first statement is clear: Fugue can be made at the unison, fourth, fifth, octave, and their extensions. The last is also clear: Imitation can be made at the second, third, sixth, seventh, and their extensions. Interpretations of the middle portion, and especially the italicized phrase, diverge, however. Should this read, as James Haar argues, “So one can manage Imitation at every interval from the unison and the above-named intervals on?"!5 Or is Michael Beiche correct when he renders it as “So the imitation can be at every interval except the Unisonus and the above mentioned [4, 5, and 8]??!* Since the appearance in 1968 of the English translation of part III by Marco and Palisca, most modern scholars have ac-

cepted the former interpretation. Most (but not all) theorists of the genera-

14

Theories of Fugue

tion after Zarlino, on the other hand, took the second interpretation, as we shall see. Exactly what Zarlino himself meant to say in the above passage turns out to be less crucial than might at first appear. Haar's and Palisca's interpretation falls on the side of logic and consistency, but even if Bciche’s more literal reading accurately reflects the true intent of this passage, Zarlino

himself recognized a conflict between categories of imitative counterpoint

based on exactness vs. inexactness of replication and categories based on perfect vs. imperfect intervals. The augmentation canon, may seem a rela-

tively uncommon, and therefore contrived and insignificant example, but

imitative counterpoint at the fifth is one of the technique's most important

manifestations. Far from sweeping this troublesome problem under the rug, Zarlino tackled it head on:

Si ritrova etiandio una sorte di compositione simile, . . . parte in Fuga, & parte in Imitatione; come qui si vede. [Ex.] . . . Imperoche communemente è detta Fuga; & si usa molto spesso nelle compositioni a piü voci, come si puó vedere in molte cantilene. There is yet another kind of composition, . . . written partly in fugue and partly in imitation, as may be seen here. [Ex.] Such a composition is commonly called fugue and is much used in writing for several parts, as may be observed in many pieces.

I have reproduced the example, in which two voices imitate each other canonically at the fifth, as Example 1.4. At only three places does the second voice answer inexactly, and in each case the inexactness consists of an F answered by a B.'? Here we see the great theorist in a rare moment of indecision. First he calls the example *part fugue and part imitation;" fugue presumably because it takes place at a perfect interval and involves predominately exact

replication, imitation because that exactness is not carried through 100%.

But then he notes that such an example is commonly called teristically, Zarlino fails in this case to express an opinion, died the waters still further by placing the example in his tion. In the end, we cannot be entirely certain just where

fugue. Uncharacand he has mudchapter on imitainexact imitative

counterpoint at the fifth should fall within the heirarchy of definitions. If one

attempts to read between the lines, the most plausible interpretation would seem to be that, in Zarlino's mind, such imitative counterpoint is "technically speaking" not true fugue, since after all its two voices do not exactly replicate each other. Nevertheless, it does take place at a perfect interval and is in fact *almost fugue," maybe even close enough to consider its one consistent de-

viation to be insignificant for purposes of classification. By 1558 the style of pervading imitation had become the predominant

way of using imitative counterpoint, at least in the north. In Zarlino's

Fugue in the High Renaissance

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16

Theories of Fugue

heirarchy it would be described with the adjective sciolta and thus would fall within the categories of fuga sciolta and imitatione sciolta. The placement of these two after the two legata categories, the predominant emphasis on exactness of replication, and the difficulty that the whole scheme creates for imitative counterpoint at the fourth or fifth all leave the impres-

sion that free imitation and point-of-imitation technique were for Zarlino

considerably less important (or perhaps less “perfect,” to use the language of the day) than strict canonic writing. This impression is reinforced when we study the musical examples Zarlino provided, both those composed for the treatise and those cited from the works of others. In fact, Zarlino offered not a single example that proceeds straightforwardly as a series of overlapping points of imitation, and there are very few examples of even an isolated point of imitation that is systematically worked out according to the common model. Certainly the two examples provided to illustrate fuga sciolta (one of which is given above in Example 1.2) do not qualify.? In each case a longnote cantus firmus supplies the structure, and the imitated notes (labeled A

in Example 1.2) never recur once each voice has stated them. Of greater interest is Example 1.3, the only example of imitatione sciolta offered by

Zarlino. Here the cantus firmus is dispensed with, certain thematic ideas (A and B) are stated more than once per voice, and we find two places (measures 10 and 14) where the voices come to an (evaded) cadence which is then followed by a new beginning with a new theme to be imitated. This

is as close as Zarlino comes to point-of-imitation technique in these two

chapters, but it still lacks the kind of formal clarity normally associated with the style: Not only are the two principal *themes" (A and B) not neatly compartmentalized into their own individual points of imitation separated by a cadence, but the *themes" (C and D) that follow the two evaded

cadences lack memorable melodic character, and their replications are at

best vague approximations of the originals. (It may in fact be stretching it to label D and D' as imitative.) Indeed, one might hesitate to use the word theme at all for this example, since only A seems to be memorable and to have both a beginning and an identifiable ending note. On the other hand,

the example fits nicely Zarlino's definition of the adjective sciolta, which

talks not about the passing back and forth of a brief theme, but rather

about a second voice replicating the first for a few notes and then simply

going its own way. Zarlino's two chapters on fugue and imitation lack examples of *real"

music by *real" composers. In a later chapter offering miscellaneous ad-

vice on compositions for four or more voices, however, the theorist offered at least some clues to the ways in which he applied his terminology and categories to compositions by his teacher Willaert, Willaert's teacher Mou-

ton, and other composers of the time. These clues come in the form of a list

enumerating various ways (among a great many) in which Europe's best

Fugue in the High Renaissance

17

composers have organized or structured their pieces. Of these, eight incorporate imitative counterpoint in some fashion; they are given, together with Zarlino’s original Italian description and some of the cited musical examples, in Table 1.1. For the mid sixteenth century this is a remarkable list. Fully half of the categories (1-4) comprise pieces whose structure is determined by a longnote cantus firmus, while those without cantus firmus all base their struc-

ture on canonic technique. Not only had both become archaic ways to

construct a piece by 1558, but they virtually preclude the building of a piece as a series of overlapping points of imitation. Furthermore, the word

sciolta is nowhere to be found in the entire chapter, and only two of the categories (1 and 5) comprise compositions that incorporate any noncanonic imitation at all. The first of these two categories, for which Zarlino cited two early motets by Willaert, bears closer examination. Both Inclite Sfortiadum and Victor io, salve were composed in honor of Francesco II Sforza of Milan (almost

certainly in the mid 1520s) and were published in Willaert's first book of

motets, dated 1539.2 The opening measures of Victor io, salve (Example 1.5) reveal the underlying tension between the structural framework of the point of imitation and that of the cantus firmus. Measures 1-19 form a classically conceived point of imitation. Its thematic material consists of a prominent four-note motive (labeled A1 in Example 1.5) set to the words “Victor io," which is followed in most instances by a pattern of quicker note values (A2) for *salve." All voices but tenor (which carries the cantus firmus and is silent until measure 16) state these two ideas at least once; soprano and bass state the four-note motive twice. When the cantus firmus finally enters, the piece begins to prepare its first cadence, which is reached in measure 19 and which closes the first section of the piece. The next begins with the second phrase of text, *tantum cui fata triumphi," followed by the phrase *Gallorum capto rege." In classic sixteenth-centurymotet style, a second point of imitation would begin with this cadence, but in Willaert's motet the cantus firmus *takes over" and leads the piece forward, through a couple of weak cadences (measure 23 and 28), while the other voices simply accomodate themselves to it without any imitation. In measure 28 the next textual phrase, *dedere decus," enters, and shortly thereafter the cantus firmus again drops out. Now the piece returns to free imitation (based on the theme labeled B in Example 1.5) and builds a second point of imitation which, like the first, also closes on a strong cadence (in measure 36), this time on a C major chord. In short, the pattern revealed in Example 1.5 is one that alternates between the newer technique of free imitation participated in by all voices (complete with tonal answer) and the older technique of allowing the tenor with its long-note cantus firmus to determine the course and nature of the counterpoint. This is as close as any of the cited examples comes to the point of imitation as a

18

Theories of Fugue

Table 1.1. Uses of imitative counterpoint in works by Willaert and other contemporaries Techniques

Examples?

In Italian

I. Pieces with Cantus Firmus (1) All other voices are in fugue with each other; or they imitate each other. (2) One or more of the other voices is in canon

with the cantus firmus itself.

(3) Two or more of the

other voices are in canon

with each other but not with the cantus firmus.

(4) One other voice is in canon with the cantus firmus, which is stated twice, the second time with guida and consequente switching

roles.??

... usando di porle in Fuga l'una con l'altra; over di fare, che l'una

Willaert, Inclite Sfortiadum, Victor io

... Sopra il quale accommodavano ...due, 0 Tre parti in

Willaert, Verbum supernum, Praeter rerum

imitasse l'altra . . .?

Consequenza . . ^

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continua o legata

...?

... ordinandolo con un'altra parte in Fuga in tal maniera: .. . prima fu la Guida diventi il Consequente; & similemente quella, che era il Consequente

salve?

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lepores?

diventi la Guida.”

II. Pieces without Cantus Firmus (5) Two voices participate in canon while others

freely imitate it.”

...due parti...in Consequenza:

Zarlino, Ecce tu pulchra es?

overamente porle legate insieme con la Imitatione

32

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Mouton, Nesciens mater?

(7) The voices are made "now in consequenza, NOW in imitation, with as many consequenti as there are guide."

... ponendo le parti hora in Consequenza, hora nella Imitatione; ove si ritroverà esser tanti li Consequenti, quante

Zarlino, Petite Camusette

(8) All voices participate in a single canon (which may be notated with only one voice), with some in fugue and some in imitation.

Sarà anco lodevole il comporre Quattro parti sopra una, ponendone alcune in Fuga, & alcune

(6) All voices are canonic,

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Fugue in the High Renaissance

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22

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either consequenza or fugue, Zarlino simply wishes to account for all can-

ons at any interval. The the imitative technique expression that suggests tween either exact and

same is true of category 7. Here Zarlino describes as “now in Consequenza, now in Imitatione,” an some sort of alternation within a given voice beinexact replication or canonic and free imitation.

|

Fugue in the High Renaissance

23

The only cited example that still exists today, Willaert's four-voice chanson "Petite Camusette," 1s simply a double canon, however, with the two no-

tated voices to be answered by two added consequenti at the sixth below.*!

This example suggests that Zarlino may have meant his expression to be interpreted to mean “either in consequenza or in imitation." We are left once again with categories 1 and 5. It is not clear in the former case whether the verb imitasse is meant to refer to the technique of imitatione or whether it simply serves as a generic word to indicate that the voices copy each other. Whatever the case, we have seen that the examples cited for category 1 lie closer than any others to classic point-of-imitation technique, although the expression imitatione sciolta is not used to describe them. The piece cited in category 5, Zarlino's Ecce tu pulchra es (see Example 1.6), consists of two voices (cantus and tenor) in canon while the remaining voices borrow brief snatches from them. The word imitation serves in this instance to designate extremely free imitative counterpoint without any systematic basis or structural implications at all.

In summary: Both Zarlino and his teacher Willaert took a predomi-

nately conservative approach to the use of imitative counterpoint and continued to think of it in primarily linear terms: it was more often than not introduced into some rather than all of the voices; it appeared more often in the guise of canon than of non-canonic imitation; and exactness of replication continued to be highly prized. In this respect, the examples cited from Willaert's oeuvre are particularly suggestive. Freer types of imitation— either canonic at imperfect intervals or non-canonic—turn up in the earliest works: the chanson published in 1520 and the two motets from ca. 1525. The other four Willaert works cited—Venator lepores, Verbum supernum,

Praeter rerum seriem, and Salve sancta parens—are

later, the

first published in 1542, the remaining three in his well-known Musica nova

of 1559. Not only are all four motets based on canon, but all of these

canons take place at the fourth or fifth and maintain exact replication be-

tween voices. This exactness is no accident. In Venator lepores, the single note in the guida (F) that would produce inexact replication in the consequente (B natural) is carefully avoided. In the three motets from Musica nova, partial signatures ensure that the interval relationships are exactly maintained.* The pattern exhibited by these six pieces suggests that Willaert himself may perhaps have made a conscious decision in mid-career, after having experimented with free imitation as a structural principle, to return to the greater rigor of canon and to the roots of “fugue” in exact replication of hexachordal scale steps. Dressler and Clemens

Willaert's two great Flemish contemporaries, Nicolas Gombert and Jacobus

Clemens non Papa, form together with him a trirumvate often referred to

24

Theories of Fugue

today as “the post-Josquin generation.”* Whereas Willaert pursued his

career entirely in Italy, however, both Gombert and Clemens remained north of the Alps: Gombert in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Clemens in various cities of his native Flanders. Furthermore, Willaert's

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interest in canon was not shared by his two northern colleagues, who instead made point-of-imitation technique the cornerstone of their compositional style. Ultimately, of course, it was the latter rather than the former

that represented the future of imitative counterpoint and that led eventu-

ally to the Baroque fugue. Zarlino's terminology for imitative counterpoint,

26

Theories of Fugue

devised under Willaert's influence, was poorly suited to this style, as we

have seen, and it seems never to have been adopted during the Renaissance

to describe it. Our most important guide nical detail of this style turns out to be German contemporary Gallus Dressler. Dressler was born in Thuringia in ment of protestant Humanism.* It is

to the fugal terminology and techyet another northerner, Zarlino's

1533 and raised in the environthought that as a youth he stud-

ied music in Belgium, perhaps with Clemens, since his theoretical writ-

ings make frequent reference to the works of Clemens and other Netherlandish composers. While serving as cantor to the protestant Latin school in Magdeburg, Dressler compiled his most important theoretical work, Praecepta musicae poeticae, which appears never to have been printed and which survives only in a single manuscript copy dated 1563.* It is devoted exclusively to the art of musical composition, which its author called musica poetica. Dressler based his Praecepta on the idea that a composer who wished to write an effective piece of vocal music faced a task analogous to that of an orator or essayist.* In each case the goal was to take the elements at hand— whether notes and rests or words and phrases—and to put them together in such a way that the listener or reader was both persuaded (by the logical progression) and inspired (by the rhetoric). Dressler, who presumably taught both music and Latin in the Magdeburg school, chose therefore to draw upon two particular elements of the classical discipline of rhetoric for the teaching of musical composition. First, he recognized the analogy between the “figures of speech” with which a schoolboy fleshed out the thesis of an essay or speech and the "techniques of composition" by which a composer created a polyphonic composition from a few basic musical ideas. Second, he recognized that, like a well-constructed essay, a well-constructed piece of music required a good beginning [exordium], middle [medium], and end [finis]. The Praecepta is thus organized like a Latin rhetoric text of the period: it begins with the appropriate definitions, proceeds to the most important elements of contrapuntal writing (primarily the handling of consonances and dissonances), and finally takes up the *ornaments of music? (i.e., techniques of composition) with advice on how to treat these techniques at the beginning, middle, and end of a composition. Dressler identified as *ornaments of music" the three most important skills that a composer needed to master: the writing of suspensions [syncopationes], the handling of cadences [clausulae], and the mastery of imitative texture [fugae]. No one handled these three better, in his opinion, than the Netherlander Clemens non Papa. Dressler defined fuga succinctly and concretely: [Fuga] est duarum vel trium vel plurium vocum repetitio quae fit vel per unisonum, 8 5 vel 4.8

Fugue in the High Renaissance

27

Fugue is the repetition of two or three or more voices which is made either at the unison, octave, fifth, or fourth.

His definition resembles the opening phrase of Zarlino's 1558 definition, which read: [Fuga] è una certa Replica di alquante voci nella cantilena.# Fugue is a certain repetition of some voices in a composition.

At first glance, Dressler's mention of repetition at perfect intervals also reminds us of Zarlino's. As we shall see, however, the resemblence is superficial, and the two theorists understood fugal terminology in completely different ways. Dressler identified three types of fuga. His system of classification appears to be unique, and it has caused much misunderstanding and misinterpretation. The three types can be clarified, however, by studying the musical examples that Dressler cited to illustrate his brief definitions. Dressler called the first type fuga integra, and he gave this definition: [Fuga integra] est cum omnes voces ex una cantione canunt usque ad finem.?? Fuga integra is when all voices sing from one cantio all the way to the end.

The example that follows it in the manuscript is a four-voice canon written as one voice with a rule (labeled *Canon") for its realization. Thus, although in writings of this period cantio usually meant *a piece of music" in general, here Dressler was thinking of cantio as *a single line of music" or “one voice part" from which all parts sing. Dressler's Fuga integra is nothing more nor less than the technique of canon. Dressler made no mention of the canonic motet. His only remark about the function of fuga integra was that "such fugues are fitting for exercises."5! [t seems at first surprising that a theorist of the middle of the sixteenth century would think of canon solely as a technique for exercises. After all, many musicians still considered canon an important compositional device for the motet, as both Willaert's music and Zarlino's treatise demonstrate. Dressler's primary focus in his Praecepta, reflected in his development of the analogy between music and rhetoric, was, however, on the expression of a text. A long-note cantus firmus surrounded by several voices in canon was structurally rigid and thus ill-suited for this task; free imitation, with its greater flexibility, was ideal. Howard Brown has noted the sense of conflict in many of Willaert's motets between, on the one hand, the structural constraints of cantus firmus and canon and, on the other, the desire to express the text with freely composed music.? No such conflict

28

Theories of Fugue

exists in the motets of Dressler's favorite composer. For Clemens, and the German theorists who admired his music, free imitation seemed the ideal way to express a text, and canon was relegated to the composer's study. While Dressler's first type of imitative counterpoint is clear, his other two types have so far remained obscure. Their definitions allow for more than one interpretation, and modern scholars have been unable to agree on just what they mean. Dressler called the two types semifuga and mutillata fuga. He defined them as follows: [Semifuga] est cantio referens initia integrae fugae sed tandem omissa fugae

imitatione in clausulam concedens

ut *Deus virtutum,"

*Domus

mea

virtutum," *Mane nobiscum Domine," *Fuerunt mihi lacrymae meae."

domus

[Mutillata fuga] est cantio, quae quamquam statim initio non integram fugam referat tamen talem sonat harmoniam ut intelligi possit ad imitationem fugae compositam, ut initium “Timor et tremor."? Semifuga is a piece [cantio] that produces the beginnings of fuga integra but that at length abandons the imitation of fugue before arriving at a cadence, as in *Deus virtutum," etc.

Mutillata fuga is a piece that, although it does not right away produce fuga integra, nevertheless produces such a texture that it can be understood to have been composed in imitation of fugue, as at the beginning of *Timor et tremor."

If Dressler had identified only two types of fuga—fuga integra and semifuga—his meaning would be clear, for semifuga looks comfortably like Zarlino's fuga sciolta. In the definition, Dressler relates the technique

to the already-defined fuga integra by referring to the imitated thematic

material as *the beginnings of fuga integra." He goes on to say that, although the piece begins like fuga integra, the various statements of these “beginnings of fuga integra” are then abandoned (i.e., the imitation ceases) and the parts come to a cadence. In other words, as Zarlino put it for his definition of fuga sciolta, the imitation is not carried through to the end. Dressler’s mutillata fuga is a more difficult problem. Interpretations by modern scholars have agreed only that it is in some way freer than semifuga and thus that these two types together comprise the territory that the later German writers called fuga soluta, partialis, or fracta. Certainly Dressler’s

three terms—” whole fugue,” “half fugue,” and “mutilated fugue"—sug-

gest by themselves a progression from stricter to freer imitation. Two as-

pects of the definition of mutillata fuga also support this conclusion. First,

whereas semifuga “produces the beginnings of fuga integra,” mutillata fuga does not “produce fuga integra,” at least not “right away.” Dressler further implied its greater freedom by insisting that in spite of this [not pro-

ducing fuga integra right away], mutillata fuga is still understood to be

Fugue in the High Renaissance

29

composed in imitation. Apparently, therefore, both semifuga and mutillata fuga are free types of imitation. The question remains: how do they differ?

Two modern theories have been proposed. In a 1945 dissertation on

Dressler, Wilhelm Martin Luther assumed that the imitation of mutillata fuga was shorter than that of semifuga. He characterized the latter as *the

strict point of imitation ending in a cadence" (*der strenge Imitations-

abschnitt bis zur Clausel"), the former as “imitation of a short nature” (*kurzzügige Imitation").5^ Fritz Feldmann echoed Luther’s interpretation in an article on the early-seventeenth-century German theorist Joachim Thuringus. Dressler's semifuga was “Imitation bis zur Clausel”; mutillata fuga, “noch kürzere Imitation.”* Luther’s and Feldmann’s theory seems to have been inspired primarily by the term itself. *Mutilated fugue" certainly

suggests some sort of truncation. The second theory was offered by Martin Ruhnke in his monograph on

Joachim Burmeister. He assumed that the greater freedom of Dressler's mutillata fuga referred to the use of free imitation within a piece that was not predominately imitative. *Fuga mutillata is the development of a [point of] imitation within a piece that is full-voiced throughout."? Several pages later, Ruhnke amplified his meaning when he called Dressler's mutilated fugue “an inner imitation" (“Binnenimitation”) in which “the dux . . . begins with its theme in the middle of the complex of voices” (“der dux . . . innerhalb des ganzen Stimmverbandes mit seinem Thema einsetzt").^* If we look back at Dressler's definition, we find in the word “initio” (“in the beginning" or “right away") the probable source of Ruhnke's interpretation. Ruhnke might have paraphrased Dressler's definition, “mutillata fuga does not present imitation at the beginning, but it is nonetheless imitative [because it presents imitation elsewhere in the piece]." A third interpretation is suggested by a comparison with Italian theory. We will see below how Zarlino's four categories were reduced by Pietro Pontio and Scipione Cerreto to three: fuga legata (or obligata), fuga sciolta (or non obligata), and imitatione (or fuga ad imitatione). Furthermore, Dressler's wording as he defined semifuga and mutillata fuga resembles the descriptions of fuga naturale and fuga accidentale by a slightly later Italian theorist, Lodovico Zacconi, namely, imitative counterpoint in which the imitation was strictly maintained (naturale) and that in which occasional liberties, such as the tonal answer, were allowed (accidentale)? Dressler's definitions similarly suggest that semifuga somehow resembled fuga integra while mutillata fuga did not. At least on the surface, therefore, it appears that Dressler could have intended semifuga to be the equivalent of Zarlino's fuga sciolta, in which the imitation is strictly maintained but of short duration; mutillata fuga, then, would be the equivalent of Zacconi's

fuga accidentale or Cerreto's fuga ad imitatione: i.e., freer imitation in which liberties were allowed. In other words, the *greater freedom" implied in

Dressler's definition of *mutilated fugue" could conceivably refer to rhyth-

30

Theories of Fugue

mic and melodic freedom in the answering voice rather than to the imitation’s

shortness or its placement within the piece. One possible way to determine Dressler's meaning is to study the cited examples. Few of the titles mentioned in Dressler's manuscript carry an

attribution, probably because the manuscript appears to have been put

together for his own teaching, and he would undoubtedly have known what pieces he intended. The most likely composer would be Clemens, of course, but at least one of the titles is not to be found among his surviving

works. Elsewhere in the Praecepta Dressler also cited his own works as

well as music of Crecquillon, Gombert, and Lassus. The compositions of

this group of composers thus provide the likely repertory in which to seek Dressler's examples. Clemens is the only composer of the five known to have set texts beginning “Mane nobiscum Domine” and "Fuerunt mihi lacrymae meae."*! Settings of “Timor et tremor" survive by both Clemens? and Lassus.9? The

title *Deus virtutum" is cited at two other points in Dressler's Praecepta, once attributed to Crecquillon, once to Gombert. Since no setting of it by

Gombert (or by Clemens, Lassus, or Dressler himself) is known, we must assume that Dressler erred in attributing it to Gombert and that all three references are to the Crecquillon motet.°* “Domus mea domus virtutum" appears to be either a mistake or a reference to a lost work; no such title is found among the works of any of these composers. Clemens's “Domus mea domus orationis” may have been intended; it is the only setting of a text even remotely like it among the works of this group of composers. Examples 1.7-1.11 give the opening points of imitation of three of the semifuga motets (1.7, 1.8, and 1.9) as well as of both surviving settings of “Timor et tremor," the only title mentioned under mutillata fuga (1.10 and

1.11).

If the Clemens setting of “Timor et tremor" is the one intended by Dressler, then none of the above interpretations quite fits. Beginning with the last theory, namely that the imitation of mutillata fuga is freer in rhythm and melody than that of semifuga, we find that, although the thematic material of Clemens's “Timor et tremor" is answered tonally (i.e., its imitation is melodically free), the imitation of *Fuerunt" and “Mane nobiscum" is equally free. In the opening of *Fuerunt," for example, the “theme” takes on two forms, which I have labeled A and A'. With only one exception (measures 13-16 in the bass), statements of the theme that begin on the note A take the A form, while statements on D take the A' form. *Mane nobiscum," like Clemens's *Timor et tremor," features a tonal answer. Clearly, therefore, when Dressler said that in semifuga the voices produced fuga integra, he did not mean that semifuga began with exact imitation in the same way that fuga integra did. Thus, Dressler's semifuga is not strictly the equivalent of Zarlino's fuga sciolta, and the difference between mutillata fuga and semifuga has nothing to do with exactness of imitation.

Fugue in the High Renaissance

31

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Fugue in the High Renaissance

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Example 1.7, cont.

six notes duration. The opening theme of “Timor et tremor,” divided into

two shorter “motives,” contains eleven (five plus six) notes.

One possible key to Dressler’s meaning may be the verb refero. Refero

can take several meanings, one of which is “to bring back.” If we read that

translation into both definitions in place of the word “produce,” then

Theories of Fugue

34

A

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laDe

ae,

Example

1.8. Clemens

non Papa ; "Fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae."

mensurabilis musicae , 4/15:59—60.)*

(Corpus

Fugue in the High Renaissance

35

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Example 1.8, cont.

semifuga becomes that which *brings back the beginnings of fuga integra" while mutillata fuga “does not bring back fuga integra and yet produces a texture that it can be understood to have been composed in fugal imitation.” In other words, in the technique of semifuga, the thematic material (Dressler's *beginnings of fuga integra") is first stated once in each voice and then is brought back again in some or all voices before a cadence is reached. In mutillata fuga, on the other hand, there is no return of thematic material after the initial statement of the theme in each voice. The Clemens

version of *Timor et tremor," when compared with the other examples,

fits this interpretation perfectly. In the first two Clemens motets (Examples 1.8 and 1.9), each voice states the thematic material at least twice; in the Crecquillon motet (Example 1.7), two of the five voices (superius and bassus) state the material twice. In other words, each example of semifuga begins with a point of imitation approximately 20-25 measures in length built

upon several statements and restatements of the opening thematic mate-

rial. On the other hand, there is no return of material in “Timor et tremor." Its theme is constructed of two smaller motives (labeled A and B in Ex-

36

Theories of Fugue A

Superiu1 s

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Example 1.9. Clemens non Papa, *Mane nobiscum Domine." (Corpus mensurabilis

musicae, 4/14:14—15.)

ample 1.10), which never reappear after their opening presentation by each voice. If the Clemens setting of *Timor et tremor" is not the one to which Dressler intended to refer, and instead Lassus's setting is meant, then Ruhnke's idea of *inner imitation" gains credibility. Here is a piece in which

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Fugue in the High Renaissance

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fuga integra is not produced right away, but within a few measures we find a series of staggered entries on the words “venerunt super me” which create a texture “suggestive” of fugal imitation, even though, strictly speaking, these entries are not truly imitative. Without clear indication of which piece Dressler meant to refer to, and lacking any further information on which to base our interpretation, it

38

Theories of Fugue

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may never be possible to know exactly what Dressler inten ded the distinction between semifuga and mutillata fuga to be. Fortunatel y, perhaps, the distinction proved to be of little importance in the histor y of fugal theory, since no later theorist took up Dressler's terms or presented any theory outlining differences suggestive of these. What is clear is Dressler's emphasis on the free manipulation of imitative counterpoint and the exploitation

I

Fugue in the High Renaissance A

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Example 1.10. Clemens non Papa, *Timor et tremor." (Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 4/12:43-44.)

of the structural possibilities of point-of-imitation technique, as opposed to Zarlino's more backward-looking focus on strictness of imitation and

the replication of exact solmization syllables. In fact, Dressler had nothing

more to say about fuga integra; rather, he focused his attention on points of imitation, which he referred to consistently as fugae, and how the composer should write them. To learn to create good fugae, the student was advised to study the works of other composers rather than to

try to memorize a large number of rules. There was, however, one aspect of imitative writing that Dressler felt deserved several rules. That

40

Theories of Fugue

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Example 1.12. Dressler’s “species of fourth and fifth," “repercussions,” and “primary and secondary cadence notes" for each mode as outlined in the Praecepta.

(3) Ex clausulis tonis musicis convenientibus fugae eruuntur (utuntur) ita ut ex

alia clausula ad aliam rendamus. Ut Domine Jesu Christe est enim 4 toni La sol

fa.

(4) partim ex repercussionibus, partim ex diatessaron et diapente speciebus mixtae fugae constituuntur ut exordium in cantione Crequillonis *Deus virtutum" sumptum est partim ex specie diatessaron fa ut et partim repercussione fa la, est enim sexti toni (vel Maria Magdalena, in isto cantu sunt mixtae fugae. Nullae fugae possunt aliunde sumi quam ex his fundamentis jam dictatis).”!

Fugue in the High Renaissance

45

(1) The foundations of fugae are taken from the species of fourth or fifth (as in “Mane nobiscum Domine”

and *Adesto dolori meo").

(2) The foundations of fugae are taken from the repercussions of the modes which are made not only empty but also with many other intervals intervening. (3) Fugae may appropriately arise out of the cadence [notes] in the modes of music so that we may get from one cadence to another. As indeed *Domine Jesu Christe" is fourth mode La sol fa. (4) Mixtae fugae are made partly from the repercussions and partly from the species of fourth and fifth; thus, the exordium in Crecquillon's *Deus virtutum" is made partly from the species of fourth fa ut and partly from the repercussion fa la, for it is of the sixth mode. (Or *Maria Magdalena," where mixtae fugae are to be found. No fugae can take their foundations in any other way than those already given.)

Two of the pieces listed are among those cited earlier—Clemens's *Mane nobiscum" (Example 1.9) and Crecquillon's *Deus virtutum" (Example 1.7). All of the other motets appear to be works of Clemens.” The openings of two of these—" Adesto dolori meo"? and “Domine Jesu Christe””*—

are given as Examples 1.13 and 1.14.

Dressler's examples clarify his rules. When he used the phrase “founda-

tions of fugae," Dressler did not mean the notes with which the various

voices began, but the notes that the various voices should emphasize in their subsequent motion. For example, the opening thematic statement of Clemens's *Domine Jesu Christe" (Example 1.15) begins on the final (E mi) but avoids the dominant (B mi) of mode 4 and emphasizes instead the primary (A la) and secondary (G sol and C fa) cadence notes of the mode. Similarly, the opening statement in Crecquillon's *Deus virtutum" (Example 1.16) emphasizes the species of fourth and fifth and the repercussions of mode 6. Dressler called this an example of mixtae fugae. In short, in his description of the relationship between imitation and the modes, Dressler was concerned with the question of how the voices should proceed rather than with the question of what the first note in each of the voices should be. His reasons for attaching so much importance to this relationship were primarily pragmatic. As he himself put it in Rule 3, fugae that are built around the cadence notes allow the composer to move more readily from one cadence to the next. Dressler noted in Rule 2 that the voices could emphasize the important notes by either leaping or moving stepwise from one to the other. The same

is apparently true for the other three rules as well. For example, of the two

motets cited in Rule 1, the first (^Mane nobiscum") features a “theme” that leaps from dominant to final, while the second ("Adesto dolori") has a theme that proceeds stepwise from final to dominant.

Theories of Fugue

46

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Example

1.13. Clemens non Papa, “Adesto dolori meo.”

musicae, 4/13:33.)

(Corpus mensurabilis

Fugue in the High Renaissance

47

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Example 1.13, cont.

Chapter 12 of Dressler's treatise was devoted to the exordium, the term he borrowed from rhetoric to designate the opening section of a musical composition up to the first cadence.” He insisted that the exordium of an imitative composition should express its mode clearly by emphasizing the species of fourth and fifth, the repercussions, and the primary cadence notes. Thus, by implication, the secondary cadence notes should not play a prominent role and should be relegated to the body of the work.” Dressler distinguished two types of exordia: full [plenum] if all voices began together, empty [nudum] if they began individually. The fuga was the most common form of exordium nudum, and Dressler considered it one of the best ways to begin a composition. The medium, or body of the work, could also be of two types; i.e., either with fugae (called medium ex fugis) or without them (medium sine fugis or medium semplice). He gave five general rules which applied to both types." Two of these rules addressed purely musical elements: the composer could compose cadences on all the primary and secondary cadence notes (Rule 3) and he should understand good harmonic progression (Rule 5). The other three demanded careful attention to the text: a *happy" or *sad" mode should be chosen according to the overall nature of the text (Rule 1), text painting of individual words was recommended (Rule 4), and, in the most forward-looking of all the rules, the music should serve the words, not the words the music (Rule 2). To write a medium ex fugis, a composer needed only to remember the rules already given for constructing fugae and combine them with the five rules for constructing the medium. Once again, Dressler urged the study of

Theories of Fugue

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other composers' media rather than the memorization of rules. Nevertheless, he also elaborated on two important points.” First, he described the way in which the composer might create a series of overlapping points of imitation by beginning a new point of imitation just as the previous one was coming to a cadence. Second, he recommended that, in a point of imitation in which the theme was stated several times (in other words, in semifuga), some statements could be at different intervals [per diversa intervalla]. Dressler cited as an example of both techniques the Clemens motet * Concussum est mare,”” of which the end of the opening point of imitation (measures 11-17) and all of the second point of imitation (measures 17-34) are given in Example 1.17. Clemens's treatment of thematic material is much more regular in the exordium than in the medium. For example, every statement of the exordium's *theme," labeled *A" in Example 1.17, begins on either the final (C) or the dominant (G) of the mode and leaps upward either a fourth or a fifth. On the other hand, the next “theme,” labeled B, enters not only on C and G but also on E (bassus, measure 24), B (superius, measure 26), and D (contratenor, measure 30). Particularly significant is the bassus statement in measures 24-26, where a transposition of the “theme” from “C major" to “A minor” is accompanied by a corresponding harmonic em-

phasis on A minor and E minor. The intervals of theme B are also fre-

quently altered. For example, its opening leap is at various times a fourth, a fifth, a third (contratenor, measures 26-27), and an octave (tenor, measure 29). Much of this freedom is due to the medium’s greater emphasis on

stretto—whereas theme B

is stated nineteen times in seventeen measures,

theme A is stated only ten times in as many measures. If, in the medium of a composition, Dressler found such fugae per diversa

Theories of Fugue 50

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intervalla to be particularly pleasing, it is hard to understand why he defined fuga in the first place as "repetitio . . . per unisonum, 8, 5, vel 4.”

Perhaps the source of this inconsistency lies in the difference between the proper use of fuga in the exordium and in the medium. In the exordium the

composer needed to establish the mode, and, to do this, he had to bring out the most important notes of that mode, namely the species of fourth and

52

Theories of Fugue

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Example 2.5. The modal system of the Medieval period.

mode, fourth appeared above fifth; in a plagal mode, fourth was below fifth. This system, expanded by Glarean in 1547 to include the modes on A and C, is diagrammed in Example 2.6 according to the configuration found in Le istitutioni.? Theorists devised two sets of terms to label the final and dominant notes. Many Italians, including Zarlino, used either the Latin word chorda or its Italian cognate corda, both normally meaning “string,” in the general sense of “some particular note of a mode." To identify exactly which note, adjective modifiers were frequently added. For instance, in the passage quoted above, Zarlino referred to the final note as the chorda estrema, since it appeared at either extreme of the authentic mode’s ambitus, and the dominant note as the chorda mezane, the note in the middle. Elsewhere, Zarlino also used the term chorda finalis for the final note, which he described as always the lowest note of the mode’s characteristic fifth.?? Frequently, final and dominant were grouped together by theorists of the period and given the collective title corde naturali del tuono (the “natural notes of the mode;” see Zarlino’s quote above) or more simply the corde del tuono. A second method of labeling the two notes focused on the intervals of fourth and fifth formed between them. Diruta, for instance, noted that in

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Italy and the Netherlands

67

Example 2.6. The modal system according to Glarean and Zarlino. (Zarlino, Le

istitutioni, 1558 ed., p. 310; Zarlino, On tbe Modes, p. 38.)

the hexachord solmization system there existed four "species" or types of fifth and three of fourth, by which he referred to the number of ways in which the intervals could be spelled with solmization syllables.?! The species of fifth consisted of ut-sol, re-la, mi-mi, and fa-fa; those of fourth, utfa, re-sol, and mi-la. Each mode was in turn composed of a unique combination of fourth and fifth—e.g., in mode 1, the fifth re-la (D-A) and the fourth re-sol (A-D). Thus, the final and dominant notes as determined by these intervals were referred to as a mode's *species of fourth and fifth" or "proper species." This was the nomenclature preferred by most German theorists of the period. To return to Zarlino's description, we can conclude that, given a piece in the Dorian mode beginning with a point of imitation, he expected the first note of each of the voices to be either D or A. Zarlino went on to admit that exceptions were occasionally allowable, and he took some pains to include the fourth, often considered a dissonance by earlier theorists, among the perfect consonances. Zarlino's rule about the opening of an imitative composition and its relationship to the mode of the composition formed the first important rule in the early seventeenth-century theory of tonal answers. Zarlino himself carried it no further, however. He never suggested that a melodic fifth in one voice should be imitated by a fourth in another, nor that if one voice began on the final, the other ought to begin on the dominant rather than on the same note. In fact, Zarlino did not comment at all on what particular melodic motion was appropriate for imitative counterpoint. Nevertheless, the twelve imitative duos that he composed in illustration of the twelve

68

Theories of Fugue

modes not only obeyed the rule outlined above, but also included several

examples of tonal answers.” All twelve duos begin imitatively (one in inversion), and in each case the two voices begin one on the final and one on the dominant (not necessarily in that order) or both on the dominant. The guida of four of the duos (nos. 1, 5, 9, and 10 in the 1558 ed.; nos. 3, 7, 11, and 12 in the 1573 ed.)

outlines the fifth between final and dominant above, and the consequente

of three of these answer tonally by outlining the fourth between dominant and final above. In the exceptional case, no. 9 (11 in later ed.), the answer is real but at the octave rather than the fifth. Twice (nos. 2 and 8, 1558 ed.; nos. 4 and 10, 1573 ed.) the guida outlines the fourth between final and dominant below and is given a real answer, i.e., the consequente outlines the fourth between the dominant and the note one step above the final.

We can infer from these examples that Zarlino certainly knew the value

of tonal answers at the beginning of a composition, but that he considered them neither necessary nor worthy of special comment. Since in general he answered fifths with tonal answers but fourths with real answers, he may have had in mind Vicentino's caution that answering a fifth with a fifth at the beginning of a composition was bad if the two voices together overstepped the ambitus of the mode.? By implication, two fourths would not overstep the ambitus and would therefore be acceptable. In order to make the mode clear at the beginning of an imitative piece, however, it was necessary only that the voices begin on the final and dominant of the mode. How they proceeded melodically was apparently not important to the piece's modal identity. Before turning to the second strand of late-Renaissance theory—i.e., how the melodic material of a point of imitation should be constructed— we must briefly consider the terms theorists used to refer to this melodic material. Today we use the word “theme” or, in fugues, “subject,” by which we mean a short melody (with a clearly defined beginning and ending) that is treated imitatively by all the voices. We think of such a theme or subject like the theme or subject of an essay; that is, as the “pre-compositional idea" upon which the work is based. Zarlino used soggetto in precisely this sense in Le istitutioni. He devoted chapter 26 of Part III to the topic and insisted that each composition should have a subject just as every piece of literature had one. He described at various points in the book different types of soggetti: a subject could be borrowed or freely invented, monophonic or polyphonic;* it could be that which sounded first and which the other voices imitated;” furthermore, it might be not that which entered first, but the principal part [perhaps Zarlino was thinking of the tenor] from which the other parts were derived.* In general, the subject of a composition was "the first part to be written or the first to be imagined by the composer."?7 We might deduce from these several descriptions that for an imitative

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Italy and the Netherlands

69

composition Zarlino's soggetto would most likely be the “theme” or "themes" that were imitated, and that the composer would probably have

worked them out before he composed the piece. Nevertheless, Zarlino did

not use the word in this sense in his chapters on fuga and imitatione. Instead, he chose modulatione, a general term meaning “melodic line” or "melodic motion." Unlike soggetto, modulatione implied neither pre-com-

positional material nor an identifiable theme with both beginning and end.

Zarlino used soggetto only once in the two chapters on imitative counterpoint. For a three-voice example consisting of a long-note cantus firmus over which two upper parts were constructed in imitation, he chose the term to describe not the material treated in imitation but the underlying cantus firmus. In other words, the borrowed melody was the pre-compositional material, the *subject," upon which the example was composed. Pietro Pontio used neither soggetto nor modulatione. Instead, he devoted several pages of his Dialogo to what he called inventione. Pontio

included several examples, all of which were short 2- or 4-voice points of

imitation. Although he seems to have used the term sometimes to mean

“one of the voices of an example" and sometimes “an entire example,” his

definition of inventione and the ensuing discussion of the examples includes important information about fugal answers in the late-Renaissance. Like that of imitatione, which we examined above, Pontio's definition of inventione requires interpretation. He wrote, L'inventione . . . serà [sic] quella, che con leggiadri movimenti, à intervalli si moverà da luogo à luogo; e poi con l'altra parte si troverà hora in quinta, hora in sesta, & tal volta in terza, overo in ottave, si come l'occasione porterà, facendo gli suoi movimenti grato, & harmonioso udire. Questa cosi fatta inventione si potrà chiamare bella; quando, peró gli suoi intervalli seranno secondo il tuono, dove serà fondata detta compositione, che, s'altrimente fosse, non si potrebbe cosi chiamar. Et sappiasi certo, che la sua bellezza consiste nel far modular bene le parti insieme; & che i suoi intervalli siino [sic] commodi al cantore; . . .” Invention is that which proceeds from place to place with graceful motion or intervals; and with the other part it is found sometimes at the fifth, sometimes at the sixth, and sometimes at the third or octave, as the occasion affords, making its motion agreeable and harmonious to hear. Thus constructed, the invention can be called beautiful so long as its intervals are according to the mode on which the compositon is based; if it were otherwise, it would not be beautiful. And be it known for certain that its beauty consists in putting the parts together well and in that its intervals are comfortable for the singer; . . .

The first sentence, the heart of the definition, indicates that Pontio thought of an inventione primarily as a single melodic line in a polyphonic complex. We might paraphrase the sentence, “An inventione proceeds with

graceful motion, and it forms harmonious intervals with another part." An

70

Theories of Fugue

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inventione could form thirds and sixths “with the other part” only if it were itself a single melodic line. Furthermore, only as a single melodic line could it proceed with movimenti and intervalli. In short, an inventione was to Pontio a well-constructed melodic “invention” that was treated (as his examples showed) imitatively; as such, it was analogous to Zarlino's *soggetto as a theme for imitative counterpoint." In the second sentence of the definition, Pontio explained the role that the mode of a composition played in the construction of its inventione: a good inventione should emphasize the important notes of the mode. He then added that it should also be constructed so that the parts fit together well (i.e., that it worked well in imitation) and that the melodic intervals should be comfortable to sing. This idea we have already encountered in the Praecepta of Gallus Dressler, written over a quarter of a century earlier. Pontio went on to expound upon this close relationship between inventione and mode by insisting that any particular inventione could fit only one mode, although he admitted that it could fit both an authentic mode and the related plagal. His examples followed this rule scrupulously. For instance, in the first, which was transposed Dorian on G and identified by Pontio as mode 1, the guida emphasized the notes G, B flat, and D. (See Example 2.7.)*!

Example 2.7. Pontio, example of inventione. (Dialogo, p. 46.)

Despite the importance that Pontio attached to a close relationship between an inventione and its mode, he did not extend that importance to the relationship between an entire point of imitation and its mode. (Here Pontio slipped somewhat carelessly from inventione as “one voice of an imitative complex” to inventione as “an entire imitative complex,” i.e., a point of imitation.) He continued his discussion by identifying three methods for the construction of a point of imitation.‘ For the first, which he called inventione reale, the voices of the point of imitation were made similar in all respects; in other words, although Pontio did not make the connection explicit, an inventione reale employed the technique of fuga. His term reale

survives today in the expression “real answers.” The voices of the second

were “made similar in name [hexachord syllable] and intervals [whole and half steps] but not in figures [rhythm].”* The third featured “a similarity

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Italy and the Netherlands

71

of figures and intervals, but not of name.” To these basic three, Pontio added two others: (1) inventione (or inventioni) written in contrary motion and "real," i.e., with notes on lines answered by notes on lines and notes on spaces answered by notes on spaces, and (2) contrary motion without such restriction. At a later point in the Dialogo, Pontio discussed, although only in passing, a tonal answer that appeared in one of his examples (Example 2.8). He admitted that the imitation was not exact, but justified its use by demonstrating how the important notes of the mode were properly touched upon by all voices. Significantly, Pontio did not consider it an important enough compositional device to give it a name or to include it with his five types of inventione.

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72

Theories of Fugue

Girolamo Diruta—Il Transilvano II (1609)

For Pontio, the tonal answer was a useful if slightly irregular compositional device worthy only of passing mention; for Girolamo Diruta, writing a mere fourteen years later, it was the most important technique of imitative counterpoint. Diruta's famous didactic work, Il Transilvano (Part I, 1593; Part II, 1609), which is recognized today as one of the first great organ tutors, was written at the instigation of his teacher, Claudio Merulo, whose teaching it probably summarized.^* Although Part I was devoted entirely to playing the organ, Part II (comprising four *Books") included some theory. Book III dealt with the modes, and in the final section, Diruta

reviewed the proper character of each of the modes and noted that one

must modulare [i.e., proceed] in a particular mode with that mode's character in mind. Then he added, (M]à vi voglio dare un'altro avertimento sopra le modulationi delli Tuoni non meno importante de gli altri, qual è questo. Havete da modulare li Tuoni sopra qual soggetto vi piacer, pur che il soggetto sia fondato sopra le sue proprie specie, cioé ch'una faccia la Quinta, & l'altra la Quarta. Come volendo voi fare una fantasia overo comporre altre Cantilene sopra il primo Tuono; le sue specie sono re la & re sol, contenute tra D la sol re, A la mi re, & D la sol re. Se la parte del Tenore overo del Soprano farà il soggetto, & che dica re, la, il Basso, overo il Contralto re sol, dal A la mi re, & D la sol re, questa sarà la sua vera formatione.*’ [B]ut I wish to give you another caution concerning the melodic lines in the [various] modes, which is no less important than the others. It is this: you can proceed in the modes with whichever subject you like, on the condition that the subject is based on its proper species, i.e., that one [voice] makes a fifth and the other a fourth. If you want to make a fantasy or compose other pieces in the first mode, its species are [the fifth] re la and [the fourth] re sol contained between D la sol re, A la mi re, and D la sol re. If the tenor or soprano part states the subject with re la, the bass or alto [answers] re sol, which is the true formation of A la mi re and D la sol re.

Diruta used Zarlino's word soggetto here in the sense of a pre-compositional theme upon which the point of imitation was built, and he echoed Pontio's rule for constructing inventioni when he said that a soggetto should be based on the *proper species" of its mode. Then, he took Pontio's rule one step further. Not only was the subject to be assigned a specific mode and to be based on the proper species of that mode, but its answer was also to emphasize the same two notes. Since, as Zarlino had said, the voices should begin on the final and dominant of the mode and since those two notes divided the octave into unequal parts, a fifth and a fourth, the two voices would have to differ melodically—one to outline the fifth, the other the fourth. Diruta also noted that this rule was more important at the be-

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Italy and the Netherlands

73

ginning and end of a composition than in the middle, a further clue that he had Zarlino's rule in mind. In short, for Diruta and the composers of his generation it had become more important that the beginning of a composition project its mode clearly than that the exactness of its opening imitation be maintained. Nevertheless, not every composition began with a tonal answer. Diruta

admitted that a piece could begin on notes other than the proper species but

that in such a case the composer should take special care to emphasize the two principal notes of the mode. In other words, if a soggetto in the first mode began on F instead of D or A, the latter two notes should figure prominently

in its subsequent motion. Compositions that did not fulfill the above condi-

tions often did not fit any one mode, Diruta complained. He added somewhat disapprovingly that such pieces could frequently be explained only with a concocted *mixed mode." Having made clear his own preference for soggetti and points of imitation that defined their modes unequivocally, he concluded with the recommendation that the student follow “the proper and sure path” in these matters by studying the ricercari of good composers. Pontio had admitted that an authentic mode and its related plagal could properly use the same inventioni, thereby implying that polyphony was gradually rendering the difference between authentic and plagal modes obsolete. Diruta, however, zealously maintained the distinction. Yet, how could one distinguish between, on the one hand, a soggetto and its answer in mode 1 and, on the other, a soggetto and answer in mode 2? Although he had stated elsewhere (Book III, p. 4) that the tenor part determined the

overall mode of the composition, Diruta did not repeat that rule here. In-

stead, he recalled the tradition, cited by Zarlino, according to which authentic modes proceeded “from low to high" and plagal modes “from high to low.”* Translating this to imitative counterpoint, Diruta insisted that authentic soggetti should ascend while plagal ones descend. Thus, for example, a point of imitation that began on D and A would define mode 1 if

the guida ascended from D to A and mode 2 if it descended from A to D.

Among the compositions that Diruta included in the Seconda parte del Transilvano was a collection of twelve ricercari in the twelve modes.* Each was twenty-four measures in length, and Diruta commissioned two each from Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Adriano Banchieri, Gabriel Fattorini (maestro di capella of the Faenza Cathedral, fl. ca. 1598-1609), and Giovanni Picchi (organist of the Casa Grande and Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, fl. ca. 1600-1625), together with four of his own composition.” Diruta obviously spelled out his new theory to each composer, since every piece begins exactly as prescribed: those in the odd-numbered modes begin with an ascending soggetto, those in the even-numbered modes with a descending one, and the “proper species" of each mode figure prominently in its soggetto. As an example, I have reproduced the first few measures of the third ricercar, Picchi's “Ricercare del terzo tuono,” in Example 2.9.5!

74

Theories of Fugue

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(Diruta, Seconda Parte del Transilvano, Book II, p. 26; The Transylvanian, pp. 7475.)

Although Diruta had no trouble convincing his colleagues to compose illustrative examples according to his rules, the same compo sers did not necessarily always follow these rules in their other compo sitions. An examination of the theoretical and keyboard works of Adria no Banchieri, a colleague whose handling of imitative counterpoint Diruta singled out for special praise, shows how one composer of the period understood the theories of tonal answers and authentic vs. plagal subje cts and how he applied them in practice.

1 ]

1]

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Italy and the Netherlands

75

Adriano Banchieri

Banchieri (1567-1634) lived and worked in Bologna, where he composed a prodigious amount of both vocal and instrumental music in all of the

prevailing genres of his time. As a theorist, he is recognized today primarily

for his important insights into early seventeenth-century instrumental practice. His treatises were almost entirely practical in nature and generally included many more pages of musical examples than of explanation; no systematic presentation of imitative counterpoint is to be found. Nevertheless, Banchieri did incorporate Diruta's rules into one of his theoretical works. To the 3rd edition (1614) of his treatise Cartella musicale he added a new section, entitled “Duo spartiti al contrapunto” [Contrapuntal duos in score], which featured an imitative duo for each of the twelve modes.”

Except for the few whose imitation took place at the octave, each duo

began with a tonal answer (nearly always a leap of a fifth answered by a fourth), and in all cases authentic and plagal subjects were distinguished exactly as Diruta had prescribed. Diruta had noted that Banchieri's ricercars and canzonas were carefully written according to the “true formation . . . of all the modes,” but Banchieri's keyboard works do not entirely support this claim. The most important of these pieces appeared in the first two editions (1605 and 1611) of Banchieri's publication L'organo suonarino.** Banchieri seems to have applied titles rather indiscriminately to the imitative pieces, including in the first edition eight *sonatas" and four “capriccios” and in the second edition three “ricercatas,” four *canzonas," and a “fantasia.” Although some of these pieces follow Diruta's rules, a number of them do not. One of the exceptions is Banchieri's third ricercata. He called it *Ricercata del Terzo & Quarto Tuono" in obvious violation of Diruta's (and his own) insistence that the authentic and plagal modes be kept separate. Furthermore, he began the piece on the third of the mode, although he then made sure that both final and dominant figured prominently in the theme.’ The other two ricercatas fit Diruta’s rules well.’ The four canzonas, on the other hand, do not. None of them begins with a tonal answer. In fact, the *Seconda Canzone Italiana," with its final on F and a signature of one flat, begins with the leap of a fifth from C down to F answered with another fifth from F down to B flat.’ (See Example 2.10.) A similar “subdominant real answer" appears in the “Sonata Ottava, in Aria Francese" of the first edition.?? In many cases, it is difficult to determine whether Banchieri considered the mode of a piece authentic or plagal. For example, the first sonata is entitled, “Sonata Prima, Fuga Plagale."?? It does indeed have a “plagal theme" (as well as a tonal answer), but the tenor voice has an ambitus of D-D, which would suggest mode 1, an authentic mode. Is the piece mode 1, as the tenor indicates, or mode 2, as the opening imitation indicates? Whichever interpretation Banchieri intended, it is clear that the ambitus of

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the tenor and the nature of the subject do not always work together in his music to define the mode of an imitative composition. Clearly, Banchieri's keyboard pieces were not written in slavish obedience to Diruta's theories about authentic and plagal soggetti and tonal answers: Banchieri did not always distinguish carefully between authentic and plagal modes; his soggetti did not always outline the *proper species" clearly; and fifths were not always answered by fourths. Thus, even one of Diruta's most respected colleagues interpreted the rules with considerable freedom. Perhaps when Diruta said that a composer ought to begin an imitative composition with a tonal answer, he had in mind primarily a useful guideline for beginners, not a dictum for the accomplished com-

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Fugue at the End of the Renaissance Part II: Germany

The enthusiasm initiated by Gombert, Clemens, and Dressler for point-ofimitation technique continued to reverberate among musicians north of the Alps long after their colleagues in Italy had acquired a wariness toward it born of humanistic and Counter-Reformation concern for clarity of text. In addition, as we have seen, Zarlino's enormous authority among Italian theorists meant that in spite of the backward-looking nature of his pronouncements on fugue and fugal terminology, later writers were unable to step out from under his shadow. The resulting gulf that developed south of the Alps between the theory of fugue and the practice of musical composition was not mirorred in Germany, where as late as the second decade of the seventeenth century theorists were still citing motets by contemporary composers (Lassus had become a particular favorite) as illustrations of fugal writing. It may be in part this enthusiasm for the point of imitation that caused German writers of the late Renaissance to pay scant attention to Zarlino's theory of fugue, even though Le istitutioni had been made available through Seth Calvisius's published rendering in Latin and Sweelinck's

manuscript distillation. Meanwhile, most German treatises before the sec-

ond half of the seventeenth century contain a chapter on fugue whose ideas can be traced back, either directly or through Calvisius, to Dressler's work. Seth Calvisius—Melopoeia (1592)

Seth Calvisius was born in Thuringia in 1556,! and in 1572 he went to Magdeburg, where he probably studied music with Dressler, who was there until 1575.? Calvisius served as Kantor of the Fürstenschule in Schulpforta from 1582 until 1594, when he was called to the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig. As a learned scholar with credentials in astronomy, history, chronology, and music, Calvisius set the intellectual standard for a whole series

of highly educated Thomaskantors that included such men of letters as the

poet Johann Hermann Schein and the novelist Johann Kuhnau. He also showed interest in composing Latin and German hymns of a pedagogical nature, but today he, like Dressler, is remembered almost exclusively for his contributions to music theory. These include his most important music treatise—the Melopoeia (1592), written while he was in Schulpforta?—

78

Theories of Fugue

and a pioneering work on the history of music.*

Calvisius based most of his Melopoeia on Zarlino's Istitutioni, but the portions on imitative counterpoint display a great deal more independent

thinking. Calvisius's approach has a good deal in common with Dressler's, suggesting that whether or not he actually studied with Dressler, he was almost certainly acquainted with the older theorist's work. Like Dressler, Calvisius also understood the term fuga to embrace all imitative counterpoint, and he consciously rejected Zarlino's distinction between fuga and imitatione. He did not, however, adopt Dressler's three categories of fuga integra, semifuga, and mutillata fuga. Instead, he introduced the simpler twofold system of canon and free imitation. To label the two he translated Zarlino's fuga legata and fuga sciolta into fuga ligata (i.e., all canonic techniques) and fuga soluta (all non-canonic types of imitation.) Calvisius divided his discussion of imitative counterpoint into two chapters, the first devoted primarily to free imitation (chapter 15, *De Fugis"), the second exclusively to canon (chapter 19, *De fugis legatis"). Chapter 15 contains in addition most of the material on imitative counterpoint in general, including a definition of fuga and the most important terminology. In it, Calvisius devoted a separate paragraph to each of the following six topics: (1) a general definition of fuga; (2) the names of the voices; (3) the difference between fuga and imitatione; (4) the difference between fuga ejusdem modulationis and fuga diversae modulationis; (5) the difference between fuga ligata and fuga soluta; and (6) where fuga soluta was to be found. He defined fuga with few words: Est autem Fuga certa alicujus modulationis repetitio. Fugue is a certain repetition of some melodic line.

Zarlino's influence is very much in evidence both in the general wording and the specific choice of vocabulary. Calvisius appears to have consciously adapted Zarlino, part of whose 1558 definition read, “[Fuga] è una certa Replica . . . di tutta la modulatione."* He omitted the remaining explanatory portions of Zarlino's definition, however. Calvisius apparently preferred a vague definition in order to allow for the widest possible interpretation of the word fuga. As a result, when he described at the end of chapter 15 the various manifestations of fuga, he could include practically all types of repetition without falling into Dressler's trap of contradicting his own definition. Calvisius added one important qualifying statement, however, on the relationship between fuga and the modes. Sumitur plerumque ex iisdem speciebus diapente ac diatessaron, modum in quo

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Germany

79

Harmonia condita est, constituentibus.?

[Fugue] is generally taken from the same species of fourth and fifth that establish the mode in which the harmony is formed.

The verb sumo, “to take," is the same word used by Dressler to describe

the “taking of fugae" from the species of fourth and fifth, the repercus-

sions, and the primary and secondary cadence notes. Thirty years after Dressler, however, Calvisius reduced the important modal notes to two: final and dominant. By abandoning the repercussions and secondary cadence notes, he took fugal theory one step further from the traditional structure of the eight Medieval modes and one step closer to the tonicdominant polarity so important to later Baroque fugue. Calvisius made no comment in chapter 15 about the intervals at which

imitation took place. His examples make clear that, like Dressler, he recog-

nized under the heading fuga imitation at any interval. Elsewhere he re-

peated Zarlino's rule that in the exordium of a piece the voices should

begin with the final and dominant notes of the mode, whereas in the medium no such restriction was necessary.? Calvisius's most enduring contribution to music theory was undoubtedly his translation of Zarlino's guida and consequente into dux (*guide" or “leader”) and comes (literally: “comrade” or “companion;” plural: comites). Modern German writers about fugue continue to use Calvisius's terms,? and American students of fugue and counterpoint still occasionally encounter them.'? Nevertheless, whereas today dux and comes are most commonly defined as *statement and answer of the theme" or *antecedent "!! their original meaning was literally “the voice that leads” and consequent, and *each of the voices that follow." Thus, every four-voice canon or point of imitation consisted not of the alternation dux-comes-dux-comes but of only one dux followed by three comites. Calvisius repeated Zarlino's warning that in order to avoid stereotyped patterns of imitation the voices should not follow each other too closely. Calvisius declared his independence from Zarlino when he rejected the older theorist's distinction between fuga and imitatione. He noted that *some musicians" recognized a difference between exact and inexact imitation, but added that *because it seems somewhat subtle and at the same time may hinder the studies of beginners, we shall not especially emphasize it, but will group both arrangements under the name of fuga.”'? Calvisius introduced the terms fuga ejusdem modulationis (literally “fugue of the same melodic motion") and fuga diversae modulationis (*fugue of diverse melodic motion") with these descriptions: Ejusdem modulationis Fuga est, non tantum quae in unisono, sed etiam ex alliis intervallis procedit, quando voces paribus, aut non multum discrepantibus

80

Theories of Fugue consecutionum motibus, in ascendendo, aut descendendo progrediuntur. Diversae Modulationis Fugae fiunt, quando comites cum duce suo, vel motu, vel figurarum quantitate discrepant, fugam tamen non obscure ostendunt, vel etiam quando diversae Fugae miscentur." Fugue, whether at the unison or other intervals, is said to be of the same melodic motion when the voices progress with equal or very similar intervals in ascent and descent. Fugues are said to be of diverse melodic motion when the comites differ from their dux either in the [rhythmic] motion or the [intervallic] size of their figures, but yet display the fugue clearly, or when diverse fugues are mixed.

He cited as an example of the first type Giaches de Wert's * Ascendente Jesu”;'* its opening measures are given in Example 3.1. As an example of the second, Calvisius cited the Lassus motet *Inclina Domine"? (Example 3.2). À comparison of these two examples demonstrates clearly what Calvisius

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two melodies in a point of imitation. His first definition reads:

Metalepsis est Fuga duplex, in qua vocum, quae simili, in modorum coniugio, sunt ambiu circumscriptae, altera alterius Melodiam in fugam abripit, cui mox alterarum similiter ruminando adjicit." Metalepsis is a double fugue in which one voice fugally imitates the melody of another, so that in their modal correspondence the two voices are delimited by the same ambitus; soon a different melody is likewise treated fugally in the other 1 78 voices.

For his Musica autoschediastike Burmeister wrote an entirely new definition, which in the Musica poetica he pared down to the following: Metalepsis est talis habitus Fugae, in quo duae Melodiae in Harmonia hinc inde

transsumuntur & in fugam vertuntur.

Metalepsis is that manner of fugue where two melodies are interchanged here and there in the polyphony and treated fugally.”

Burmeister's favorite example, cited in all three books and included in the Musica autoschediastike, was the Lassus motet “De ore prudentis,"??

given in Example 3.9.

This example and Burmeister's definition provide the clue to his original reasoning. Burmeister noted that “each of the voices takes the melody of the other in fugue," and indeed, each voice of Lassus's motet does state both themes.?! Such a sharing of two melodies among the voices reflects not so much Quintilian's original definition and Meyfart's above-mentioned poetic example as Meyfart's definition. Whereas for Quintilian metalepsis involved an association made in the reader's mind, Meyfart’s definition speaks of an association that occurs on the page—that which comes before (theme 1) is clarified by what follows (theme 2) and vice versa. Furthermore, while Burmeister's two themes can be matched rather easily with Meyfart's *preceding" and “following,” Quintilian's “series of associations" does not seem to fit. In short, although in its rhetorical context Meyfart's definition appears anomalous, such a definition seems to have provided the inspiration for Burmeister's musical analogy.

The exchanging of themes between voices, so central to Burmeister's

first definition of metalepsis, is not found in his last definition, which bears

Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Germany

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Fugue at the End of the Renaissance: Germany

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in general little resemblence to Meyfart's description of preceding and following. Ruhnke has noted similarities between Burmeister's new explana-

tion and Melanchthon's

definition, especially Melanchthon's term

transumptio and Burmeister's verb transsumuntur, and proposed that the music theorist was consciously emulating the rhetorician.?? Thus, it is possible that Burmeister was trying to recapture the original meaning of metalepsis as metaphor by implying that the listener heard the two themes

and "interpreted" them as a fugue.? Nevertheless, he still cited the same

musical example, Lassus's *De ore prudentis." Like his reorganization of the chapter of ornaments, therefore, Burmeister's new definition probably represented less a change of attitude about metalepsis than an attempt to bring the prose in line with the wording and vocabulary of familiar rhetoric treatises. Burmeister's second fugal ornament, Hypallage (sometimes known by the Latin submutatio), signified to rhetoricians a construction in which normal word order was inverted or two words were interchanged. Meyfart included an example (in German) from Virgil: *They went forth darkly under the lonely night,”** which, he pointed out, would more correctly read “They went forth alone in the dark night."95 Seizing on the process of inversion, Burmeister matched this ornament with the inversion fugue. Again, he offered two different definitions, both intimately connected with bypallage's origins in the discipline of rhetoric. In 1599, Burmeister simply defined it using its other common name. *Hypallage est Fugae submutatio."56 He modeled his later definition (used in both the Musica autoschediastike and the Musica poetica) after Melanchthon. Melanchthon had written *. . . est quoties oratio converso rerum ordine effertur," ([Hypallage] is when the discourse is carried out with the order of things inverted).? Translating this into musical terms, Burmeister wrote, “Hypallage est quando Fuge converso intervallorum ordine introducitur" (Hypallage is when the fugue is expressed with the order of intervals inverted). As examples of this ornament, he listed four works of Lassus, all of which are clear illustrations of imitation by inversion.? An apocope is a rhetorical figure in which a final letter or syllable is excised from a word. It is not mentioned in Meyfart's treatise, but Henry Peacham (1546-1634), who published a rhetoric text in 1577, called it *the taking away of a Letter or Sillable, from the ende of a worde."?? As illustrations, Peacham gave several individual lines of poetry, including

“Thus lovingly Dame Dian did” (for *Diana") and “Shae sayd my sweete

husban" (for *husband"). Again, Burmeister stayed fairly close to the rhetorical definitions in his own musical ones. Lucas Lossius described the rhetorical apocope as "abscisio dictionis in fine vel literae vel syllabae"

(cutting off the end of an expression by either a letter or a syllable).”!

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was short (^ Apo-

102

Theories of Fugue

cope est Fugae absolutio non integra”*?), but the final revision was considerably more specific: Apocope est Fuga, quae ex omni parte per omnes voces non absolvitur, sed cujus affectionis, quae in fugam abrepta est propter aliquam causam in una aliqua voce fit amputatio. Apocope is a fugue that is not completed in all the voices. Instead, its subject, interrupted in mid-fugue, is cut off in one voice for some reason.”

Here Burmeister seems to describe a point of imitation in which a theme is presented several times, but with one of those statements shortened. This is, in any event, the interpretation accepted by modern scholars, but Burmeister's favorite example, the beginning of the Lassus motet *Legem pone mihi,” does not fit it. The first eight measures of *Legem pone mihi” appeared in Musica autoscbediastike?* in a somewhat different version from that of the Lassus complete works. Example 3.10 reproduces Burmeister’s version (originally in parts). The theme of this point of imitation begins with a falling third (C-A in the discantus, F-D in the other four voices), but has no further melodic identity. That is, the altus follows this head motive with the upward leap of the fifth, tenor I with a downward second, tenor II with a downward third, and discantus and bassus with a unison. In short, beyond the opening twonote motive there is no consensus about the melodic identity of the theme, and thus there is no clearly defined theme that one of the voices *amputates." In a sense, Lassus's example is, to paraphrase Burmeister's definition, “a fugue which is not completed in any part throughout all the voices." One might best describe the example as a fugue whose affection 1s truncated by its very nature— i.e., consists of only two notes—rather than one whose affection is truncated by one voice.” Burmeister's other illustrations of apocope resemble *Legem pone mihi" rather than the definition. For the Hypomnematum Burmeister composed his own short textless example for four voices. In it, the affection has a melodic identity of only three notes. Another cited example, Lassus's

" Confitemini Domino,” begins with the word *confitemini" sung by each

voice in turn on only one pitch (D in cantus, tenor, and quinta pars, G in altus and bassus). Here the affection has no melodic identity beyond the reiteration of a single note, since the first intervallic leap for each voice is different. Burmeister considered such examples by no means unusual or rare. He added that “this figure is frequently found in composers’ works.” ” The weight of evidence thus suggests that by apocope Burmeister understood “a fugue constructed with a truncated affection." As with metalepsis, Burmeister's new definition of apocope described the given musical examples less well than had the original one.

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hi -

T

l 5

]

hi

Example 3.10. Lassus, “Legem pone mihi,” opening measures. (Burmeister, Musica autoschediastike, fol. I4v-K1r.) Text underlay is Burmeister’s own. Italicized texts are editorial.

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To these five basic figures of imitative counterpoint—free imitation,

canon, imitation with two themes, imitation by inversion, and imitation of a short head motive—Burmeister added anaphora in the Musica autoschediastike. Rhetoricians described anaphora as several consecutive sentences or clauses beginning with the same word or phrase. Meyfart gave this anonymous example from German poetry: Wenn Wenn Wenn Wenn

aus aus aus aus

dess dess der dess

Fürsten Schild die Fürsten Schild der [sic] Fürsten Schild Fürsten Schild die

grüne Raute roch / bunde Lówe kroch / die weisse Lilgen straalten schwartzen Adler praalten . . .?

In his 1599 chapter of ornaments, Burmeister defined anaphora as a

particular type of ostinato technique. Once again he changed his mind, and for the 1601 and 1606 revisions he assigned anaphora an entirely different meaning. In his own words, Anaphora est ornamentum, quod sonos similes per diversas aliquas, non aute[m] omnes, Harmoniae voces repetit in morem Fuge, cum tamen revera non sit fuga. Ad Fugam enim requiruntur omnes Voces, si Fugae nomen Harmoniae

moreatur.

Anapbora is an ornament which repeats similar pitch patterns in several but not all voices of the harmony. This happens in the manner of a fugue, although it is in fact not a fugue. For all the voices are required to be in fugue if the harmony is to merit the name of fugue.”

Thus, the new anapbora involved imitation in two or more but not in all voices of the harmony. Burmeister gave three examples, all by Lassus, and in each case the imitation takes place between two or three voices of the texture.! Strictly speaking, Burmeister's “anaphora as ostinato” fits the non-musical use of the word better than his “anaphora as imitation in two

or three voices," and it is difficult to imagine why he changed it. Other

German theorists, including Johannes Nucius, Joachim Thuringus, Athanasius Kircher, and Johann Gottfried Walther, continued to use the term with reference to ostinato.!?! In Burmeister's treatment of the five original “fugal” ornaments, two important points stand out. First, although he tampered with their definitions in each of his three books, Burmeister consistently cited the same musical examples. Second, the revised definitions were usually less descriptive of his musical examples than the original ones. These two facts suggest that Burmeister began with the musical devices themselves and then searched for appropriate rhetorical terms by which to name them. In the case of

anaphora, on the other hand, he seems to have done exactly the opposite.

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That is, he had the rhetorical term in mind and searched for an appropriate musical device with which to pair it. In summary, Burmeister understood all imitative counterpoint to be of two types: free imitation, found primarily in motets, and canon, found primarily in school music texts. He recognized three, later four, particular categories of free imitation: imitation of two themes, imitation by inversion, imitation based on a short head motive, and, in the later books, imitation in fewer than all voices. Although the Hypomnematum described this arrangement as one primary ornament (fuga) divided into two principal types (fuga realis and fuga imaginaria) and three special sub-types (metalepsis, hypallage, and apocope), Burmeister obscured the arrangement in his later works by reorganizing the material and redefining the ornaments in stricter accordance with his rhetorical models. His original plan remained below the surface, and perhaps, since he included both systems in the Musica autoschediastike, Burmeister himself taught imitative counterpoint sometimes from a primarily musical and sometimes from a primarily rhetorical perspective. Burmeister became one of the first theorists to concentrate on the analysis of other composers’ works. At the conclusion of his chapter on ornaments, he offered in illustration of his theories a complete analysis of the Lassus motet “In me transierunt."!? He divided the piece into nine “periods" based on both the major cadences and the use of text, and he identified some of the ornaments that were to be found in each. The opening period (which Burmeister called the exordium) contained both fuga realis, since it was a point of imitation, and hypallage, since the imitation was in inversion. In the medium, Burmeister found anaphora in period 3 (at the words *conturbaverunt me") and fuga realis again in period 6 (at the words *in conspectu meo semper"). Such an analysis of a complete motet was unique in late-Renaissance German theory. It found its only echo in a dissertation presented to the University of Tübingen in 1664 by one Elias Walther, who for the most part plagiarized Burmeister's earlier effort.!?? Johannes Nucius—Musices poeticae (1613) Johannes Nucius was born sometime in the 1550s in the eastern German city of Górlitz, where he studied composition with the Kantor of the local Protestant Gymnasium Augustum, Johannes Winckler."* Although little is known about Winckler, Nucius praised him forty years later in the foreword to his Musices poeticae and attributed to him the fundamentals that formed the basis of his treatise. By 1591 he had taken vows as a Cistercian monk at the monastery of Rauden (now Rudno, Poland), and from then until his death in 1620 he served as abbot of the small monastery of Himmelwitz

near the modern Polish city of Strzelce (Strehlitz). Nucius published two vol-

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umes of motets (1591 and 1609)'% and one theoretical work, the Musices

poeticae of 1613.17 A few manuscript compositions also survive."%®

Although Nucius's music is of very high quality, he is better known today for his treatise, in which, like Dressler and Burmeister, he applied the methods

of rhetoric to the teaching of musical composition.’ Fritz Feldmann specu-

lates that Nucius may have known Burmeister's work,!!° but there is no evidence to support such a connection. The two works are, at least in their treat-

ments of fuga, quite different in both purpose and method, and there seems

no reason to doubt Nucius's word when he acknowledges only his teacher Winckler. The humanistic and scholarly tone of Musices poeticae has led some music historians to conclude that Nucius must have received a thorough education in the Protestant humanistic tradition at the Görlitz Gymnasium." Nucius's Musices poeticae lays out its principles of composition in much broader outline and without the complicated details found in Burmeister's three treatises on the same subject. It is divided into nine chapters and includes the usual array of topics: intervals, voice leading, the modes, cadences, and figures of music. In contrast to Burmeister's extensive compilation of twenty-six ornaments, Nucius listed only seven, although he noted that one could identify many more using the figures of classical rhetoric as a model.! He divided the seven into three primary figures—passing-note dissonance (commisura), imitation (fuga), and melodic and harmonic repetition (repetitio) —and four lesser figures. Both the small number of figures and the inclusion of fuga as one of the three primary ones suggest that Winckler's approach to the teaching of composition may have been similar to Dressler's and that what Nucius learned about imitative counterpoint in the 1570s was perhaps not very different from what Calvisius was being taught in Magdeburg at about the same time. Fuga 1s covered in two brief pages. The paragraph with which Nucius

introduced the section later attained a certain degree of popularity among

German theorists, several of whom copied or paraphrased portions of it for their own treatises. It bears quoting in full. Fugae nihil sunt aliud, quam ejusdem thematis per distinctos locos crebrae resultationes Pausarum interventu sibi succedentes. Dictae sunt autem à fugando, quia vox vocem fugat, idem melos depromendo. Porro haec figura apud Musicos in tanto est precio, ut non pro artificiosa Cantione ea habeatur, quae non [e]laboratissimis abundat & referta est fugis. Atque sane ex hac figura omnium

maxime Musicum ingenium estimandum est, si pro certa Modorum natura aptas

fugas eruere atque erutas bona cohaerentia rite jungere sciat. Quare omnino elaborandum est, ut Harmonia elegantibus fugis constet, quod si difficilius per omnes voces videbitur, quoniam magis exercitatorum est illud, in tribus tamen vel duabus vocibus Tyroni periculum est faciendum.!3

Fugues are nothing more than repeated echoes of the same theme on different degrees [of the scale], succeeding each other through the use of rests. They are

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so-called from the act of chasing, because one voice chases the other while producing the same melody. Furthermore, this figure is so much prized among musicians that a composition is not considered skillfully made which is not filled to overflowing with the most carefully worked-out fugues. And indeed by reason of this figure a musical genius must be considered greatest of all if, in accordance with the fixed nature of the modes, he knows how to bring to light suitable fugues and to join them properly and in a coherent way. Therefore one must labor so that the harmony consists of elegant fugues; and since it will seem extremely difficult [to do this] through all the voices (that being more for the welltrained musician), the attempt of the student must be with three or even just with two voices.

The first sentence constitutes Nucius's definition. Unlike both Dressler and Calvisius, who used the word repetitio as the basis of their definitions, Nucius chose resultatio (echo or reverberation) to describe the way in which the various statements of the material answer each other. He called that which they imitate a thema, the first appearance of the word, as Mann has pointed out, in the history of fugal theory.!!* Nucius's use of this particular word does not indicate that he was any more aware than his predecessors of the structural implications of a point of imitation. In fact, Nucius's thema is nothing more than the Latin equivalent of Zarlino's soggetto. As they apply to imitative counterpoint, both terms refer to “the material (whether borrowed or newly invented) upon which the imitation is based." Thus, Nucius referred to both the long melody of a canon and the short subject of a point of imitation as “themes.” Nucius's thema is merely another of a whole series of terms borrowed, concocted, or adapted by German theorists to describe the melodic material that is treated in imitative counterpoint. As such, it is roughly the equivalent of Dressler's initia fugae integrae, Calvisius's modulatio, Burmeister's affectio, and some later German theorists’ clausula. Nucius was among the first theorists to trace the etymology of fuga as a musical term back to the Latin word meaning “chase” or “flee” and to explain the analogy in terms of one voice chasing (or fleeing from) another. His explanation was widely copied in school texts of the entire period and found its way into the earliest German music dictionaries at the end of the seventeenth century.

Walter Rubsamen has noted that the predominant building block of

Nucius's motets is the point of imitation,! and Nucius's introductory paragraph makes clear that he considered imitation the most important element of any composer's technique. Thus, Nucius described as the composer's

ultimate goal the ability to create well-conceived accordance with the modes and to join two such ently. He further suggested that the student begin two or three voices and progress to fuller textures

points of imitation in points together coherwith imitation in only only after he had mas-

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tered the easier ones.

Nucius divided imitative counterpoint into the familiar categories of canon and free imitation, to which he gave the names fuga totalis and fuga

partialis, respectively. The adjective totalis (total) is synonymous with Dressler's integra (complete), but Nucius's specific choice of terms has no precedent in German theoretical writings. Total fugue was present, Nucius

wrote,

cum duae aut plures voces, ex eodem themate procedentes, juxta certi alicujus Canonis inscriptionem, usque ad finem Harmoniae concinnunt.'"® when two or more voices, proceeding from the same theme according to the writing of some certain rule, sound together until the end of the harmony.

Although Nucius followed this definition with a few examples of such rules or canons—e.g., fuga in unisono or in epidiatessaron—he did not restrict his interest in canonic writing to the study canon. On the contrary,

he cited as the sole example of fuga totalis one of his own pieces, a sixvoice motet beginning *Homo natus in muliere," in which the quintus and sextus voices sing a canon on the cantus firmus “Memento mori.”7 Although considered an archaic technique by his contemporaries in Thuringia and north Germany, this use of canon was obviously very much alive in Nucius's own compositions. To define partial fugue, Nucius wrote that hae partes tantum sunt totalium ideo & fractae fugae appellantur, ut cum ejusdem thematis resultatio in omnibus vocibus tandem in perfectam consonantiam aut formalem clausulam abit. these are only part of the whole, and therefore are called fugae fractae, as when the echo of the same theme in all voices finally disappears in a perfect consonance or a formal cadence.

Nucius's two definitions are like Calvisius's and Zarlino's in the sense that for canon, the imitation is carried forward from beginning to end of the composition, while for free imitation this process is broken off at some point, the imitative procedure is abandoned, and the voices proceed in free counterpoint to a cadence. Fuga fracta, yet another way to describe free imitation, is a term common to other German treatises of the period. Nucius found it unnecessary to cite any examples of fuga partialis or fracta, since, as he put it, the technique is *very abundantly used in every piece that is called a motet.”!"? Aside from his admonition to keep in mind "the fixed nature of the modes," Nucius made no further comment about how a point of imitation

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was to be written or which notes of a mode it should emphasize. He did,

however, add one detail not discussed by either Calvisius or Burmeister. In response to the question *In what ways are fugues formed?" Nucius noted that fugae originated from the unison, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or octave, i.e., all intervals except the second or seventh.'?° He further judged the perfect intervals of unison, fourth, fifth, and octave the best, whereas imitation at the third or sixth was less frequently encountered and *clumsier"

(imbecilliore). Nucius's recommendations are something of an improve-

ment on Dressler's insistence (contradicted by his own examples) that fugae were written only at the unison, fourth, fifth, or octave.!?! Certainly Nucius's rule reflects more accurately than Dressler's the actual practices of sixteenth-

century composers.

Nucius's handling of fuga in the Musices poeticae is, in the final analysis, simple, direct, and practical, without the profusion of detail that both elevates and clutters the writings of Calvisius and Burmeister. On some points, such as the emphasis on canonic motets, Nucius proved to be more conservative than his two colleagues, even though he wrote a full two decades after Calvisius. Furthermore, aside from his description of the intervals at which imitative counterpoint began, he offered very little in the way of specific information and guidance for the inexperienced composer. He introduced only two terms, offered no new types or subdivisions of fuga, and cited only one example. Nevertheless, the combination of a relatively direct prose style and a straightforward, uncomplicated approach to imitative counterpoint probably accounts in large measure for the enduring influence of Nucius's work on several succeeding generations of German musicians.

Johannes Lippius

The last theorist to be considered from the period before the Thirty Years War belonged to the next generation. Johannes Lippius was born in Strasbourg in 1585 and died of the plague in 1612 at the age of only twentyseven.'?? His primary musical study was taken under Seth Calvisius in 1606, while Lippius was a student at Leipzig University, and during his brief career Lippius participated actively in the intellectual life of many of Germany's most prestigious universities, including Wittenberg, Leipzig, Erfurt, and Jena. By 1612 Lippius had attained a doctor's degree in theology from the University of Giessen and had published as many as fifteen books,” including six disputations on music!#* and an overview of music theory under the title Synopsis musicae novae [Synopsis of New Music]. He died

en route to his first professorship at the University of Strasbourg.

The Synopsis musicae novae of 1612, a summary of the material found in Lippius's earlier disputations,"* is a brief but extremely significant contribution to early seventeenth-century theory. Its importance lies primarily

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in its treatment of harmony—in particular, the recognition of the harmonic triad and the idea of composition over a functional bass rather than upon a preconceived tenor. Although he was not the first to describe triads and their inversions,'?® Lippius introduced the term trias harmonica, and with the Synopsis he became the first to relate most aspects of musical composition to this fundamental musical element. Lippius's emphasis on vertical harmony rather than on the more traditional linear counterpoint reflected the change ushered in by the new technique of thoroughbass, and it marked an important step in the transition from modality to tonality. Lippius treated fuga only briefly. He used Calvisius's terms fuga ligata and fuga soluta to describe canonic and free imitation, and his understanding of imitative counterpoint was probably rather close to his teacher's. Lippius praised fuga soluta as the most artful of all the ornaments of musical composition, and he identified as the best models the motets of Lassus

and the madrigals of Marenzio.'”? Fuga ligata, on the other hand, was its

own genre of music.!# Lippius considered canonic studies to be a true test of the composer, analogous to strict verse for the poet.!?! In keeping with the overall focus of the treatise, Lippius's description of how to write canons and points of imitation dealt exclusively with relating these techniques to the fundamental triad. For fuga soluta he wrote: Exercitium autem Fugae [solutae] ordiendum est in unica duntaxat Triade Harmonica: ut reliquae deinceps Formae atque species Fugarum tanto facilius apprehendantur juxta Exempla eorundem illorum Heroum Musicorum Practicorum Orlandi nempe & Marentii. The practice of fuga [soluta] should begin with only one harmonic triad. In this way other forms and species of fugues will eventually be learned more easily according to the examples of those heroes of practical music, Lassus and Marenzio.!?

This description represents yet another way to view the relationship between imitative counterpoint and the modes. Calvisius had reduced Dressler's many important modal notes to only two—final and dominant. Lippius

placed these two notes within the context of the triad and consequently

admitted a third note to the group. Elsewhere in the Synopsis, Lippius elaborated on this relationship between imitative counterpoint and the fundamental triad: Primaria Fuga & Clausula est à Prima Triadis Propriae: Secundaria à Suprema: Tertiaria à Media.!?

À primary fugue or cadence is taken from [or characterized by] the fundamental note of the proper triad; secondary from the top note; tertiary from the middle note. |

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Lippius explained at an earlier point in the book that a cadence was “taken from” or “characterized by" a particular note of the triad when its threenote melodic formula (which Lippius identified as descent by one step followed by ascent back to the original note) ended on that particular note.'? He never indicated, however, how “fugue” was to be taken from a particular note of the triad. The most obvious way would be to begin the point of imitation on that note,!? but Dressler and Calvisius had under similar circumstances insisted only that the theme emphasize the important modal

notes in some way through its melodic motion. Thus, Lippius may have meant that “primary fugue” emphasized the final note, while “secondary”

emphasized the dominant and “tertiary” the mediant. Lippius recommended that the student first write points of imitation

built around the notes of “only one harmonic triad,” i.e., the tonic triad. He admitted that points of imitation could be built around other notes, but he declined to show how or where this was to be properly done and referred the student instead to the works of Lassus and Marenzio for examples. In the writing of fuga ligata, on the other hand, a composer was less restricted by considerations of mode. Thus, canon could be written at

any interval, and the voices need not be restricted to a single triad.'°

In the final analysis, Lippius's new trias harmonica brought fugal theory no closer to the tonic-dominant polarity of late-Baroque fugue than Calvisius's species of fourth and fifth. Lippius's focus on the vertical aspect of polyphony, although forward-looking in other ways, was poorly suited to the task of describing imitative counterpoint, for which a more even balance between vertical and horizontal components is necessary. Ultimately, it was not Lippius's tonic triad but Diruta's tonal answers, based as they were on the more traditional linear approach to counterpoint, that served as the bridge between Renaissance imitation and Baroque fugue.

Lippius's early death is lamentable. He was clearly one of the most ca-

pable thinkers of his generation, and after his death creative work in German theory saw a dramatic decline. During the ensuing period of almost half a century, while the keyboard fugue continued to develop, only two German writers made real contributions to fugal theory. At the same time, a host of theorists, including such celebrated names as Johann Crüger, Johann Andreas Herbst, and Athanasius Kircher, continued to plagiarize the writings of Dressler, Calvisius, Nucius, Lippius, and others. Had Lippius lived to refine his ideas about fuga and to treat it more extensively, fugal theory in Germany might have enjoyed a rather different development.

Chapter 4

German Theory during the Thirty Years War: Fugue in Latin School Music Texts The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) plunged Germany into one of the darkest periods in its history. Although most of the combatants were foreign, the fighting took place almost entirely on German soil, and its effects were felt in nearly every aspect of German life. Cities were repeatedly beseiged, invaded, burned, and plundered by armies serving either side of the conflict, and central Germany, where Dressler and Calvisius had produced the most original and influential German writings in late-Renaissance fugal theory, bore the brunt of much of the fighting. Magdeburg was brutally sacked in 1631,! Leipzig found itself under siege five times between 1631 and 1642,

and the Dresden Kapellmeister, Heinrich Schütz, fled to Denmark between

1642 and 1644 when the war had made music-making at the elector's court all but impossible? The high level of intellectual activity that had flourished in many universities as a result of the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counterreformation likewise fell off alarmingly as professors fled before the advancing armies and universities closed in their wake.* Meanwhile, the European musical landscape had begun to change dramatically. The year 1594 witnessed the death of Orlande de Lassus, the last of the great Netherlandish composers and the favorite of German theorists. When the seventeenth century dawned a few years later, Italians had already replaced the Netherlanders as Europe's supreme composers, and German musicians had begun their Italian apprenticeship, inspired per-

haps by Hans Leo Hassler's study with Andrea Gabrieli in the mid 1580s. À spirit of innovation ruled the Italian musical scene. Vocal composers

such as Luca Marenzio and Claudio Monteverdi first bent and then abandoned the traditional rules of sixteenth-century counterpoint in their search for new means of expression. Other musicians, such as Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and Girolamo Frescobaldi, elevated keyboard and instrumental ensemble music to a level previously attained only by masses and motets. Fascination for and assimilation of the new Italian styles dominated German music throughout the Baroque period. |

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During the Thirty Years War, German musical activity slowed considerably, but creative work in German theory practically dried up altogether.

The combined effects of the horrors of war, the stagnation of intellectual

life, and the dizzying changes in musical styles conspired against all but the brightest and most capable German theorists, and most writers on fuga

between 1618 and 1650 contented themselves with plagiarizing earlier

works. Only two men, Michael Praetorius in 1619 and Wolfgang Schonsleder in 1631, contributed original ideas to the theory of imitative counterpoint. Both recognized the importance of the new genres of keyboard music, and Schonsleder went so far as to define fugal terminology in light of

both prima and seconda prattica. For the others, fuga remained exclusively a

technique of Renaissance motet style and study canon, and the treatises of Calvisius, Nucius, and Lippius remained the chief theoretical sources from which they drew. It is indicative of the war's impact that in battle-scarred central Germany not a single significant contribution to fugal theory appeared during the four decades between Praetorius's Syntagma musicum III and Christoph Bernhard's Tractatus compositionis augmentatus of ca. 1660.

Michael Praetorius—Syntagma musicum III (1619) A Thuringian by birth and a fervent Protestant by confession, Michael Praetorius enjoyed one of the highest reputations among German musicians of his day.’ He is a well-known figure to both performers and scholars of Renaissance and Baroque music and his biography need not be recounted here. Praetorius published a prodigious amount of both vocal music and writings on musical topics, the latter contained primarily in the three books of his Syntagma musicum written toward the end of his life. The first of these was devoted to a history of sacred and secular music, the second (the well-known De Organographia) to instruments, and the third to a discussion of genres, foreign terminology, elements of music, thoroughbass, and other topics. Praetorius promised a fourth book on musical composition (to be entitled Melopoiia [sic]), but it never appeared. Thus, no record survives of how Praetorius might have taught imitative counterpoint or of the rules by which he understood it to be written. Nevertheless, in Syntagma musicum III the word fugue appears several times throughout discussions of the various genres. These genres, of both vocal and instrumental music, are treated in the first twenty-six pages of Syntagma III." The vocal genres are divided into, on the one hand, those with sacred or serious texts (concertos, motets, and falso bordoni) and, on the other, various categories of secular music based on the structure or purpose of the text. Keyboard music was also divided into several categories: independent works (*Praeludiis vor sich selbst"), preludes to dance movements, preludes to motets or madrigals, and two categories of dances. Praetorius made use of the word fugue in describing

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four of these genres—motet, canzona, fantasia (or capriccio), and toccata (or prelude)—and he also gave it, for the first time in the history of music theory, a genre designation of its own, equivalent to the keyboard ricercar. In his discussion of the term *motet," Praetorius used fugue in the tradi-

tional sense of a point of imitation. Thus, at one point he described motet style as an alternation of *harmonies and fugues" (i.e., homophonic and

imitative sections). At another, he noted that a vocal concerto required

less attention to the working out of “fugues” than a motet.? Elsewhere in

his book, Praetorius quoted from Nucius's chapter on fugue, and it is quite likely that his own understanding of imitative counterpoint as used in vocal music agreed entirely with that of Nucius.'? Praetorius's discussion of the various instrumental genres is much more significant for fugal theory. The earliest composers of independent instrumental music in the sixteenth century often applied titles rather indiscriminately, but by the early seventeenth century certain stylistic characteristics had come to be associated, at least in Italy, with such titles as ricercar, canzona, and capriccio.!! Praetorius was clearly aware of some of these

recently established traditions, but he also made an effort to explain the

non-musical meaning of each Italian word and to relate that meaning to

the musical style with which it was associated. His attempts to blend the

two-were not always entirely successful. Praetorius placed the canzona with the genres of secular vocal music, but he identified both a vocal and a purely instrumental type. Silbiger describes the typical seventeenth-century Italian keyboard canzona as a composition in three or more brief sections (often alternating duple and triple meter) with an imitative opening (usually featuring the familiar long-shortshort repeated-note theme) and very little contrapuntal development." In Praetorius's description of the instrumental canzona, the word fugue once again appears in its traditional guise as a point of imitation: Seynd auch etliche ohne Text mit kurzen Fugen / und artigen Fantasien uff 4. 5. 6. 8. etc. Stimmen componirt: Dahinten an die erste Fuga von fornen meistentheils repetirt und darmit beschlossen wird: Welche auch Canzonen und Canzoni genennet werden. Wie dann solcher Art gar viel und schóne Canzonen in Italia / bevorab des Iohan Gabrielis mit wenig und viel Stimmen publicirt werden. There are also some [canzonas] without text composed with short fugen and agreeable fantasien for four, five, six, eight, etc., voices. At the end the opening fuga is usually repeated, and with that [the piece] concludes. These are also called Canzonen or Canzoni. Many beautiful canzonas of this type, either for few or many voices, are published in Italy, particularly by Giovanni Gabrieli.

Praetorius's canzona, with its several brief points of imitation and agreeable (i.e., not “learned”) musical ideas, fits the type described by Silbiger.

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The singling out of a repetition of the opening point of imitation toward the end may reflect Praetorius's acquaintance with the canzoni of the Gabrielis, in whose canzoni such repetition can often be found.'* Other contemporary composers’ canzoni exhibit this structure only infrequently.'‘ The first of the independent instrumental genres in Praetorius's list is the fantasia, which he equated with the capriccio. Fantasia was, as Silbiger points out, a much less common title in Italian music than in the music of England, France, and the Low Countries.'5 In fact, the only important Italian collection, Frescobaldi's Primo libro delle fantasie of 1608, may have been inspired by the composer's contacts with English and Netherlandish music during a visit to Flanders in 1607." Praetorius, in searching for information about the fantasia, turned to an English source, Thomas Morley's Plaine and Easie Intoduction to Practicall Musicke. Morley had written: The most principall and chiefest kind of musick which is made without a dittie [1.e., text] is the fantasie, that is, when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit. In this may more art be shown then [sic] in any other musicke, because the composer is tide to nothing but that he may adde, deminish, and alter at his pleasure. And this kind will beare any allowances whatsoever tolerable in other musick, except changing the ayre & leaving the key, which in fantasie may never be suffered. Other thinges you may use at your pleasure, as bindings with discordes, quicke motions, slow motions, proportions, and what you list.'#

Praetorius's version reveals many similarities of thought and wording: Fantasia, rectius Phantasia: Capriccio. Capriccio seu Phantasia subitanea: Wenn einer nach seinem eignem plesier und gefallen eine Fugam zu tractiren vor sich nimpt / darinnen aber nicht lang immoriret,

sondern

bald in eine andere fugam,

wie es ihme

in Sinn kómpt /

einfllet: Denn weil ebener massen / wie in den rechten Fugen kein Text darunter gelegt werden darff / so ist man auch nicht an die Wórter gebunden / man mache viel oder wenig / man digredire, addire, detrabire, kehre unnd wende es wie man wolle. Und kan einer in solchen Fantasien und Capriccien seine Kunst und artificium eben so wol sehen lassen: Sintemal er sich alles dessen / was in der Music tollerabile ist / mit bindungen der Discordanten, proportionibus, etc. ohn einigs bedencken gebrauchen darff; Doch dass er den Modum und die Ariam nicht gar zu sehr überschreite / sondern in terminis bleibe: Darvon an eim [sic] andern Ort / geliebts Gott / mit mehrerm sol gesagt werden.”

Fantasia, more properly Phantasia: Capriccio. Capriccio or improvised Phantasia: when one takes up a fugue to treat it according to one's own pleasure but does not dwell on it very long. Rather, he soon passes on to another fugue in whatever way occurs to him. For just as in a “fugue proper," no text may be used, so that one is not tied down by words. One

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Theories of Fugue

may make much or little, digress, add on, take away, or return however he prefers. One can display very well his artistry and ingenuity in such fantasies and capriccios, since everything that is tolerable in music (tied dissonances [i.e., suspensions], proportions, etc.) may be used without hesitation. Nevertheless, one must not overstep the mode and the air [Aria], but must remain within the boundaries. More will be said elsewhere, God willing, on this and other topics.

Praetorius translated Morley's “point,” i.e., a theme to be treated imitatively, with fugue, and like Morley, he allowed the composer free reign to show his craft by treating the theme *according to his pleasure" while making use of nearly all the licenses of music. The two descriptions do not agree in all respects, however. First, Praetorius's fantasia is improvised (subitanea). He seems to have derived this characteristic from the original meaning of the Latin phantasia as “imagination” or “whim” (related to the English words “fancy” and *fantasy"). Thus, he equated it with the Italian “capriccio” (whose meaning is reflected in the English word “caprice") and interpreted Morley's “according to one's pleasure" as “ad libitum" or “wie es ihme in Sinn kómpt." Praetorius also indicated that a fantasia or capriccio was, like a canzona, composed of short points of imitation that were treated in the rather free style described by Morley. In short, Praetorius's fantasia or capriccio was an improvised work consisting of brief imitative sections in which the performer let his fancy take him where it might. Praetorius repeated Morley's sole restriction against “changing the air and leaving the key," but he reworded it slightly and may have had a different interpretation in mind. He translated Morley's two verbs into the German überschreiten and added that the piece should remain *within the boundaries." Although Praetorius never fulfilled his promise to elaborate on this rule, its wording suggests that he was familiar with Diruta's tonal answers and that if he had lived to write Syntagma IV German musicians might have learned of the theory of tonal answers twenty years before Marco Scacchi introduced it in 1643. It seems unlikely that Praetorius was unfamiliar with the great ricercarlike fantasias and the popular echo fantasias of Sweelinck and his German students. After all, Sweelinck's most celebrated student, Samuel Scheidt, was a colleague and acquaintance of Praetorius," and the two musicians must certainly have discussed their common interest in organs and organ music. Nevertheless, no account of these compositions appears in Syntagma III. Nor is any sign of Frescobaldi's Fantasie of 1608 or of any contemporary Italian capriccios to be found. Perhaps Praetorius's concern for the non-musical meanings of fantasia and capriccio led him simply to adapt Morley's description and to ignore actual uses of these terms in contemporary keyboard composition. Praetorius showed much greater awareness of contemporary trends when he discussed the next genre of independent instrumental music. His de-

German Theory during the Thirty Years War

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scription of fugue is well known and often cited in the literature today. It

warrants a complete translation: Fuga: Ricercar

Fugae nihil aliud sunt, ut ait Abbas D. Ioannes Nucius, quam ejusdem thematis per distinctos locos crebrae resultationes Pausarum interventu sibi succedentes. Dictae sunt autem a fugando, quia vox vocem fugat, idem melos de promendo.

Italis vocantur Ricercari: RICERCARE enim idem est, quod investigare, quaerere,

exquirere, mit fleiss erforschen / unnd nachsuchen; Dieweil in tractirung einer guten Fugen mit sonderbahrem fleiss unnd nachdencken aus allen winckeln zusammen gesucht werden muss / wie unnd uff mancherley Art und weise dieselbe in einander gefügt / geflochten / duplirt, per directum & indirectum seu contrarium, ordentlich / künstlich und anmuthig zusammen gebracht / und biss zum ende hinaus gefhrt werden kónne. Nam ex hac figura omnium maxime Musicum ingenium aestimandum est, si pro certa Modorum natura aptas Fugas eruere, atq; erutas bona & laudibili cohaerentia rite jungere noverit.?! Fugue: Ricercar As the Abbott D. Johannes Nucius says, *Fugues are nothing more than repeated echoes of the same theme on different degrees [of the scale], succeeding each other through the use of rests. They are so called from the act of chasing, because one voice chases the other while producing the same melody." In Italy they are called ricercari. RICERCARE is the same thing as ‘to investigate,’ ‘to look for,’ ‘to seek out,’ ‘to research diligently,’ and ‘to examine thoroughly.’ For in constructing a good fugue one must with special diligence and careful thought seek to bring together as many ways as possible in which the same [material] can be combined with itself, interwoven, duplicated, [used] in direct and contrary motion; [in short,] brought together in an orderly, artistic, and graceful way and carried through to the end. “For by reason of this figure a musical genius must be considered greatest of all if, in accordance with the fixed nature of the modes, he knows how to bring to light suitable fugues and to join them properly and in a coherent way.”

The quotes at the beginning and end (indicated in the translation by quotation marks) come from the introductory paragraph of Nucius’s chapter on fugue.? Sandwiched between them is a description of the Italian ricercar that is inspired primarily by the meaning of the word itself, for which Praetorius gives several synonyms. Praetorius’s emphasis on learned counterpoint agrees with Silbiger’s characterization of the Italian keyboard ricercar as a work “in the [manner] of the stile antico."? Neither Nucius’s

praise of fugue nor Praetorius’s of the ricercar is extraordinary in itself, but

the combining and equating of the two words is of great historical significance. To understand how and why Praetorius put them together, one must

first survey the earliest uses of the term fugue among keyboard composers and editors.

The earliest datable appearances of the term fugue in keyboard music

118

Theories of Fugue

are to be found in Italy, where around 1600 it appeared in the titles of imitative pieces with the meaning “a theme to be treated imitatively” (e.g., *Ricercar primo tono con tre fughe”).?* Fugue as a genre designation can be traced back with certainty to 1607, when the Straßburg organist and music editor Bernhard Schmid published an anthology in which he applied

the term to Italian keyboard works originally designated canzoni alla

francese. A similar collection of 1617, edited by Johann Woltz and published in Basel, offered twenty brief fugues (somewhat like the contemporary canzona in character) by the Netherlander Simon Lohet, court organist in Stuttgart." None of these three uses of the term explains Praetorius,

however. The clues to his thinking are to be found in the manuscript sources

of late-Renaissance and early-Baroque German keyboard music. Although modern scholars, in their search for the roots of late-Baroque fugue, have focused much attention on the imitative fantasias of Sweelinck and his north- and central-German students, the term fugue itself seems not to have been used there much before Scheidt's Tabulatura nova of 1624.” North-German uses of fugue as a genre designation remained rare throughout the first half of the century, and applied mostly to brief works quite unlike the extended tours-de-force that Praetorius described.?? By contrast, south-German manuscripts of the early seventeenth century include fugues that are in fact indistinguishable from ricercars, and they fit Praetorius's description perfectly. For example, two of the most reliable of these manuscripts, Padua Ms. 1982 and Turin Ms. Giordano 7, contain fugues and ricercars whose style and scope are practically indistinguishable from each other.” Thus, a “Fuga di secondo tono," attributed to Hans Leo Hassler, treats a single theme, first with various countersubjects, then in augmentation (measures 96-121), then in diminution (measures 131—47), and finally with both the original and the diminished versions played simultaneously (measures 148-56).% A ricercar by Hassler in the same manuscripts is equally grand in scale and displays a similar interest in learned counterpoint techniques.?! Hassler's extended fugues are not unique in the south-German repertory. Most of the fugues of Christian Erbach, the other important southGerman keyboard composer of the period, are similarly large in scale and learned in style. Additional evidence that fuga and ricercar were frequently used interchangeably in south Germany can be found in the collection of manuscripts originally copied in Augsburg for the Fugger family ca. 16371640 and now housed in Turin, Italy.? The compositions in these sixteen manuscripts are arranged by genre, with a single genre per manuscript, and the fugues are intermingled with the ricercars rather than with the canzonas.”* In the preface to Syntagma musicum III Praetorius named Hassler as the most distinguished organist of his day and noted Hassler’s training under Andrea Gabrieli. Although Hassler had been dead for seven years

German Theory during the Thirty Years War

119

when Syntagma III was published, he and Praetorius had met as early as 1596 at the dedication of the new organ in Groningen near Halberstadt.*

Praetorius took particular note in hiis preface to Syntagma III of the im-

portance of Italian music, and he stated that among his sources of information were the reports of those who had had firsthand experience in Italy.?” Hassler, the first important German composer to study there, undoubtedly gave Praetorius such a report. These factors point to Hassler as the most likely source for Praetorius's information about fugue and ricercar. Unfortunately, the pieces attributed to Hassler and bearing the title fugue survive only in manuscript, and none of the sources can positively be dated before his death in 1612. If, however, the titles and attributions in the most reliable manuscripts (Padua Ms. 1982 and the Turin Mss.) can be trusted to reflect Hassler's intent, as Schierning implies,?? then he clearly preceded Praetorius in applying the term fugue to the keyboard ricercar, and Praetorius's statements were almost certainly inspired by Hassler's example. Furthermore, it is possible that Scheidt's use of fugue as a title in the Tabulatura nova, a use totally without precedent in north and central Germany, was in turn inspired in some way by his contacts with Praetorius or Syntagma III. Although it is impossible to prove unequivocally that Hassler was the first composer to use the title fugue as an equivalent for the Italian ricercar, it is not difficult to determine why he, Praetorius, or Erbach might have equated the two. Praetorius's definition itself provides the answer. The technique of fugue was the most important ornament of musica poetica in lateRenaissance vocal music. Every German theorist from Dressler to Nucius

and Lippius considered it the ultimate test of a composer's ability and the most advanced and learned of all compositional techniques. Keyboard composers around 1600 could point to examples of imitative counterpoint in nearly every known genre, but only one—the Italian ricercar—required the kind of strictness and learned approach prized by late-Renaissance German theorists.? To a keyboard composer familiar with the treatises, only the extended stile antico ricercar deserved to be called by the name fugue. Praetorius's equating of fugue with ricercar is not to be interpreted as a reciprocal relationship. That is, wherever the word ricercar is used, the word fugue can be substituted, but the reverse is not true.*! The old manifestations of fuga (as a point of imitation in stile antico vocal music or as a canon in whatever context) were still very much alive, and the term continued to be applied to them, as Praetorius's own prose makes clear. Far from drastically altering the meaning of fuga, Praetorius and the south-German keyboard composers had simply continued the process, begun toward the

end of the fifteenth century, of expanding it to reflect advances in composi-

tional technique and changes in musical style. From its fourteenth-century

origins as canon, fuga had come to mean both canonic technique and the technique of free imitation in the sixteenth century, and it was usually dis-

120

Theories of Fugue

cussed with respect to sixteenth-century motet style. By the first years of the seventeenth century its manifestations had grown to include points of imitation in both vocal and instrumental music, canons within motet style,

study canons, and now entire pieces for keyboard based on the rules of

stile antico vocal music. Fugue was used with all of these meanings throughout the seventeenth century. One final genre completes the survey of Praetorius's references to fugue. As the only type of “prelude before a motet or madrigal” Praetorius offered the toccata, which he equated with the praeambulum or praeludium.*? He noted the meaning of the Italian verb toccare (“to touch") and described how the general style of a toccata—chords in one hand, passagework in the other—was related to the organist's touching (greifen) of the keyboard. Praetorius made no mention of imitative counterpoint within the toccata or prelude, but he pointed out that its usual function was to pre-

cede “a motet or fugue” and that it was often improvised. Praetorius also

referred to a collection of toccatas by Italian and Netherlandish composers

that he intended to publish, but his plan was never carried out.

Praetorius's definitions of the various genres served as the standard in Germany for over a century. Music reference works from Christoph Demantius's Isogoge artis musicae (8th ed.) of 1632 to Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732 relied either wholly or in part on Praetorius's work. His wide-ranging interests, many professional contacts, and relatively cosmopolitan experience as a musician enabled him to speak about nearly every type of music at a time when the array of types was bewilderingly complex. If he occasionally let himself be carried away into linguistic

speculation, he also provided the musical world a much-needed point of

reference from which to bring at least some order into apparent chaos. At the same time, he provided just the clue necessary to understand how fugue first came to be known as a piece of keyboard music in learned style. Wolfgang Schonsleder—Architectonice musices universalis (1631)

Wolfgang Schonsleder led a long and seemingly uneventful life as a Jesuit priest and teacher in various localities of Bavaria and the Tirol.* Born in Munich in 1570, his only recorded musical training was as a singer in Lassus's chapel choir in 1593. Schonsleder joined the Jesuit order in 1590 after studying at the University of Ingolstadt, and for over half a century, from 1596 until his death in 1651, he taught rhetoric and classical languages at various Jesuit institutions, including the University of Dillingen and the Jesuit colleges in Munich and Hall am Inn. He is known to have composed one mass (now lost) but made his most important contribution to German culture as a writer of texts,* including a book on German-Latin praseology, a Greek-Latin dictionary, a rhetoric text, and one music theory treatise entitled Architectonice musices universalis. Published in 1631 when

German Theory during the Thirty Years War

121

Schonsleder was sixty-one years old, the Architectonice seems to have been relatively little known among German musicians of the period, and it exerted essentially no influence on the development of German fugal theory. Nevertheless, in it Schonsleder offered the only original ideas on fugue to be developed in Germany between Praetorius's Syntagma III of 1619 and Bernhard's Tractatus of ca. 1660. Schonsleder's treatise is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the rules of musical composition, the second consisting mostly of longer examples illustrating the various styles and types of music.* Schonsleder al-

lotted to imitative counterpoint a brief chapter (De Fugis) in part one.” Like his German predecessors he divided the technique into two cate-

gories, which he called *long [fugae] that are worked out" [longae deductaeque] and *short ones or imitations" [breves seu imitationes]. These two were not, however, the techniques of canon and free imitation found in central- and north-German treatises of the period. Schonsleder noted that the first type was to be found primarily in motets of late-Renaissance composers (he named Homer Herpol, Palestrina, and Lassus) and in the 1608 book of fantasias by Girolamo Frescobaldi. He paid special tribute to the Roman organist, singling out the great variety to be found in the fantasias and praising Frescobaldi's skill in working with one, two, three, or more “subjects” in a given piece. He observed in passing that “in this day and age [such fugues] are rarely used.”* Schonsleder added a general description of the style in which he noted that the imitation took place at the unison, fourth, fifth, and octave, and that such points of imitation were to be written *according to the mode of the fugue." He then drew up a brief guide to their composition much like Burmeister’s;*” that is, after selecting a clausula [i.e., theme] to be imitated, the composer should set it down in each voice successively, filling in empty spaces with

proper consonances. À series of such points of imitation formed the struc-

tural basis of this style, for which Schonsleder recommended a maximum of four voices. Schonsleder's *long fugues" are obviously equivalent to the fugae solutae and fugae partiales of other German theorists. His recognition of Frescobaldi and of the emerging importance of keyboard music, however, reveals a much greater awareness of early seventeenth-century trends than was shown by his colleagues farther north. Nevertheless, as his own guide demonstrates, Schonsleder subscribed to the traditional rules laid down by sixteenth-century theorists for the writing of points of imitation.

The chapter on fugue offers very little information on Schonsleder's sec-

ond type. The reader is told, for instance, that in contrast to the long ones that have fallen out of favor and are seldom used, *the short ones or imitations have the most charm."*? Furthermore, while the long fugues are gen-

erally restricted to four voices, “imitations are found in five, six, and eight

voices, where they season a composition wonderfully and add interest [lit-

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Theories of Fugue

erally: remove plainness].”°! He named two early-Baroque Italians, Casentini

and Priuli, as composers who commonly use this type of imitative counterpoint. Perhaps the best example of *imitation" is found in part two of the treatise. In a chapter devoted to examples of two-voice pieces, Schonsleder contrasted the older bicinium with the newer duet for two voices with basso continuo. He noted that the latter type generally consisted of a great many “imitations”? and offered an example by Monteverdi.? The piece, entitled “O beatae viae," first appeared in a 1620 anthology; its opening measures, given in Example 4.1, reveal clearly the meaning of Schonsleder's

imitatio.

Schonsleder's *imitation" involves the passing back and forth of brief motives (see especially the treatment of motive B in measures 10-13) without the kind of overall planning (or *working out," Schonsleder's deducendo) that forms the raison d'étre of the point of imitation. Schonsleder included no guide or rules for writing *imitations" because none was necessary. They were to be treated very freely and used primarily to add interest to a composition. Two final points conclude the survey of Schonsleder. First, he defined contraria fuga as that which most Germans called fuga doppia or gedoppelte Fuge (i.e., invertible counterpoint), while omitting all mention of imitation in contrary motion. Finally, the technique of canon is conspicuous by its absence. Once again, Schonsleder betrayed his southern orientation, since canon, a favorite of seventeenth-century German theorists, had become by 1600 a technique of little interest to most Italian musicians. Schonsleder's knowledge of the Italian Baroque style and similarities between his use of terminology and that of contemporary Italian theorists demonstrate that he was more aware than most of his German colleagues of developments south of the Alps. Nevertheless, the Architectonice was not derived from specific Italian texts. References to the best composers of the day (Monteverdi and Frescobaldi) and interest in both vocal and instrumental music set Schonsleder's book apart from all other Italian as well as German writings of the period. Only the cosmopolitan Michael Praetorius showed comparable awareness of the new Baroque trends.

Other Published Treatises in Germany, 1610-1650 A number of German music treatises published in the first half of the century treated fugue in ways that were almost entirely derivative and added no new insights to the topic. These books exerted no particular influence on the development of fugal techniques or theoretical underpinning at the time, but their existence in print lent them a certain longevity and weight of

authority, so that toward the end of the seventeenth and into the eigh-

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teenth centuries German lexicographers drew upon them when compiling definitions of fugal terminology and descriptions of fugal procedures. For our purposes they need only be briefly surveyed. Johannes Magirus, of the generation of Calvisius, Burmeister, and Nucius, was a Lutheran pastor who also published two books on music, one of which dealt with musica poetica and contained information on fugue.f It was entitled Artis musicae . . . libri duo and originally appeared in 1596.5 À second, revised edition was published at the author's expense in 1611 with considerable reorganization and expansion of previous material.?? Fugue was included in both editions as one of only four ornaments of music, along with cadences, rests, and homophonic writing.” In the first edition, Magirus offered a minimum of information on the four ornaments, but for the second edition he expanded all of the material on ornaments, and fugue was allotted three pages. He began with this defi-

nition:

Fuga est, cum voci pr(a)ecinenti voces post tactus alia(e) plures alia(e) pauciores

simili sono succinunt, (ut vocum altera alteri que praeire, eamque insequentem

fugere videatur: Unde & Fuga appellata est).°

Fugue is when voices [entering] after varying intervals of time sing with the same sounds as a preceding voice, the one voice that precedes the others seeming to flee from the following ones. Whence it is called fugue.*!

Magirus's definition resembles that of Nucius in its emphasis on both the successive entry of the various voices after rests and the etymology of the word fuga from the Latin verb meaning “to chase" or “to flee." The definition is followed by a laudatory paragraph on fugue and, as illustrations of the technique, titles of several motets by Clemens and Lassus. In the next paragraph, Magirus described another sort of fugue in which a ho-

German Theory during the Thirty Years War

125

mophonic passage was repeated by the two choruses of a double-choir motet. This technique was of course Calvisius's third type of fuga soluta; as examples Magirus cited three passages from double-choir motets of Jacobus Handl.* Magirus then began a new paragraph with the following: Et has Fugas fractas nominare licet: est & aliud gen., quod Fugas integras nominamus.° One may call these fugae fractae. There is yet another type, which we call fugae

integrae.

The section on fuga then concluded with a discussion of the study canon. Magirus named the various intervals at which canon took place and singled out for special praise the triple canon for three choirs with which Michael

Praetorius inscribed the title page of part I of his Musae Sioniae (1605).

The meaning of Magirus's fuga fracta has caused some confusion among modern scholars. In his monograph on Magirus, Nolte presumes that the statement translated above about fuga fracta refers only to the paragraph immediately preceding it and thus that the term meant “the repetition of a homophonic passage in double-choir music."5* Fuga fracta, however, is the same term used by Nucius only two years later to describe all types of free imitation. Furthermore, nearly two decades earlier Calvisius had grouped points of imitation and repetition of a homophonic passage under the common heading fuga soluta. Clearly, Magirus's fuga fracta must apply not merely to the immediately preceding paragraph but to all of the preceding examples in his text, including both the double-choir examples of Handl and the points of imitation in the Clemens and Lassus motets. Thus, Magirus's sentence simply identifies the two familiar types of imitative counterpoint—fracta (free) and integra (canonic)—but is placed between the examples of the former and those of the latter. Its placement and the consequent ambiguity are most likely the result of the way in which Magirus revised his original material. That is, instead of reorganizing the entire section on f#ga he simply took the original format consisting of a general definition followed by an example of free imitation and grafted the new explanatory material onto it. Like Nucius, Magirus kept his treatment simple. He divided all imitative counterpoint into free imitation (fuga fracta) and canon (fuga integra), and, like Calvisius, he included simple repetition of homophony in the former category. He offered no details about how imitative counterpoint was to be written, nor did he introduce any additional terminology. In the end, only one writer is known to have taken Magirus's fugal theory into account: the philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and university professor Rudolph Goclenius.

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Theories of Fugue

Goclenius was a professor at the University of Marburg, where he enjoyed a very high reputation as both teacher and scholar of physics, mathematics, logic, and ethics for nearly half a century beginning in 1581.55 He

is not known to have taught music, but in 1613 he published a Lexicon

philosophicum in which he included some musical terminology.° Many of

the definitions were taken from the first edition of Magirus's Ars musica,”

and Nolte has concluded that Magirus was at one time Goclenius's student.? The word fuga received several definitions in Goclenius's lexicon. Its musical meaning was reserved for last, and, since it is of only moderate

length, the text is quoted here in full.

In Musica Fuga est, cum voci praecinenti voces post tactus alias plures, alias pauciores simili sono succinunt. Seu Fuga est eiusdem clausulae post certa intervalla, sive in omnibus, sive in aliquibus vocibus repetitio. Ideo fugae duplices constituuntur, Universales & Particulares. Universales dicuntur, cum in omnibus vocibus initia se sequuntur intervallis paribus, & sibi respondentibus, donec tandem ad communem aliquam clausulam deveniant, Particularis, quando una vox aliam praecedentem sequitur in certa distantia notarum, ad certum intervallem, etsi non omnes reliqui in tali ordine sequantur." In music, fugue is when voices [entering] after varying intervals of time sing with the same sounds as a preceding voice. Or, Fugue is the repetition, either in some or all of the voices, of the same clausula after certain intervals [of time]. Therefore, fugues are of two types: Universal and Particular. They are called universal when in all voices the beginnings follow each other by re-echoing themselves at equal intervals until at length they arrive together at some cadence. [They are called] particular when one voice follows the other preceding [voice] at a certain distance of notes and at a certain interval,

although not all of the rest [of the voices] follow in such order.

The entry concludes with a chart translating into German the various intervals at which fugue can take place, e.g., *Fuga Epidiatessaron, oben in der quart." The first of these definitions was borrowed straight from Magirus's ear-

lier book and requires no further comment. The source of the second is

uncertain, although aspects of its wording recall the writings of Dressler and Calvisius. For example, Goclenius's first sentence resembles both Calvisius's definition of fuga as “the repetition of a modulatio," and Dressler's definition of the technique as “the repetition of several voices.”” The terms “universal” and “particular” refer to the two familiar techniques of free (universalis) and canonic (particularis) imitation. Just like Dressler's semifuga, in which “the beginnings [initia] of fuga integra resolve in a cadence,"? Goclenius's fuga universalis involves “beginnings [initia] that arrive together at a cadence." On the other hand, the voices in fuga particularis

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imitate "at a certain [or ‘fixed’] distance of both pitch and rhythm.” Duration of imitation is not mentioned, but immediately following the description we

find a list of the most common titles used in canonic writing. Like Burmeister,

Goclenius expected all voices of a composition to participate in free imitation, whereas a canon could be written for only two of several voices. Throughout the Lexicon, Goclenius borrowed extensively from Magirus and many other authors, and it seems unlikely that either the terms universalis and particularis or their descriptions were entirely of his own creation. Nevertheless, I have so far been unable to turn up a direct source for them. Until further research uncovers such a source, Goclenius's second definition must be considered a unique contribution to German fugal theory. Practically the only known fact about Joachim Thuringus is that in 1624 he published in Berlin a music theory treatise with the title Opusculum bipartitum. Most of the text of chapter 16, De Fugis, was taken verbatim

from Nucius's Musices poeticae, with interpolations from Calvisius's

Melopoeia. Like Nucius, Thuringus included fugue as one of the three principal figures of music, and he borrowed from the older theorist the introductory paragraph, the list of intervals at which fugue might take place, the terms fuga totalis and fuga partialis, and the poem of Wenceslaus Philomathes. From Calvisius he borrowed the terms dux, comes, fuga ligata, and fuga soluta. The only original material in the textual portion of the chapter is a one-sentence definition of fuga, essentially an expansion of that of Calvisius. Thuringus's definition later found its way into Kircher's Musurgia universalis. Thuringus illustrated the text with original musical examples (one canon and a three-voice piece consisting of a series of points of imitation), and he appended a set of eleven rules for the writing of fugue.” The rules appear to be his own work, although most of the ideas are not original. Several of them (especially nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8) constitute a guide to imitative writing that resembles and may have been inspired by Burmeister's guides to the writing of free imitation and canon." Thuringus noted further that fugae should begin on the same notes used for cadencing (no. 2, borrowed from Dressler) and that identical solmization syllables could be obtained only if the voices imitated at a perfect interval (no. 5). To these, he added three rules of his own: that not all voices [voces] were suitable for imitative writing (no. 1), that all voices need not participate in the imitation (no. 9), and that paired imitation was a technique particularly to be recommended (no. 10). Finally, he concluded (no. 11) that a student learned best by studying other composers’ works, not by memorizing a great many rules. Most of Thuringus's rules were in turn copied and translated into German in 1643 by Johann Andreas Herbst. Nevertheless, aside from this isolated borrowing and the single sentence that appears in Kircher, Thuringus's formulation of fugal theory seems to have exerted relatively little influence on later writers.

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Another theorist active in Berlin at about the same time was Johann Crüger. Crüger lived from 1598 until 1662 and made significant contributions to the Protestant chorale repertory. Of his several books on music, the most important is the Synopsis musica of 1630; its chapter on fugue is derived almost entirely from Calvisius.” Borrowings include Calvisius's definition of fuga and descriptions of the terms dux, comes, fuga ligata, fuga soluta, fuga ejusdem modulationis, and fuga diversae modulationis. Crüger was also acquainted with Sweelinck's version of Zarlino, and under its influence he rewrote Calvisius's description of imitatione in order to accept rather than reject Zarlino's distinction between fuga and imitatione. The only other change of any substance involved the replacing of Calvisius's species of fourth and fifth with Lippius's harmonic triad in the passage relating fugue to the modes. For his introductory material, Crüger borrowed sentences from Lippius and Nucius as well as Calvisius. The many examples with which the chapter concludes are taken from Zarlino and Sweelinck,® and there is no mention of the Wert and Lassus motets cited by Calvisius. In the same year as Crüger's Synopsis, an Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta was published by Johann Heinrich Alsted. Alsted, who lived from 1588 until 1638, held professorships at the Universities of Herborn and Weissenburg and wrote books on nearly all topics of learning.?! One entire section of the Encyclopaedia is dedicated to the study of music, and all of its statements on fugue are copied word for word from Lippius.®? A music text for the Lateinschule was published in 1638 in Kónigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) by one Laurentius Ribovius and entitled Encbiridion musicum. Among extant seventeenth-century Lateinschule texts, the Enchiridion alone devoted an entire chapter to fugue,? the first such chapter to be written in the German language. Ribovius divided his material into a general discussion of the term, a description of the two types of imitative counterpoint, and a list of the most important terminology for canonic writing. For the first section, he pieced together Dressler's

one-sentence definition of fuga, Nucius's statement concerning the deriva-

tion of the term from the Latin meaning “to chase" or “to flee," and Praetorius's remark that fugue was called ricercar by the Italians.** The two types of fugue are called ganze and halbe Fugen, recalling both Dressler's fuga integralsemifuga and Nucius's fuga totalislpartialis. To define ganze Fugen, Ribovius translated Dressler's definition of fuga integra, which he followed with a passage from Calvisius (or Crüger) about the proper meaning of the term canone. The definition of halbe Fugen seems to be Ribovius's own, based on Calvisius's (originally Zarlino's) description of it as fuga ligata that is not carried through to the end. The reader is referred to a now-lost Musica poetica of Christoph Demantius and Crüger's Synopsis for more information on halbe Fugen. The chapter concludes with explanations of canonic terminology and with canonic examples attributed to Johann Stobaeus and Thomas Walliser.

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Johann Andreas Herbst (1588-1666) is remembered today both as a composer and a theorist. Herbst was born in Nuremberg and served for most of his career as Kapellmeister in Frankfurt am Main (1623-36 and 1644-66) and his native city (1636—44).5 He wrote several books on music, of which the most important, the Musica poetica, written in German and published in 1643, includes a chapter on fugue.* The core of the chapter consists of a series of nine rules put together from Thuringus's eleven rules and Schonsleder's guide for writing “long fugues.”* The musical examples of this section are also taken from Schonsleder.** Herbst preceded his rules with an introductory paragraph derived from Calvisius (via Crüger?) and Nucius (via Thuringus?), and the chapter concludes with a description (based on Calvisius and Crger) of the two types of fuga, which Herbst labeled soluta and ligata. He also translated Dressler's four ways in which fugue is to be written and reduced them to three (i.e., emphasizing the species of fourth and fifth, the repercussions of the mode, or the formal cadence notes), but offered little explanation. The Musurgia universalis of Athanasius Kircher, published in Rome in 1650, is generally recognized as “one of the really influential works of music theory."*? Nevertheless, Kircher's extraordinarily long treatment of fugue is almost entirely derived from the writings of Nucius, Thuringus, and the Italian Silverio Picerli, and it exerted only modest influence on German fugal theory. The huge work contains most of the numerous fugal and canonic examples, along with their explanations, from Picerli's Specchio secondo di musica (1631).°! Kircher relied on Nucius, however, for the overall outline of imitative counterpoint.” He ignored the Italian imitatione and divided fuga into totalis (which he equated with fuga ligata, canon, and his own term peridromas) and partialis (equated with soluta and libera). Two sentences from Nucius's popular introductory paragraph on fuga ap-

pear unaltered at the beginning of Kircher's discussion, along with Thuringus's

definition of fugue. Kircher was also familiar with Calvisius's dux (which he

equated with Zarlino's guida, vox antecedens, and his own phonagogus) but

failed to mention the word cornes, calling it instead the consequens. Kircher also defined several terms borrowed from Picerli. Fugae semplices were those that are repeated only once, while fugae duplices were repeated more often. Authentic and plagal subjects were described as in Diruta (via Picerli). Picerli had defined *regular" fugues as those that began on the corde del tuono [i.e., final or dominant] and “irregular” as those that be-

gan on other notes.” Kircher misconstrued this when he wrote:

Regulares sunt quando instituuntur supra eandem chordam; Irregulares quando supra diversas.”

[Fugues] are regular when they are constructed on the same note and irregular

when constructed on different notes.

Theories of Fugue

130

Kircher's version suggests that he did not understand the corde del tuono and failed to realize that they referred to specific notes of each mode. He

also seems to have misunderstood Picerli’s imitanti and imitate. The latter referred to imitation that took place at a fixed pitch level [sopra le note ferme], while the former was used for imitation at more than one pitch level [in diversi luoghi]. Kircher mistranslated ferme as cantus firmus and wrote: Imitantes dicuntur, quando replicantur in diversis locis; imitatae quando fiunt supra notas & progressum harmonicum alicujus cantus firmi, qui progressus deinde repetitur.” They are called imitantes when they are repeated on different pitches and imitate when they are made on the notes and harmonic progression of some cantus firmus, which progression is then repeated.

Again, Kircher's version makes no sense. A final term, apparently Kircher's own, was fuga dimorpha or biformis, that is, imitative counterpoint with two themes.” Kircher's treatment of fuga was already out of date in 1650. He took no account of developments since the late Renaissance and made no attempt to update the sources from which he worked, all of which were themselves somewhat out-of-date when they were published. Furthermore, he based most of his text on Picerli's examples; these were themselves already quite backward-looking in 1631 and were limited almost exclusively to the time-

honored techniques of canonic writing and imitative counterpoint over a

long-note cantus firmus. ian terms as “authentic” of imitative counterpoint The German translation discussion.”®

Kircher deserves credit for introducing such Italand “plagal” to German theory, but his treatment had in general little influence in his native land.” of Musurgia published in 1662 omitted the entire

Music Texts for the Lateinschule Before turning to the next phase in the development of fugal theory, a brief digression on music texts for the German Lateinschule is in order. Music was a mandatory part of the Latin school curriculum, and nearly every German locality of any size produced at least one music textbook between the mid-sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. These works afford us

important insights into the most fundamental level of music instruction,

since each student, musician and non-musician alike, received his earliest music training with one of them. Although the tutors broke no new ground in fugal theory, their treatment of the topic shows us the seventeenth-century layman's understanding of the word fugue.

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131

Lateinschule music texts that include the word fugue in some way appear chronologically in Table 4.1. The list reveals that nearly all of them

fall between the years 1591-1703 and that German gradually replaced

Latin as the favored language. Multiple editions, although numerous, are,

with one exception, not included in the table.

In general, the goal of the music teacher, as revealed in a number of the German titles in Table 4.1, was to teach all students to sing.” At the most

basic level, this meant an introduction on the origin and definition of music and the presentation of a few fundamentals of notation. Students with

particular musical talents advanced to polyphony in note-against-note style (four-part settings of Latin odes or of chorale tunes) and ultimately to true contrapuntal music. The more sophisticated theoretical studies included

scales, proportions, mensuration signs, and the modes.

Only three of the authors treated fugue in any detail. The first, Cyriacus Schneegass, included a chapter on fugue in his Isagoges musicae libri duo of 1591.!% The text is brief and based for the most part on Dressler's Praecepta. The definition of fugue as “the repetition of two or more voices, rendering compositions in a wonderful and pleasant manner" is much like Dressler's; the single line of verse by Wenceslaus Philomathes with which Schneegass followed it can also be found in the Praecepta."! For an example, Schneegass referred the reader to a Vater unser im Himmelreich found in part I of his book,!™ a piece set with the pervading imitation of sixteenth-century motet style. Without mentioning a term for free imitation, the author concluded by stressing canon, which he called fuga integra (Dressler's term) or fuga mera (his own). Again echoing Dressler, he specified that the technique took place when *two or more voices, in unison or distinct intervals, are sung from only one cantilena."? The second discussion of fugue appeared in the expanded eighth edition of Christoph Demantius's Isogoge artis musicae (1632).% Demantius concentrated exclusively on canon and devoted most of his section to a description of the various types of canons and their names. These include fuga simplex (ordinary canon), fuga contraria (in inversion), fuga perpetua (Calvisius's *circle canon"), fuga reciproca (a canon that is performed first forward, then backward), and fuga cancrizans (crab canon). The final work, Laurentius Ribovius's Enchiridion Musicum of 1638, was examined above.! Like Schneegass, Ribovius mentioned both canonic

and free imitation while emphasizing the former, and he referred the reader to other authors for more information on the latter.

Although no other school text author offered any details on the writing of imitative counterpoint, many of them defined the term fugue in one or two sentences. The earliest, Maternus Beringer, asked the question, “ Was ist Fuga?” in the later 1610 edition of his Musicae. He answered, “When

one preceding voice is followed by the other voices, which imitate it in the

same way either sooner or slower [i.e., at a short time interval or a longer

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132

Table 4.1. Chronological list of Lateinschule music texts in which the word fuga is found (only first editions or significant later editions) Year

Author

Title

Language

1548

Faber

Compendiolum musicae pro incipientibus

Latin

1550

Faber

Ad Musicam practicam introductio

Latin

1591

Schneegass

Isagoges musicae libri duo

Latin

1592

Demantius

Forma musices

Latin

Schneegass

Deutsche musica

German

1595

Gumpelzhaimer

Compendium tironibus

Latin

1596

Machold

1599

musicae pro illius artis

Compendium germanico-latinum

bi-lingual

Crappius

Musicae artis elementa

Latin

1602

Calvisius

Compendium incipientibus

Latin

1603

Orgosinus

Musica nova

bi-lingual

1606

Gesius

Synopsis doctrinae musicae

Latin

Lochau

lanua musicalis

Latin

Demantius

Isagoge artis musicae

bi-lingual

Quitschreiber

Musicbüchlein für die

Harnisch

Artis musicae delineatio

bi-lingual

Vulpius

Musicae compendium latino germanicum

bi-lingual

1610

Beringer

Musicae, das ist der freyen lieblichen Singekunst (first edition 1605)

German

1613

Daubenrock

Epitome musices pro tyronibus scholarum

Latin

1614

Stiphelius

Commpendium musicum latino-germanicum

bi-lingual

1623

Hizler

Extract auss der Neuen Musica oder Singkunst

German

1625

Crüger

Praecepta musicae practicae figuralis

Latin

Crüger

Kurtzer und verstendtlicher Unterricht recht und leichtlich singen zu lernen

German

1626

Gengenbach

Musica nova (with music dictionary)

German

1629

J. Praetorius

Musicae practicae et arithmeticae

Latin

1607 1608

musices practicae

musicae pro

Jugend

German

German Theory during the Thirty Years War

133

1630

Müller

Nucleus musicae practicae

German

1632

Demantius

Isogoge artis musicae

bi-lingual

Institutionum musicarum

German

Stenger

Manductio ad musicam theoreticam

German

1638

Ribovius

Enchiridion musicum oder Kurtzer Begriff der Singekunst

German

1642

Herbst

Musica practica

German

1649

Friderici

Musica figuralis oder Newe / klärliche / richtige / und verstündliche Unterweisung der Singe-Kunst

German

(later edition with added music dictionary)

1635

Sartorius

(with music dictionary)

(first edition 1618)

1657

Hase

Gründliche Einführung in die edle Music oder Singkunst

German

1658

Zerleder

Musica figuralis oder kurtze, gründtliche und verstándtliche Underweysung der Sing Kunst

German

1660

Erhardi

Compendium musices latino-germanicum (1640 edition lost; with music dictionary)

bi-lingual

Metzel

Compendium musices

bi-lingual

1673

J. R. Ahle

Brevis et perspicua introductio in artem musicam Gdentical with Kurze doch deutliche Anleitung of 1690; with music dictionary)

German

1675

Quirsfeld

Breviarium musicum

German

1686

Mylius

Rudimenta

German

1688

Falck

Idea boni Cantoris (with music dictionary)

German

Lange

Methodus nova et perspicua in artem musicam (with music dictionary)

German

1699

Schmiedeknecht

Tyrocinium musices, das ist: Erster Anfang zur Sing-Kunst (with music dictionary)

German

1703

Beyer

Primae linae musicae vocalis

German

1726

Wesselius

Principia musica oder Gründlicher Unterricht zur Musicalischen

German

musices

(with music dictionary)

(with music dictionary)

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Theories of Fugue

one] and at the unison or [another] interval.”'% Although this sounds like canon, Beringer's wording is not sufficiently precise to be certain. The next author to define the term, however, connected fugue and canon unequivocally. In 1626, Nikolaus Gengenbach appended to his Musica nova a modest dictionary of musical terms which contained Fuga. He wrote, *Fugue, from fugare, to chase, quia vox vocem fugat [because one voice chases another]. A type of piece wherein two, three, four, or more voices can sing from one voice, each voice some certain rest or tempus after the other, so that one always, so to speak, chases the other.”!” This is canon, as the phrase *da zwo / drey / vier / oder mehr Stimmen aus einer singen kônnen” makes clear. Although Gengenbach borrowed the Latin phrase *quia vox vocem fugat" from Nucius and Praetorius, he did not adopt their broader definition; he confined fugue to its strict, canonic sense. Between 1632 and 1703, nine authors included music dictionaries in

their Lateinschule tutors; Table 4.2 gives their definitions of fugue in chro-

nological order.'9? Seven of the writers condensed Gengenbach's definition, and two, Mylius (1686) and Schmiedeknecht (1699), actually made the equivalence of fuga and canon explicit by placing the two terms side by side. Johann Rudolf Ahle was the only lexicographer who did not copy from Gengenbach.'? His definition, found in both the Brevis et perspicua introductio in artem musicam of 1673 and the Kurze doch deutliche Anleitung zu der lieblich- und löblichen Singekunst of 1690, was also later plagiarized. It read, *Fugue (Canon) an artistic adjoining of the song wherein one voice follows after the other at the unison, fourth, fifth, or octave." Ahle's restriction of canon to the perfect intervals did not concur with other tutors, where canons at imperfect intervals could be found as well. No other school text author mentioned these intervals or made such a restriction. None of the remaining thirty tutors offered any explanation of fugue, although the term appeared in all of them. Practically every text I examined included canons for the students to sing. Such pieces were invariably labeled something like *Fuga [sometimes: Canon] ex unisono post minimam" (Fugue [or canon] at the unison after a minim [rest]), a formula that can be traced to Zarlino's discussion of the proper use of the terms fuga and canon.' Conversely, in only two early instances (Schneegass's

Vater unser cited above and several motet-style fugae in the appendix to Heinrich Orgosinus's Musica nova of 1603) did the title fuga denote a

freely imitative piece. A few authors included tables listing the Latin terms for the various intervals at which canon could take place; e.g. "Fuga in Hyperdiatessaron equals fugue at the 4th above." A couple offered one or another symbol, called signum fugae, as the indicator for where the second voice of the canon should enter. Many refrained altogether from any use of the term outside the titles of canonic pieces. In short, it was in the guise of canon that fuga survived in the Latin

German Theory during the Thirty Years War Table 4.2.

1626

135

Dictionary definitions of fuga within Lateinschule music texts

Gengenbach Fuga à fugare jagen, quià vox vocem fugat. Ein solcher Gesang / da zwo

/ drey / vier / oder mehr Stimmen aus einer singen kónnen / jede

Stimme etliche gewisse Pausen oder Tempora nach der andern / dass immer eine die ander gleichsam jaget.

1632

Demantius Fuga ist ein solcher Gesang / da etliche stimmen aus einer singen / und immer eine die andern gleichsam jaget.

1635

Sartorius Fuga à fugare Jagen / quia vox vocem fugat, ein solcher Gesang / da 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. oder mehr stimmen auss einer singen kónnen / durch gewisse tempora, also dass einer den andern jaget.

1660

Erhardi Fugae à fugando, quia vox vocem fugat, dictae.

1673

Ahle

1686

Mylius Canon oder Fuga, ist eine gewisse Art eines Gesangs / aus welcher 2. 3. 4. und mehr Stimmen nach einander aus einer Stimme singen kónnen/ dergleichen Arten gar unterschiedlich gefunden werden.

1688

Falck

1688

Lange Fuga, Eine künstliche Zusammenfugunge des Gesanges / worinne eine Stimme der andern nachgehet.

1699

Schmiedeknecht Fuga, Canon, ist ein solcher gesang / aus welchen zwey und auch mehr Stimmen nach einander singen / und gleichsam einander jagen.

1703

Beyer

Fuga, (Canon) eine künstliche Zusammenfügung des Gesanges / da eine Stimme der andern in Unisono, Quarta, Quinta oder Octava nachgehet.

Fuga ist ein solcher Gesang / da etliche Stimmen aus Einer singen / und immer eine die andern gleichsam jaget.

Fuga, ist ein solcher Gesang / da eine Stimme der andern nachsinget.

school music texts. As John Butt remarks in his recent book on music education in the German Baroque, “The canon (usually labeled ‘Fuga’) is the

staple diet of practical education well into the seventeenth century; it was

especially serviceable since the pupil needed only to learn one line of music in order to become acquainted with polyphony and independence of voiceparts.”!!! Indeed, this predilection survived into the eighteenth century.

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Theories of Fugue

Apparently, fugue in the broader sense was a theoretical topic too advanced

for most students, and as a result pedagogues restricted it to its original canonic meaning. No doubt many German musicians, including most likely

Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel, first learned about

fugue as they sang canons with the other students in their grammar school.

Part II

The Genesis of the Modern Fugue: Italy and Germany in the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Chapter 5

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680 The initial wave of German musical study in Italy focused on the Venice of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and found its influence primarily in Lutheran church music. Concurrent developments in Italian secular music—madrigals, monody, and the stile rappresentativo—proved much more difficult to “translate” into German, intimately bound up as they were in the peculiarities of the Italian language and contemporary Italian literature. As the madrigal declined, however, and the extreme text sensitivity of such works as Monteverdi's Lament of Arianna gave way to the more conventional approaches of opera and cantata, a second wave of Italian influence began to lap up on German shores beginning around mid-century. Included in this wave were innovations in instrumental music, especially the keyboard styles of Frescobaldi brought north by Froberger, and the new ensemble music of the Italian violinists, as well as emphasis on smaller vocal forces in more affective style. Italian influence on German fugal theory of this period was also pervasive. It began with Marco Scacchi's introduction to German musicians of Diruta's theory of tonal answers and the idea of modal predominance over contrapuntal manipulation. It continued with Christoph Bernhard's recasting of the music-rhetorical analogy by applying it solely to dissonance treatment, as laid out by the Monteverdi brothers ca. 1600, and his consequent abandonment of the traditional German model according to which fugal procedures had served as figures of music. Italy's most significant contribution to fugal theory came from its violinists, who at this time developed and brought north a structural model for fugue that, with some modification, has served composers of fugue ever since. Last of all, Zarlino played his final role in the history of fugue when a group of north-German composers adapted his ideas for invertible counterpoint to fugal writing to create the countersubject and so-called permutation fugue. All of these developments, as a group probably the most important in the entire history of the fugue, came about through an extremely close symbiosis between Ital-

ian and German musicians and their respective ideals and penchants. By

the time that Bach and Handel were born in 1685, virtually all of the ele-

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Theories of Fugue

ments of the standard fugue were in place, awaiting the musical geniuses

who could realize the potential these elements represented. Marco Scacchi vs. Paul Siefert

In 1625 the most important musical position in the Hanseatic city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) became vacant with the death of the Kapellmeister of the Danzig Marienkirche. Two local musicians contended for the position: Caspar Fórster, Kantor and librarian of the Danzig Akademisches Gymnasium, and Paul Siefert, organist of the Marienkirche. The city council selected Fórster, and thus began a bitter feud that lasted a quarter of a

century and came to involve the most important German and Italian musi-

cians in Saxony, Prussia, and Poland. It was as a direct result of this protracted controversy that the Italian theory of tonal answers came to be introduced in the 1640s to the German musical establishment at large. The tonal answer in turn dominated German fugal theory in the second half of the seventeenth century and provided the most important link between late-Renaissance modal imitation and the late-Baroque tonal fugue. It is not difficult to understand why the Danzig city council chose Fôrster over Siefert. Although Siefert had studied for two years (1607-09) with Sweelinck and held previous positions in Kónigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and Warsaw, his training and experience were almost exclusively as an organist.! Fórster had in the meantime been directing vocal music in Danzig for twenty years.? Nevertheless, Siefert felt wrongly passed over and immediately began a campaign of personal attacks on Förster and formal complaints to the city council that continued throughout the 1620s and 1630s. Many of the official documents, including complaints by both Siefert and Fórster as well as judgments of the council, can be found in modern transcription, and they paint an unsympathetic portrait of Siefert as a nettlesome, stubborn, and even haughty man with an abrasive personality. Fórster complained on several occasions that he had been verbally threatened, and he asked repeatedly for the council’s protection.’ Although Siefert began his complaints against Förster in 1627 by challenging the Kapellmeister's disinterest in composition, he later broadened the attacks to include the latter's preference for Italian music, attacks that take on overtones of nationalism in addition to their ringing endorsements

of the old style. Archival documents record no further hostilities after 1638,

but the quarrel continued verbally and soon spread beyond the Danzig city limits. The primary agent in its dissemination was undoubtedly Kaspar Fórster jun. (1616-1673), who clearly shared his older relative's enthusiasm for the new Italian style. In the 1630s, he studied composition both in Rome with Giacomo Carissimi, music teacher at the Collegium Germanicum, and in Warsaw with the court Kapellmeister Marco Scacchi. The latter, quite familiar with the famous Artusi-Monteverdi exchange,

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

141

was particularly eager to defend modern Italian music in the face of Siefert's continued criticism. Thus, when in 1640 Siefert published a collection of twelve psalm settings with cantus firmi borrowed from the GoudimelLobwasser Psalter,’ Scacchi launched a counterattack. He published three years later a detailed critique of Siefert’s Psalmen Davids under the title Cribrum musicum ad triticum Siferticum (“Musical sieve for the Siefert wheat"), which was dedicated to the elder Fürster. In it, Scacchi cited 151 errors as proof that Siefert was incapable of composing properly in the

older style that he so vehemently championed.

Marco Scacchi had been born ca. 1600 in a small town near Rome,’ and received his musical training from Giovanni Francesco Anerio, lesser-known brother of Felice Anerio, Palestrina's successor and imitator at the Papal Chapel.!° Giovanni Francesco was a much more progressive composer than his brother, with a breadth of compositional technique that embraced secular as well as sacred music and both the older and newer styles. In 1624, Giovanni Francesco left Rome to assume the position of court Kapellmeister in Warsaw, and Scacchi probably accompanied him." In any case, Scacchi was in Warsaw by 1626, and in 1628 succeeded his teacher as Kapellmeister, in which capacity he served until il] health prompted his return to Italy in 1649. He was particularly celebrated as a teacher and counted among his pupils the important Italian theorist Angelo Berardi, who studied with him

after his return to Italy. Much of Scacchi's music is lost, and his impor-

tance, in his own day and in ours, rests squarely on his work as a theorist. Both his Cribrum and the shorter tracts and letters he addressed to German musicians in the 1640s exerted tremendous influence north of the Alps. Despite his activities as a theorist and teacher, Scacchi apparently never wrote a comprehensive treatise on musical composition. In his last known theoretical work, a brief discourse written in 1649 in defense of the seconda prattica, Scacchi announced his intention to write such a treatise.'? Failing health and subsequent retirement to Italy may have caused the project's abandonment, however, since there is no trace of a larger work. In a letter of 1648 to one Christian Schirmer, Heinrich Schütz also mentioned an extended treatise promised by Scacchi, and he expressed the hope that the work would soon be finished and made available to German musicians." Schütz again referred to a forthcoming treatise, this time by an unnamed theorist, in the 1648 foreword to his Geistliche Chormusik.'* Several similarities between Schütz's two references of the same year have led modern scholars to conclude that he was referring in the Geistliche Chormusik to Scacchi's promised work, not to Christoph Bernhard's Tractatus compositionis augmentatus as was once thought." In place of the large treatise that was apparently never produced, an extensive letter written ca. 1648 to Cs. Werner sets forth in brief Scacchi's views on musical composition in general. Scacchi described to Werner

142

Theories of Fugue

three categories of music, classified according to place of performance, and he discussed the various styles appropriate to each category. In church music (Stylus Ecclesiasticus), for example, Scacchi identified four possible styles: unaccompanied pieces for four to eight voices in *grave style" (as model composers he named Josquin, Lassus, and Palestrina), pieces for multiple choruses, pieces for voices and instruments in concerto, and pieces "in the modern style" (Scacchi named Jacobo Peri, Marenzio, Luzzaschi, and Monteverdi). The second and third categories comprise chamber music (Stylus Cubicularis, including madrigals, both with or without instruments, and monodies with basso continuo) and music for the stage (Stylus Theatralis). Although his system was based on the dichotomy—first articulated by Claudio and Giulio Cesare Monteverdi—of prima prattica, in which musical structure received precedence over the text, and seconda prattica, in

which text controlled music, Scacchi expanded and refined the original plan to include hybrid styles falling between these two extremes. In church music, for instance, he recognized not only the unaccompanied stile antico of Palestrina and Lassus and the innovative stile moderno of Peri and Monteverdi, but also, lying between those two, the styles of polychoral and concerted music, in which the strict rules of the old style could be bent and elements of the modern style introduced. As Scacchi himself described them: In cantilenis vero ad plures choros, sive cum concerto sint, sive plenae, quamvis

ad primam praxin pertineant, propter vocum tamen multitudinem, vel etiam ob

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numerusque, eo major etiam erit libertas, praesertim in Concertis, aliquam usurpandi licentiam, quae tamen terminos et rationem artis musicae non excedat." Indeed, pieces for many choirs, either with or without instruments, may be related to the first practice to whatever extent you prefer, depending on the number of voices. Likewise in a concerto the composer need not rigorously restrict himself to the rules as is done in the masses, psalms, and motets of four or five voices. For the more voices one has, the more one is free, especially in concertos,

to take some liberties, which nevertheless do not exceed the limits and ratio of the art of music.

In the above-mentioned Breve discorso of 1649, Scacchi elaborated further on the way in which “through the benefits of this modern practice harmonic art has been greatly enriched," and he rebutted Siefert's accusations that the introduction of elements from the seconda prattica had excessively secularized and trivialized church music.'* Finally, Scacchi insisted that, while every good composer had to command the prima prattica rules, a composer who restricted his compositions to those rules was needlessly depriving his music of all that the seconda prattica had to offer.

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

143

Scacchi's letter to Werner reveals a great deal about his use of the term fugue and how he applied it to imitative counterpoint. The word appears

only with respect to the unaccompanied style of church music in the Palestrina/Lassus tradition. To characterize this stile antico, Scacchi gave eight brief rules not unlike those taught today in courses on Palestrina-style counterpoint. Two of the rules (nos. 4 and 7) focus on the writing of fugae: Quarto. Pars consequens Fugam a chorda naturali, ac prope consona incipiat. Septimo. Fugae propositio sex aut septem Tactus non excedat.!? Four. The consequent part must begin the fugue at the chorda naturali and with the proper consonances. Seven. The proposition of the fugue must not exceed six or seven beats.

The word fuga clearly refers to points of imitation in this context. Propositio is synonymous with Nucius's thema or Zarlino's soggetto, i.e., the precompositional material upon which the imitation is based, and it is to be no more than seven beats in length. In the fourth rule, the composer is told how to choose the proper notes for the entrance of the various parts. First of all, the second voice should enter on one of the *natural notes," which Scacchi identified elsewhere as the chorda principalis and chorda media, or final and dominant of the mode.?? Second, each voice should be consonant with the other voices at its point of entry. In applying fuga to the point of imitation, Scacchi, like his German colleagues, ignored Zarlino's distinction between exact and inexact imitation. There is, moreover, no evidence that Scacchi used the term with respect to canonic writing. He made no mention of canon in his rules for the stile antico, and when, in the Breve discorso, he discussed study canons, he used the term canon and dismissed the technique as a fairly worthless exercise.?! In the Cribrum, Scacchi evaluated Siefert's 1640 collection according to the rules of the prima prattica, but his criticism went far beyond the eight general rules outlined to Werner. In particular, Scacchi identified one prevalent technique of Siefert's imitative writing that he denounced as absolutely incorrect. The first instance of this “error” occurred in Siefert's setting of

Psalm 33. Siefert opened his piece with a point of imitation built on the

first phrase of the cantus firmus, which begins with the upward leap of a fifth from final D to dominant A.” (See Example 5.2.) Goudimel’s setting is shown for comparison (Example 5.1). The theme was stated at the original pitch by soprano and tenor and answered by alto and bass at the dominant with another fifth A to E. In criticizing this real answer, Scacchi insisted that under no conditions was a piece to begin with a fifth answered by a

fifth or a fourth by a fourth. Scacchi justified his rule by first describing

144

Theories of Fugue

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how each mode was made up of a particular combination of fourth and fifth. Then he wrote: Et haec diversa Octavae divisio constituit verum ambitum cujuslibet cantilenae, ex quo nulla Vox, praefertim in principio, egredi & evagari debet. Nullus autem Tonus, sive Authenticus sive Plagalis, reperitur, qui duabus Quintus vel Quartis

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

145

efformetur. . . . Cum enim ipse sit Primi Toni, debuisses Altum & Bassum in principio per Quartam, non autem per Quintam formare . . . siquidem rectam & naturalem formationem Toni huic cantioni non dedisti.? This different division of the octave constitutes the true ambitus of whatever piece you like, from which no voice, especially in the beginning, ought to step

out or stray. Moreover, no mode, whether authentic or plagal, is found which is

formed with two fifths or fourths. . . . Indeed, since [this psalm] itself is first mode, you would have to form alto and bass by fourth in the beginning, not by fifth . . . because you have not given the correct and natural formation of the mode in this piece.

Scacchi concluded the critique with his own “correct” version of the point of imitation, in which alto and bass answered with the rising fourth A to D. At least one modern scholar has suggested that Scacchi invented his theory of tonal answers for the mere sake of argument with Siefert.?^ Far from inventing petty rules, however, Scacchi was in fact simply applying the Italian theory of tonal answers developed by Diruta and Banchieri over a quarter century earlier. For Scacchi, as for his Italian predecessors and successors,” it was absolutely essential that a composition's opening point of imitation display its mode clearly; that is, not only should each voice begin on either final or dominant, but the voice's subsequent melodic motion should also be made to emphasize the same two notes. Unlike Diruta, Scacchi stopped short of insisting that every piece ought to begin with fifth answered by fourth or fourth by fifth in order to avoid all possible ambiguity. He simply demanded that any theme that did begin with the leap of a fifth or a fourth

must be given a tonal, not a real, answer in order to insure proper obser-

vance of the mode. When Siefert built a point of imitation on a cantus firmus that did not begin with a fourth or fifth, Scacchi found no fault with the use of a real answer. Scacchi's pupil Angelo Berardi included two of his teacher's motets in the Documenti armonici, and these two works neatly illustrate Scacchi's handling of tonal and real answers. The second motet, "Vobis datum est noscere," has its final on D with a signature of one flat.” It opens with a tonal answer—i.e., the top voice begins with a falling fifth A to D answered

in the second voice by a falling fourth D to A, as shown in Example 5.3.

The opening of the other motet, *Si Deus pro nobis" (Example 5.4), features a stepwise theme that progresses from final C to “subdominant” F rather than to dominant G." Although the theme is given a real answer (G to C) which would seem to violate Scacchi's rule about answering a fourth

with another fourth, the combination of statement and answer is carefully worked out so that final and dominant are clearly emphasized and *sub-

dominant" is well hidden. In short, although themes that leapt a fourth or

fifth should always be answered tonally at the beginning of a composition,

146

Theories of Fugue

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other sorts of themes need not be so answered. Nevertheless, one rule remained absolutely inviolable: Every piece should begin in such a way that the mode was made immediately clear.

In his critique of Siefert's Psalm 90, Scacchi added a few details about

the proper treatment of imitative counterpoint at the beginning of a com-

position. Siefert's piece, in which the cantus firmus is treated rather freely,

begins not with an entire point of imitation but with only two voices in imitation at the octave. (Example 5.5 shows Goudimel's rendering of the cantus firmus; Example 5.6, Siefert's opening imitation based on it.) Scacchi again complained that the piece's mode was not made clear at the beginning, and he reiterated the need for a tonal answer in this context. Scacchi then went on to insist not only that a composer ought to answer fifth with fourth and vice versa, but also that authentic points of imitation should be

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distinguishable from plagal ones. He did not, however, repeat Diruta's rule for writing ascending themes in authentic points of imitation and descending themes in plagal ones. He concentrated instead on the configuration of fourth and fifth in the tenor and alto voices. Scacchi offered in place of a lengthy explanation four brief points of imitation illustrating the proper handling of tonal answers in authentic and plagal modes.” The four examples embrace all four possible configurations: (1) authentic mode with point of imitation beginning on the final, (2) authentic mode beginning on dominant, (3) related plagal mode with point of imitation beginning on final, and (4) plagal mode beginning on dominant. Examples 5.7-5.10 show the opening measures of each example. They reveal that, given a piece in an authentic mode beginning with a tonal answer, the characteristic fifth from final to dominant should be placed in the tenor (and soprano), with the fourth from dominant to final in the alto (and bass). In a plagal mode, tenor should have the fourth and alto the fifth. In addition to this scheme, Scacchi noted elsewhere that the tenor ambitus was responsible for a composition's overall mode.? Like Diruta, he appears to have assumed that the two determining factors—tenor ambitus and

opening tenor motive—would never contradict each other. Scacchi offered Example 5.11 as the *correct" way for Siefert to have begun his Psalm

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148

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like this: Since the overall range of Goudimel's cantus firmus makes it authentic, mode 1 is proper for the polyphonic setting. Thus, although any voice may begin the piece, the tenor should enter with the characteristic fifth D-A of mode 1. Since the theme's opening phrase begins with the “plagal” fourth A-D, it is assigned to the alto, which is answered tonally by the tenor with the fifth D-A.?! A slightly different solution to the problem of distinguishing authentic

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from plagal points of imitation was later offered by Scacchi's pupil Berardi. In the Miscellanea musicale of 1689, Berardi demanded that if the mode was authentic, one of the voices stating the fifth should be chosen to begin the composition, answered by a voice stating the fourth. If, on the other hand, its mode was plagal, the composition began with a fourth answered

by a fifth.? Berardi offered a point of imitation for each of the twelve modes, including for modes 1 and 2 the examples 5.7 and 5.9 from Scacchi's

Cribrum.? (He omitted what I show as Examples 5.8 and 5.10, since they

contradict his rule.) Not only do all authentic examples open with a fifth

and all plagal ones with a fourth, but the characteristic interval is always placed in the tenor and soprano, just as Scacchi had prescribed. Whether

150

Theories of Fugue

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Berardi's revised plan represents an original contribution or Scacchi's own refining of the earlier theory cannot be determined. Two years after Scacchi's Cribrum, Siefert published his reply in a book entitled Anticribratio musica ad avenam Schachianam (“Musi cal unsifting of Scacchi's wild oats"). He insisted that the Italian rules of the prima prattica were not the same as those followed by late-R enaissance composers north of the Alps.’ To defend the use of real answer s, Siefert pointed out that such answers could easily be found in the works of Lassus, Hassler, and his own teacher Sweelinck. He also provided theore tical justification by invoking Tinctoris's original explanation of fuga as the imitation of solmization syllables within the hexachord system:

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

151

Si cantus canit re la, re fa, nonne melius, quod altus canat re la, re fa, quam ut

cantet re sol, re fa, cum destructione subjecti? Ita enim ambitus communis Toni observandus est, ne sequantur absurda et subjectum pereat, sed in quantum fieri potest subjectum observetur, alias subsequitur, non subjectum sed nudos tonos possuisse.?? If the cantus sings re la re fa, is it not better that the altus sing re la re fa rather than re sol re fa with the [resulting] destruction of the subject? Indeed, the common ambitus of the mode ought to be observed, but only to the extent that the subject can be made, lest absurdities follow and the subject be ruined; otherwise that which follows after [will] have established not the subject but a mere mode.

Siefert’s argument was doomed. Renaissance musicians had been writing tonal answers long before Diruta's theory was formulated, and not even Zarlino, who insisted on restricting the term fuga to its original fifteenthcentury meaning of exact imitation, went so far as to ban tonal answers on the grounds that they *destroyed the subject." Furthermore, it is possible that Zarlino himself would have faulted Siefert's real answer in Psalm 33 on the grounds that the imitation exceeded the octave ambitus of the first mode. Zarlino's fellow student Vicentino had, in 1555, expressly forbidden such violation of the mode's ambitus, and Zarlino's real answers in Part IV of his Istitutioni carefully avoided breaking that rule? Nevertheless, Zarlino’s Istitutioni, which Siefert must have studied as a pupil of Sweelinck, attempted neither to justify nor to condemn the use of tonal answers, and Siefert's similarly casual attitude toward them as he composed his Psalmen Davids was no match for the careful reasoning of Scacchi’s criticism. Siefert claimed in the Anticribratio that Scacchi's Cribrum represented nothing more than a personal vendetta against him on Fórster's behalf. To demonstrate otherwise, Scacchi published ca. 1649 a collection of letters written in his support by some of the most prominent German musicians of Saxony and Prussia? The work included contributions from musicians as far away as Kônigsberg and Leipzig, as well as two letters from Heinrich Schütz.* Schütz was careful to praise both Scacchi and Siefert—the former as an excellent musician in both the theory and practice of music, the latter as one of the few really fine native German composers. He regretted that Siefert had taken it upon himself to begin the quarrel in the first place and hoped that the two parties would soon end their dispute. Although Schütz

expressed reluctance to take sides, he admitted after studying both the Cribrum and the Anticribratio that for the most part he composed according to the rules laid down by Scacchi:

Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that as a youth I too was drilled and instructed by my teacher Giovanni Gabrieli of blessed memory in a way similar to that in which Mr. Marco Scacchi teaches Mr. Siefert.*!

152

Theories of Fugue

Schütz's works leave little doubt that he sided with Scacchi on the use of tonal answers and that he learned from Gabrieli how to use them systematically. The Psalmen Davids of 1619, which *show better than any of his other [works] the force of Gabrieli’s example,”**contain numerous instances

of tonal answers; the very first piece of the collection begins with a rising

fourth D-G answered by a rising fifth G-D.* Schütz's Geistliche Chormusik of 1648, which may have been produced as Schütz's own practical response to the Scacchi-Siefert controversy, also features several instances of fifths answered by fourths and fourths by fifths.** Furthermore, not a single piece in either collection begins with a real answer. The influence of Scacchi's Cribrum on German music was both immediate and enormous. No longer could a respectable composer maintain a casual attitude about when, how, or whether to use tonal answers, and the topic dominated fugal theory well into the eighteenth century. Without

question, the theory of tonal answers strengthened the ties that the earlier

German theorists Dressler, Calvisius, and Lippius had established between

imitative counterpoint and the modes, and it proved to be the ideal catalyst

in the transformation of late-Renaissance imitation into late-Baroque fugue. Christoph Bernhard—Tractatus Compositionis Augmentatus

The first important German treatise produced after 1650, Christoph Bernhard's Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, was one of a large number of German theoretical works that circulated only in manuscript during the later seventeenth century. It is also probably the best known of these manuscript treatises today, owing in large part to Müller-Blattau's 1926 edition, and it remains one of the only works of seventeenth-century German theory available complete in English translation. Two manuscript copies of Bernhard's treatise survive from the early eighteenth century," but many more must have circulated in the late seventeenth century. Bernhard's theoretical writing was widely known throughout Germany and was quoted as late as 1739 by Johann Mattheson in his Vollkommene Capellmeister. Christoph Bernhard was born on 1 January 1628 in Kolberg (now Kolobrzeg, Poland), a small Pomeranian town on the Baltic west of Danzig.* Mattheson stated that Bernhard studied in Danzig with Paul Siefert and Balthasar Erben;*he could not possibly have studied with the latter, how-

ever, for Erben was younger than Bernhard and did not come to Danzig

until after Bernhard had settled in Dresden. Fiebig also doubts the alleged relationship with Siefert and notes instead many similarities between the early careers of Bernhard and Caspar Fórster jun. Fiebig speculates that Bernhard may have studied with Förster sen. before leaving Danzig for Warsaw in order to study with Marco Scacchi.?? Certainly, Scacchi's influence pervades Bernhard's theoretical writing, whereas little of Siefert's think-

ing can be found.

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

153

By 1649 Bernhard was in Dresden, where he first worked under Schütz as a singer and singing instructor to the choirboys, and in 1655 he was named Schütz's vice-Kapellmeister. He made two trips to Italy (1650 and 1657) for the recruitment of Italian musicians and is generally presumed to have studied with Giacomo Carissimi at that time.?! Bernhard left Dresden in 1663 to join his former colleague and fellow Schütz student Matthias Weckmann in Hamburg, and the ensuing years were perhaps his most productive. He succeeded Thomas Selle as Kantor of the Johannisschule in

1664, published in 1665 his Geistliche Harmonien (probably the most

important published collection of vocal music in Germany in the second half of the seventeenth century), and collaborated with Weckmann on a famous series of concerts for the Hamburg Collegium Musicum. Bernhard also remained in close contact with Schütz, and at the latter's request composed for his funeral a motet (now lost) in the stylus gravis. Shortly after Weckmann died in 1674, Bernhard returned to Dresden to asume his former position as vice-Kapellmeister. When the Italian musicians were dismissed in 1681, Bernhard was named Kapellmeister, and he remained in that position until his death in 1692. Bernhard was equally adept in composition and theoretical writing, and he made significant contributions in both areas. In addition to the Geistliche Harmonien he left a number of manuscript compositions, which include both stile antico masses and sacred concertos in the stile moderno. Three theoretical treatises, all in manuscript, also survive under Bernhard's name. The first, entitled Von der Singe-Kunst oder Manier, is a singing manual, presumably written during Bernhard's early years in Dresden when he taught the choirboys.? His major work, the Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, was almost certainly produced between Bernhard's second Italian sojourn in 1657 and his departure from Dresden in 1663.7 A later revision of a portion of the Tractatus bears the title Ausführlicher Bericht vom Gebrauche der Con- und Dissonantien and probably dates from Bernhard's years in Hamburg.” Bernhard’s Tractatus exhibits an Italian orientation in general and the influence of Scacchi's theoretical writings in particular.’ The work is essen-

tially a counterpoint treatise, and it can be divided into several major sec-

tions: general introduction (chapters 1-3), consonances and dissonances (chapters 4-15), the three styles of music with musical figures appropriate to each (chapters 16—43), the modes (chapters 44—56), imitative counterpoint (chapters 57-63), and invertible counterpoint (chapters 64-70). In chapter 3, Bernhard divided counterpoint into, on the one hand, contrapunctus gravis or stylus antiquus and, on the other, contrapunctus luxurians or stylus modernus. These correspond to Monteverdi's prima and seconda prattica, and Bernhard noted that the first featured slower note values and emphasized musical structure while the second moved more quickly, placed emphasis on text expression, and made freer use of disso-

154

Theories of Fugue

nances. He further subdivided the modern style into communis and comicus

(or theatris) to produce three styles reminiscent of Scacchi's church, chamber, and theatrical music. Bernhard's contrapunctus gravis, contrapunctus luxurians communis, and contrapunctus luxurians theatris, although inspired by Scacchi, were not merely sociological categories. Bernhard assigned to each a specific style—respectively, the “old style," the “new style" in general, and the “new style" as adapted for dramatic music—and he identified particular figures (which he called figurae melopoeticae) associated with each one. By far the largest portion of the Tractatus is devoted to these three styles and their figures, and Bernhard's treatment represents a significant departure from the tradition of German theoretical writing. Earlier writers such as Dressler and Nucius had conceived of “ornaments” or “figures” of music in a broad sense to refer to such fundamental compositional techniques as imitative writing, use of cadences, and ostinato. Even Burmeister's twenty-six figures were simply refinements of certain basic techniques. Bernhard's fig-

ures, on the other hand, apply exclusively to harmony and focus specifi-

cally on dissonance treatment. His thinking reflects the current trends and issues of Italian theory. It was, after all, Monteverdi's expressive use of dissonance that originally drew Artusi's criticism of the new style. For his model of the old style, Bernhard chose the works of Palestrina, the sixteenth-century composer favored by Italian theorists, rather than Lassus, the favorite of German theorists. Bernhard identified only four figures associated with the Palestrina style, and he gave them the names transitus (unaccented passing tone or neighboring note), quasi-transitus (accented passing tone), syncopatio or ligatura (normal suspension), and quasisyncopatio (suspension in which the dissonant note is restruck before its resolution). For the two modern styles, Bernhard catalogued a total of twenty

figures whereby dissonances were more freely used for the sake of text

expression. This material on musical figures was later expanded to form the basis of Bernhard's final treatise, the Ausführlicher Bericht. Fuga, no longer a figure of music, was an important enough compositional technique to merit its own section in the Tractatus. Chapters 57 through 63 on imitative counterpoint represent one of the only portions of Bernhard's treatise where Italian influence is almost entirely absent. Bernhard may have been aware of Zarlino's term imitatione, as a sentence near the " elsewhere he used that word only beginning of the Tractatus suggests,but in the general sense of “learning through the imitation of other composers’ works." Fuga was for Bernhard, as for his German predecessors, the generic term for all imitative counterpoint. He defined the term in words similar to those used by Calvisius over half a century earlier: Es ist aber Fuga eine Wiederhohlung einiger in einer vorhergehenden Stimme angebrachten Modulation.

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

155

Fugue is the repetition of a melodic line introduced in a preceding voice.

To label the two types of imitative counterpoint, Bernhard used Nucius's adjectives totalis and partialis, which he equated with Calvisius's ligata and soluta, and he described them, again recalling Calvisius, as, respectively, imitation of an entire Modulation and imitation of only part of the Modulation.”

Bernhard devoted the entire section to the study or puzzle canon. He

introduced a large amount of terminology and offered many examples apparently of his own composition. He noted the proper use of the word canon as “rule;”° he distinguished canons at the unison or octave (fugae aequisonae) from those at other intervals (fugae inaequisonae), and further divided the latter into canons at the fourth or fifth (fugae consonae) and those at the imperfect intervals (fugae dissonae);f'he noted such special types as inversion canon (fuga contraria or per arsin et thesin as opposed

to the normal fuga recta), augmentation or diminution canon (fuga inaequalis as opposed to the normal fuga aequalis),9and circle canon (fuga perpetua as opposed to the normal fuga non perpetua);**and he allowed for mixtae fugae in which two or more special features were combined.‘° Most of Bernhard's terms have precedents in German theory. Fuga contraria and fuga perpetua, for example, can be found in Demantius's Isogoge, 8th ed., of 1632,55while Fuga aequisona and inaequisona are the equivalent of Burmeister's fuga imaginaria unisona and multisona.9 Bernhard's statements about fuga partialis appear not in the chapters on imitative counterpoint but in the section on the modes, and Scacchi's influence is immediately apparent. Like Scacchi, Bernhard considered free imitation a technique to be used almost exclusively in the stylus antiquus, and he drew most of his examples from Palestrina's 1593 publication of Offer-

tories. In chapters 53 and 54, Bernhard used traditional modal theory to

justify the use of tonal vs. real answers as described by Scacchi in the 1640s. Whereas Scacchi had argued only for tonal answers and Siefert defended

only real answers, Bernhard set out to demonstrate the validity and proper

uses of both. To do so, he focused on the each voice of a polyphonic composition. noted that the voice ranges of tenor and alto) were approximately a fourth apart ambitus of a particular authentic mode, related plagal.9 Bernhard used this theory the imitation began with a tonal answer,

tradition of assigning a mode to A century earlier, Zarlino had bass (and likewise soprano and and that if one voice took the the other voice took that of the to explain tonal answers. When the answering voice in a sense

“completed” the mode of the leading voice, and its mode was therefore the

authentic or plagal counterpart to the leader's. That is, if tenor and so-

prano were in mode 1 (identified by Bernhard as authentic C Ionian), alto

and bass were in mode 2 (plagal C Ionian). Bernhard called this procedure consociatio modorum, an “association of modes." When the imitation fea-

156

Theories of Fugue

tured a real answer, on the other hand, the alto's mode in a sense “paralleled” the tenor's mode, and therefore the alto took another mode a fourth or fifth removed from that of the tenor. That is, if tenor was in mode 1, alto might be in mode 7 (authentic F Lydian) or 9 (authentic G Mixolydian). This procedure was called aequatio modorum, an *equivalence of modes."

In both cases, of course, the overall mode of the polyphonic composition was mode 1. Bernhard left no doubt that he devised consociatio and aequatio modorum solely for explaining the validity of both tonal and real answers.

He described the proper use of consociatio with these words:

Consociatio ist die beste Art die Fugen in allen Stimmen dem Tono gemäss anzubringen, zumahl wenn die Subjecta nicht die Quarta und Quinte übersteigen, und einen bequemen Sprung haben. Zu solchem Ende wird die Quarte in eine Quinte, die Quinte aber in eine Quarte verwandelt, und wo móglich die Semitonia erhalten, als welche auch Soni dominantes sind.” Consociatio is the best way to bring fugues into all voices in accordance with the mode, especially if the subjects do not overstep a fourth or fifth and have a comfortable leap. To this end the fourth is transformed into a fifth and the fifth into a fourth. Wherever possible, semitones are preserved as well as the principal sounds [i.e., final and dominant]."!

He followed this description with at least one example in each of the twelve modes, either taken from Palestrina or of his own composition. To describe aequatio he wrote: Aequationem Modi nenne ich: wenn einer Quartae, Quintae, Sextae oder Octavae zu gefallen, die andere Stimme einer Fuge nicht in dero nächsten verwandten,

sondern in einem solchen Tenore fortfähret, welche der ersten nur ratione der

Quartae oder Quintae ähnlich ist.

Doch wird diese Art der Fugen mehr in Gängen als in Sprüngen, mehr im Mittel als im Anfange gebraucht.

Wie aus ihrer Beschreibung abzunehmen, so bleiben die Quarten in denen Wiederhohlung Quarten, und die Quinten bleiben Quinten, und darinnen ist sie eigentlich von der vorigen, nehmlich Consociatione, i.e., consociatio, unterschieden.’

I call it aequatio modi when, in order to preserve [literally: to suit] a fourth, fifth, sixth, or octave, the second voice of a fugue does not proceed in the most closely

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

157

related mode, but rather in one that is similar to the first only by virtue of its fourth or fifth.

However, this type of fugue is used more often in stepwise than in leaping motion, and more often in the middle than at the beginning. As may be gathered from this description, fourths remain fourths in their repetition and fifths remain fifths. In this way it is to be distinguished from the previous kind.”

Again, at least one example is offered for each mode. Bernhard concluded the chapter: Aus allen diesen Exempeln erhellet nicht allein, dass die Quinte durch eine Quinte, und die Quarte durch eine Quarte gefolget wird, sondern auch sogar, dass gemeiniglich die Quinte Ut sol durch Ut sol, Re la durch Re la, die Quarte Ut fa durch Ut fa, Re sol durch Re sol, Mi la durch Mi la, beantwortet werden.”

All these examples make clear not only that a fifth is answered by a fifth and a fourth by a fourth, but also that the fifth ut sol is answered by ut sol and re la by re la, the fourth ut fa by ut fa, re sol by re sol, and mi la by mi la.

Bernhard's system represents a significant refinement of the way in which Dressler, Calvisius, and Lippius related points of imitation to the modes. When Calvisius, for example, stated that the notes most commonly emphasized in imitative writing were final and dominant, he gave no indica-

tion how this emphasis was to be achieved—in particular, how a theme

that emphasized final and dominant was to be answered. Bernhard allowed for two ways. For example, a tenor in mode 1 would have an ambitus of C-C with its important notes on C and G. In consociatio modorum, the alto would then be in mode 2, with an ambitus of G-G and important notes on G and C. Thus, the tenor's C would correspond to the alto's G and tenor G to alto C. In aequatio modi, the alto could take on one of two possible modes. If the tenor's theme remained in the lower fifth C-G, the *analogous mode a fourth or fifth away" would be mode 9 (authentic G Mixolydian), and the alto would have an ambitus of G-G with important notes on G and D. In this case, tenor C would still correspond to alto G,

but tenor G would now correspond to alto D rather than alto C. Similarly,

if the tenor mode would F-F, and the notes C and away, would for mode 8,

theme remained within the fourth G-C, the analogous alto be mode 7 (authentic F Lydian), alto would have the ambitus important tenor notes G and C would correspond to the alto F Modes 8 and 10, whose finals are also a fourth or fifth not be appropriate because in either case the ambitus (C-C D-D for mode 10) would incorrectly place the alto in essen-

tially the same vocal range as the tenor.

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When Bernhard spoke of two modes, separated by a fourth or fifth, that

were equivalent in part, he was stretching the modal system about as far as it could go without breaking down. In this system, each mode has its own unique *scale" of whole and half steps which cannot be exactly reproduced at any other pitch (except, of course, at the octave) without the introduction of accidentals. For any two modes a fourth or fifth apart, the respective scales will differ at only one point, where a particular "scale degree" will be placed with a half step below and whole step above in one

mode while in the other whole and half steps will be reversed. For instance,

mode 3 (authentic D Dorian) is equivalent to mode 11 (authentic A Aeolian) except for the sixth scale degree (B natural in mode 3, F natural, not F sharp, in mode 11); its equivalence with mode 9 (authentic

G Mixolydian)

extends to every degree but the third (F natural in mode 3, B natural, not B flat, in mode 9). The reason for this phenomenon is the presence of the

tritone interval F-B, which cannot be reproduced at any other pitch level in the modal system. Thus, when any mode is compared with the mode a fifth above, its note B (wherever that note should fall) will be paired with the second mode's F, i.e., at the interval of a diminished, rather than perfect, fifth; when compared with the mode a fourth above, F will be paired with

B, an augmented fourth.

Theoretically, either of two modes can be chosen for the alto voice in Bernhard's aequatio modorum: one whose *scale degrees" 1 through 5 (from final to dominant) match those of the tenor's mode, the other whose “scale degrees" 5 through 8 match the tenor's mode. One of these modes will be a fifth away from the original mode, the other a fourth away. The mode selected for a particular point of imitation will depend on the theme and the notes of the mode touched on by that theme. If the theme includes an E the proper mode to select for writing a real answer must be the mode a fifth above, so that F is answered by C rather than B. If the theme includes a B, a real answer can be written only with the mode a fourth above, so that B is answered by E rather than F. Any theme that includes both F and B cannot be given a real answer, a possibility for which Bernhard failed to allow. An alternative method for producing real answers, namely by adding accidentals to either F or B, destroys the integrity of the modal system. The impossibility of producing a real answer for a theme that touches on both F and B makes particularly difficult the handling of modes 5 through 8, in which these two notes are enclosed within the fundamental fifth (E-B or F-C). Bernhard acknowledged this problem when he pointed out that modes 5 and 6 (E Phrygian) were most often treated like modes 11 and 12 (A Aeolian) and that modes 7 and 8 (F Lydian) were rarely used." In other words, in the first case the B was usually avoided in favor of the A below it, while in the second it was usually flatted to produce transposed mode 1.

Table 5.1 summarizes the various possibilities for consociatio and aequatio modorum in all twelve modes.

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680 Table 5.1. Relationship between tenor and alto voices in Bernhard's consociatio and aequatio modorum Mode

1

consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

C G C

alto (mode 2):

G C G

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 9):

(C) G C

(G) D G

Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 7):

C G (C)

F C (F)

Mode 2 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor: G C G

alto (mode 1): C G C

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 10): G D C G (G) (D) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor. alto (mode 8): (G) (C) C F G C

Mode 3 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

D A D

alto (mode 4):

A D A

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 11):

(D) À D

(A) E A

Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 9): D G A D (D) (G)

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160 Table 5.1, cont. Mode 4 consociatio (tonal answer)

tenor: A D A

alto (mode 3): D A D

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 12): A E D A (A) (E) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 10): (A) (D) G D A D

Mode 5 consociatio (tonal answer)

tenor: E B E

alto (mode 6): B E B

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth: tenor: alto: (E) real answer B requires ficta E (for interval F-B) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 11): E A B E (E) (A)

Mode 6 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

B E B

alto (mode 5):

E B E

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth: tenor: alto: real answer B E requires ficta (B) (for interval F-B) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 12): (B) (E) E A B E

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

Mode 7 consociatio (tonal answer)

tenor: F C F

alto (mode 8): C F C

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth: tenor: alto: (F) real answer C requires ficta F (for interval F-B) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 1): F C C G (F) (C)

Mode 8 consociatio (tonal answer)

tenor: C F C

alto (mode 7): F C F

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth: tenor: alto: C real answer F requires ficta (C) (for interval F-B) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 2): (C) (G) F C G C

Mode 9 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

G D G

alto (mode

D G D

10):

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 1): (G) (C) D G G C Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 3): G D D A (G) (D)

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Theories of Fugue

162 Table 5.1, cont. Mode

10

consociatio (tonal answer)

tenor: D G D

alto (mode 9): G D G

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 2): D G G C (D) (G) Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 4): (D) (A) G D D A

Mode 11 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

A E A

alto (mode

12):

E A E

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 3): (A) (D) E A A D Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 5): A E E B (A) (E)

Mode 12 consociatio (tonal answer) tenor:

E A E

alto (mode

A E A

11):

aequatio (real answer) Theme emphasizes fifth & avoids F: tenor: alto (mode 4):

E A (E)

A D (A)

Theme emphasizes fourth & avoids B: tenor: alto (mode 6): (E) (B) A E E B

Italian Influence on German Fugal Theory, 1640-1680

163

Like Scacchi, Bernhard did not attempt to dictate the sort of melodic

motion that a theme *ought" to have. He merely pointed out the rule of thumb that consociatio was more commonly used for themes that progressed by leap and aequatio for themes that moved by step. This rule basically follows common sense. The character of a stepwise theme must be drastically altered for a tonal answer, since one of its steps must be answered by either a leap or a repeated note, while a leaping theme requires only that one leap be answered by another of slightly different size. This system and Bernhard's guidelines for its use provide well for a theme that emphasizes final and dominant and that remains within the range of the mode's fundamental fourth or fifth. Given such a theme a student com-

poser could decide which of the three possible modes he should choose for

the alto voice and how to relate the most important notes of tenor and alto to each other based on the type of motion of the theme, the location of the point of imitation in the piece, and the particular mode. On the other hand, any theme that ventured beyond either the fourth or the fifth might or might not allow for a real answer, and one that included the tritone interval F-B could not be answered exactly without the introduction of ficta. Bernhard's justification of both real and tonal answers is often cited as proof that he took a middle position between Scacchi's insistence on tonal answers and Siefert's insistence on real answers. As we have seen, however, Scacchi insisted on tonal answers only under certain conditions, and Bernhard's advice for when and how to use them remained faithful to Scacchi. Neither theorist demanded that every theme touch both final and dominant, nor that every piece begin with a fifth answered by a fourth. Both felt that the composer should take special care at the beginning of a piece to project the mode clearly; Bernhard noted in this regard that real answers were better reserved for the body of a composition. As Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out, Bernhard's consociatio and aequatio

modorum preserve in microcosm the mid-seventeenth-century conflict be-

tween outdated modal theory and incipient tonal theory.” In trying to *equate" portions of two modes a perfect interval apart Bernhard was

reaching toward the innovation of a small number of scale patterns trans-

posed to different pitch levels, yet at the same time he held on to the tradition whereby each scale pattern was associated with a specific final. Poised as it was between the two worlds of modality and tonality, and despite the resulting ambiguities, Bernhard's theories of tonal and real answers served well two generations of German theorists and practicing musicians. One final topic completes the survey of Bernhard's fugal theory. In chapter 55 of the Tractatus, Bernhard applied the term extensio modorum, an “ex-

tension of the modes," to the bringing in of points of imitation on notes

other than final and dominant. Whereas at the beginning of a composition all voices should enter on one of those two notes, later points of imitation might include entries on other notes within the mode's ambitus. As an ex-

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ample, Bernhard offered Palestrina’s “Ad te levavi,” the opening work of that composer’s Offertories of 1593.77 Bernhard identified the work as mode 4 (plagal D Dorian) and noted that the opening point of imitation begins

on the notes À and D—dominant and final of the mode. The first move-

ment away from those two notes (i.e., “the first extension") takes place in the second point of imitation, where the voices enter on E and A. Later points of imitation include entries on G and C and again on E and A before in the final point of imitation the voices once again enter on À and D. This process is similar in some ways to what we call *modulation," although Bernhard described it not as a movement to another related mode but simply as a stretching of the piece's original mode through emphasis of its less prominent notes. Bernhard's theory of extensio modorum falls squarely in the tradition established by Dressler and Calvisius in the previous century whereby points of imitation in the medium of a composition were allowed greater freedom than those of the exordium. Like the earlier theorists, Bernhard drew up no specific rules for how this was to be done, e.g., which notes of the mode aside from final and dominant were most appropriate for such treatment or how the movement away from and return to final and dominant was to be effected. Instead, he preferred to point the student toward excellent examples for study. Bernhard's theories of imitative counterpoint have occasionally been described as *archaic" because of their emphasis on the traditional techniques of canon and Palestrina-style points of imitation. ? Such a characterization fails to consider Bernhard's audience and the state of vocal music in the middle of the seventeenth century. Like Scacchi, Bernhard not only assigned fuga solely to the prima prattica, but he continued to compose from time to time in that style. His theory in fact provides very well for the average German Kapellmeister's needs and uses of imitative counterpoint. Such a musician had to be able, first, to compose motets and masses in the older style for occasional use in church and, second, to write canons both for the improvement of his technique and for the teaching of part-singing to beginners. Perhaps most important of all, Bernhard agreed with his teacher Schütz that only after a thorough grounding in the rules of the prima prattica could a composer expect to handle properly the more expressive freedom

required of the modern style.

Chapter 6

Instrumental Fugue and the Emergence of Fugal Structure in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century The history of fugal theory in Italy and Germany from Zarlino to Bernhard is primarily a history of varying attitudes toward the compositional techniques of pervading imitation and, to a lesser extent, canon as developed within the universal style of sixteenth-century counterpoint. Yet during this very period it was not vocal music but instrumental music, especially music for keyboard, that witnessed the most important developments in the direction of the late-Baroque fugue. Andrea Gabrieli, Sweelinck, Hassler, Frescobaldi, and Froberger all contributed decisively to the development of instrumental fugue before 1650. Nevertheless, no contemporary theorist of either country offered a comparably significant or thorough account of imitative keyboard music. Only Praetorius and Schonsleder even so much as acknowledged the existence of imitative counterpoint outside the confines of vocal polyphony, and both men focused their attention primarily on the keyboard genre that most closely resembled the sacred vocal style, i.e., the Italian ricercar. During the one hundred years between the midsixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, Praetorius's enumeration of learned contrapuntal techniques for the ricercar/fuga remained the only written evidence that the composing of instrumental fugue differed in any respect from the composing of a motet in the style of pervading imitation. In the third quarter of the century, however, there appeared several treatises that directly reflected instrumental composers’ preoccupation with imitative counterpoint. None of these treatises were ever published, but it

is in them that fuga was first discussed in detail from the standpoint of instrumental music. From them emerged the first theoretical formulation of fugue in the modern sense, complete in nearly all essential details.

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Theories of Fugue Italian Theorists

The *Carissimi/Bertali" Manuscripts Most treatments of fuga written in the late Renaissance and early Baroque focused primarily if not exclusively on terminology. Perhaps taking their cue from Zarlino's Istitutioni, many theorists offered in addition only minimal guidelines for the student to follow in imitative writing, and recommended instead that he seek out the works of good composers and learn from them. Those who did offer some sort of plan—e.g., Burmeister and Schonsleder—limited themselves to a scheme for bringing in the various voices one by one in a point of imitation or simple canon. Beyond that, the student was again advised to model his own works after the best available examples. Writing in 1670, Johann Adam Reincken took note of an entire program for teaching counterpoint and fugue: After students of composition have acquired a certain perfection, they are customarily led to the setting of a counterpoint against a Choral in two voices. Likewise, when they are able to write one or two obligato voices [oblighen], as the Italians call them, against it, they are further led to fugues, especially so that they can set them in stretto [ins kurtze Imitiren] or bring them in quickly one after the other.

Reincken gave no further information, but fortunately a manuscript survives that fits his description perfectly and that provides the missing details. This manuscript, along with two others that are in part concordant with it, fills one of the major gaps in our knowledge of Baroque fugal writing and deserves a much more thorough discussion than it has so far received at the hands of modern scholars.? The treatise, written in German, is entitled Regulae Compositionis and ascribed to Giacomo Carissimi. It was copied in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century by Georg Osterreich (1664-1735) and now resides in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (under the number Mus. ms. theor. 170), where it forms a part of the Bokemeyer collection.? Attention

has been drawn to the manuscript in recent times by Hellmut Federhofer,

who in 1958 published an article in which he identified two manuscripts, both to be found in Austrian libraries, that were in part concordant with it.^ These two are attributed to Antonio Bertali, the Italian-born violinist

and composer who entered the service of the Viennese imperial court in

1624 and served as court Kapellmeister from 1649 until his death in 1669. One of the manuscripts survives in the Vienna Stadtbibliothek; Musiksammlung, with the call number Ms. MH 6273/e, dated ca. 1693, the other in the Kremsmünster Benediktinerstift, call number Ms. Regenterei L 67, dated

1676.5

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

167

Federhofer determined that none of the three manuscripts was directly copied from another. Nevertheless, the two Bertali manuscripts are closely related; both include some material not in the Carissimi manuscript and lack certain sections found there. Unfortunately, none of the copies date

from the lifetime of either musician, although Reincken's description sug-

gests that the material existed during their lifetimes. Federhofer was unable to uncover any evidence showing the two attributions to be untenable and

concluded that both Bertali and Carissimi could have produced the respec-

tive manuscripts bearing their names. Although both men were exactly the same age (born in 1605), Federhofer surmised that Carissimi's work was

the earlier, and that Bertali, after obtaining a copy, revised it for his own

use. In general, however, Carissimi scholars have not accepted Federhofer's

conclusions and continue to consider the Berlin manuscript spurious.f

The heart of the manuscripts’ approach to counterpoint is the pedagogical device described by Reincken, immortalized by Johann Joseph Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725, and widely known today as “species counterpoint." The essence of species counterpoint is the systematic progression from note-against-note contrapuntal writing to two-against-one counterpoint, then to four-against-one counterpoint, and finally to more complicated types. To acquire skill in contrapuntal writing, the student is given a cantus firmus by his teacher and proceeds to add to it a voice of his own composition in order to produce a series of two-voice exercises, each more difficult than the last, according to the prescribed sequence. Once the student has mastered the various species, he is allowed to progress to more difficult forms, including counterpoint for three or more voices and imitative writing. The very word *counterpoint" betrays the origin of the technique in note-against-note, or punctus-contra-punctum, writing, and many theorists since the fifteenth century had distinguished this type of *simple" counterpoint from all other more complicated types, often referred to collectively as “diminished” or “florid.”’ The idea of a gradual, systematic progression from simple to complex was an obvious refinement, and examples can be traced as far back as the mid-sixteenth century? In Adriano Banchieri’s Cartella of 1614, for instance, we find the progression (1) note against note, (2) two minims against one semibreve (i.e., two against one), (3) four semiminims against one semibreve (four against one), (4) syncopated counterpoint, (5) fugal counterpoint, and (6) ostinato counterpoint.’ In the brief introduction, he suggested that by taking the example home and studying it carefully the student might gradually learn to write good counterpoint." There can be no question that the author who fashioned the material on species counterpoint for the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts was intimately

familiar with Banchieri's six *counterpoints." The Berlin manuscript like-

wise includes six types, labeled for the first time "species:" (1) note against note, (2) minims against semibreves, (3) *black notes" (i.e., quarter notes,

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Theories of Fugue

Banchieri's semiminims) against semibreves, (4) all sorts of note values against semibreves, (5) fugal counterpoint, and (6) fugue proper. The author thus took Banchieri's arrangement one step further to produce a progression leading through the various note values to fugue. Reincken had identified two stages in the student's learning process— the writing of various counterpoints above a cantus firmus (or Choral, as it is called in the manuscripts) and the learning of fugue. The Carissimi manuscript reflects this division. Species 1 through 4 take the student through one-to-one, two-to-one, and four-to-one exercises to the ultimate use of all note values against the cantus firmus. Species 5 and 6 then teach him first how to bring back a short theme several times against the same cantus firmus before he finally abandons the cantus firmus altogether to write a piece based entirely on a short theme. Both Bertali manuscripts omit the sixth species and instead present the exercises in one continuous progression leading to the writing of fugal counterpoint above a cantus firmus. Banchieri's contrapunto fugato was, as noted in the section on Calvisius,

a sort of ostinato technique over a cantus firmus.!! Banchieri differentiated

it from what he called contrapunto ostinato by allowing its theme to be stated at various pitch levels and in contrary motion, while the theme of contrapunto ostinato retained its same pitches throughout. In the two Bertali manuscripts the fifth species is called contrapunctus cum fuga (it is given

no title in the Carissimi manuscript) and it functions in exactly the same

way as Banchieri’s fugal counterpoint. The theme, called fuga in all three manuscripts, proceeds as in Example 6.1.

D

Example 6.1. Fugal theme. (A-Wst Mus. ms. 6273/e, fol. 41v.)

All three manuscripts offer several “observations” governing the treatment of such a theme over a cantus firmus:? 1. The mode of the theme should be the same as the mode of the cantus firmus. 2. The theme should first enter on either final or dominant. Furthermore, it

should not enter twice in a row on the same note.

3. Any entrance of the theme should be preceded by a rest so that the listener

can recognize when it enters.

4 & 5. For the sake of variety and interest, the theme should not always enter on final or dominant. Each mode has two additional notes—“mediant” [tertia intermedia] and “subdominant” [quarta intermedia]—on which the theme may enter. In addition, the composer may slip out of the mode [aus dem Tono heraus

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

169

schwingen] and then return to it, although he must not go from cantus mollis to cantus durus. 6. The student should try to bring the theme in at the very end of the piece so that the theme concludes with the final cadence.!* 7. In the middle of the piece, it is permissible to alter the theme. 8-10. There are two types of fugue in contrary motion. Fuga contraria preserves the placement of whole and half steps in the inversion; fuga riversa does not.

11. Skill with this type of counterpoint is the most that can be desired from a composer.

From the standpoint of the history of fugal theory, these observations are remarkable. They seem to have less to do with showing the student how to write “fugal counterpoint" over a cantus firmus in the manner originally conceived by Banchieri than with preparing the student for a greater challenge: namely, the writing of a movement or piece based entirely on such a theme. The student is taught to begin by adapting the theme to the mode of the piece (determined by the cantus firmus) and then placing the first two entries of the theme on either final and dominant or dominant and final. In the middle of the piece, he may treat the theme more freely, and he should bring it in on notes other than final and dominant, i.e., either on “mediant” or *subdominant" within the original mode

or on notes of closely related modes. At the end, he must bring back the

original mode and, if possible, restate the theme so that it ends together with the final cadence. Two features of this plan stand out: the advanced level of harmonic thinking— *tonic" opening followed by gradual movement away from and ultimate return to “tonic”—and the equally advanced emphasis on “formal procedures"—opening statements of the theme followed by its freer treatment in the middle of the piece and its return at the end. These two factors provide most of the ingredients necessary for our modern tripartite model for fugal writing based on an opening exposition that strongly affirms the tonic, subsequent movement away from tonic to closely related keys with freer treatment of the theme, and a return to tonic with the theme stated intact at the end. That so many characteristics of our modern fugue could be accomodated within the context of Banchieri's contrapunto fugato is astonishing. The two Bertali manuscripts contain no sixth species of counterpoint and close instead with a complete example of contrapunctus cum fuga worked out according to the preceding rules. The exercise is transcribed in Example 6.2. This *textbook" example follows to the letter the precepts laid out for

the fifth species. The mode is identified as mode 5,'’and the theme enters

first on the final C, then on the dominant G. Every statement is preceded

170

Theories of Fugue

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Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

Example 6.2, cont.

by a rest, and every rest is followed by a statement of the theme. The third, fourth, and fifth entries occur at either the “mediant” (E, entries 3 and 5) or the *sub-dominant" (E entry 4). Two of them (4 and 5) allow rhythmic alteration of the theme. Entries 6 through 9 are in contrary motion (all fuga riversa, since half-steps are not preserved) and include two on A (no.

6) and D (no. 7) that perhaps signify a modulation to D Dorian in mea-

sures 14-18 (note especially the motion of the cantus firmus in those measures). The concluding statement returns to the original form of the theme, once again beginning on the final, and brings it in as a part of the final cadence. No example concludes the discussion of species 5 in the Carissimi manuscript. Instead, the student is led directly to a sixth species, called simply

fuga and described as *the most superior of all [die vornehmste]." Here the

student learns the true reason for the rules he acquired in species 5. The section begins with a complete two-voice fugue, reproduced as Example 6.3, which is followed in the manuscript by several Observations. The first rule deals with the problem of matching the theme with an appropriate mode: 1. Observatio. Wenn das Thema auffgegeben wird, muss man erstlich consideriren in was vor [sic] einem Tono die Fuga auff das Natürlichste kónte gemacht werden. Denn diese obstehende Fuga konte auch Quinti Toni gemacht werden, wann die andere Stimme in C anfinge, wird aber Natürlicher in Octavo Tono angefangen, alss in

172

Theories of Fugue FTT

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Example 6.3. Fuga à 2. (D-Bds Mus. ms. theor. 170, p. 13.)

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

173

Quinto Tono: denn das Thema heist sol, mi, la, fa, und die andere Stimme in Octavo Tono angefangen, respondirt ihr gleichfórmig, sol, mi, la, fa." First Observation. When the theme is proposed, one must first consider in which mode the fugue could be made most naturally. The fugue above could also be made in the fifth mode if the other voice were to begin on C. It is more naturally begun in the

eighth mode, however, than in the fifth mode, because the theme is sol, mi, la, fa,

and the other voice, [when] begun in the eighth mode, responds in conformity with it, sol, mi, la, fa.

Whereas a modern student of fugue is taught to select first a key and then a theme, the reader of Berlin ms. 170 is expected to select or be sup-

plied with a theme before deciding on its mode. The author notes that the

theme of the given example (G-E-A-F) could be assigned to more than one mode. If the composer chose mode 5 (on C), the theme would begin on that mode's dominant (G) and therefore the answer would have to begin on the final (C). If he chose mode 8 (on G), the theme would begin on that mode's final (G) and be answered at the dominant (D). Either is possible, but the author expresses a preference for the latter, since it allows for exact imitation by the second voice, whereas an answer on C involves different solmization (fa, re, sol, mi instead of the original sol, mi, la, fa). It is important to point out that a tonal answer is not insisted upon and that a real answer is considered desirable, at least so long as the mode is in no way obscured or contradicted. The entrances of the theme appear in Example 6.3 as a series of twovoice points of imitation (measures 1-5, 11-14, 21-24, 28-32, and 43-47;

the only isolated statement of the theme occurs in measures 38-40). In the second Observation, this procedure is described in a way similar to that in which earlier theorists described the overlapping points of imitation in sixteenth-century motet style. That is, after the theme has been stated in all voices, the voices continue with free counterpoint until a cadence is reached, at which point the process begins again. The difference is that in the new “fugue,” as opposed to the old “pervading imitation," the same theme forms the basis for every point of imitation. To avoid monotony, therefore, the student is advised to vary the successive groups of thematic entrances. That is, the voices should not always enter in the same order (Observation 3) and, if they should happen to retain the same order in two successive points of imitation, the voices should swap starting notes (Observation 2). The example demonstrates both rules perfectly. It begins with the lower voice on G followed by the upper voice on D. For the second pair of entries, the voices enter in the same order but they swap notes: lower voice on D, upper on G. In the third, the two voices exchange leading and following roles but return to their original starting notes.

174

Theories of Fugue

Observations 4 and 5 concern the treatment of the theme in the body of

the composition. The first refers the student back to Observation 4 of the

previous species and reminds him that the theme can be brought in either on the “mediant” or “subdominant” of the mode or on prominent notes of

closely-related modes. In the two-voice fugue of Example 6.3, two state-

ments of the theme illustrate this rule by entering on the “sub-dominant” (lower voice, measure 28, and upper voice, measure 38). Observation 5 considers the use of stretto which Reincken had singled out: 5. Observatio. Je mehr die Fuga untereinander gebracht wird, je schóner und kunstreicher ist die Fuga, wenn es schon dem Nätürlichen [sic] Ton nicht gar gemäss, wird doch solches zugelassen, wegen der Zierde und Volligkeit der Fuga; Solches ist aus vorgesetzten Themate im Exempel [Example 6.4] zu sehen e.g. 0

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In diesem Exempel kömt die Fuga gleich nach einer Pausen ein, und könte solche ja nicht eher eingebracht werden.” Observation 5. The more the theme [fuga] is brought back upon itself [i.e., in stretto] the more beautiful and ingenious the fugue is. If it is not exactly according to the natural mode, this is allowed because of the decoration and fullness of the fugue; such is to be seen in the [following] example using the previous theme. [See example in German text]

In this example the theme enters immediately after one rest; it could not be brought in any sooner.

Observation 7 of the previous species had allowed for the altering of the

theme in the middle of the piece; here the student learns one technique in

which such alteration is most useful. Neither exactness of imitation nor clear presentation of the mode can easily be accomodated in stretto writing, however. As a result, this technique is not appropriate for the beginning of a piece but works very well in the middle. Reincken appears to have been particularly fascinated by the possibilities of stretto writing and expanded on the treatment given here by offering many more examples in his own treatise of 1670.

The Italian theory of tonal answers is finally presented in Observation

6, near the end of the entire discussion of fugal counterpoint and fugue. The author simply notes that a leap of a fifth must be answered by a fourth

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

175

in order to remain “within the limits" of the mode. Then he adds an important note:

NB. Es kan aber die Regul bissweilen limitiret werden, alss wenn die Fuga zimlich lang geführet, kan man die Fuga in gleichen Sprung führen, alss nehmlich, wen die Erste Stimm per Quartam oder Quintam, springt, die andere auch in simili folge, heist also die Fuga per Gradus: Sie wird aber mehrentheils zugelassen in der Composition zum Singen alss zum Spielen, denn die Fuga kan eher geführet werden per Gradus alss per Tonos.?? NB. This rule can sometimes be limited, however; e.g., when the fugue is carried on for a long time, the theme can be executed in equal leap(s], i.e., when the first voice leaps a fourth or fifth, the other voice follows similarly. This is called *Fugue by observing the steps" [Fuga per Gradus]. It is more often allowed in compositions for singing than in those for playing, because the fugue can be performed more easily by observing the steps [per Gradus] than by observing the mode [per Tonos].

Fuga per Gradus and Fuga per Tonos are the equivalents of Bernhard's aequatio and consociatio modorum, although they are given no theoretical justification of the sort that Bernhard supplied. The author allows for two situations in which real answers are acceptable even if the limits of the mode are thereby transgressed. First, he agrees with Bernhard that real answers are most commonly found in the body of the piece, after the theme and the mode have been well established, although he does not repeat Bernhard's rule for using tonal answers with leaping themes and real answers with stepwise ones. The second exception appears to be unique. Real answers are more permissible in vocal music because they are easier to sing, that is, presumably because a singer who sings from part books listens to the other voices and by nature tries to imitate the solmization exactly. Interesting as this observation is in its own right, it is perhaps most useful for what it reveals about its author. The theorist of Berlin ms. 170 was clearly familiar with both instrumental and vocal composition and wrote (or at least studied) fugues for both idioms. Observation 7 is brief and relatively unimportant. It reports the author's preference for fugal entries at the difficult intervals of seventh, ninth, and second. The last observation, however, is much more significant, since it

addresses the length of the fugue and its conclusion.

8. Observatio. Wenn die Fuga in die Viert oder fünft Tempora lang ultima geführt, muss man sich befleissigen, dass man unter die letzte Cadentz die Fuga so es móglich, auff das beste untereinander bringe, und wird alss dann, das allgemeine proverbium so in aller Künsten desideriret wird, nehmlich Finis bonus, auch in dieser verificirt werden.?!

176

Theories of Fugue

Observation 8. When the theme has finally been led through four or five sections, one must endeavor if possible to bring the theme back upon itself in the best way at the final cadence. Thus will the general proverb, desired in all the arts, also be verified in this one: Finis bonus.

In summary, the student was taught to select an appropriate mode for the theme of the fugue; present it in a series of thematic entries grouped into points of imitation; vary the successive points of imitation by changing either the starting notes of each voice or the order of entry of the voices

from one to the next; move away from the original mode with entries on

other notes of the mode or notes of other modes; introduce in the body of the fugue entrances in stretto or at unusual intervals such as the seventh or ninth; and conclude with a strong finish in which the original mode is brought back and the theme is stated one last time, in stretto if possible. This plan is well represented in Example 6.3. The only rules not illustrated are those concerning the tonal answer (since the theme includes no leap from final to dominant), stretto, and the use of unusual intervals of imitation. Comparisons with Bernhard on the one hand and with modern theory on the other clarify the position of the Carissimi/Bertali fugue in the history of fugal theory. The underlying difference between the two mid-seventeenthcentury authors rests on the number of themes being used. Both theorists understood fugue as a succession of overlapping points of imitation that began in a particular mode, moved away from it, and finally returned. Each of Bernhard's points of imitation had its own theme, but the author of the Carissimi/Bertali material wished to effect this with only one theme. Thus, he was both forced to search for variety by diversifying the several points of imitation and at the same time freed to employ such long-range formal techniques as stretto and a final return of the theme with the closing cadence. The main differences between the Carissimi/Bertali model of fugue and our modern one involve the differences between the modal system of the former and the tonal system of the latter, especially as they affect the opening exposition. Only two structural features of the modern fugue are lacking in the model of Berlin ms. 170: the countersubject and the episode. The material on species counterpoint in the two Bertali manuscripts actually forms only a portion of the material contained in them. Preceding the five species is a set of rules for the use of consonances and dissonances, and the species are followed by information on four-voice writing and the modes.? None of this extra material is to be found in the Carissimi manuscript, which is much shorter and devoted exclusively to the six species of counterpoint.” Nevertheless, the text and musical examples for the first five species in the two Bertali manuscripts (excepting the final example quoted in Example 6.2) differ in no significant respect from those in the

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

177

Carissimi manuscript. If Federhofer's hypothesis is correct and the Carissimi

manuscript represents the original form, one would have to conclude that the material on species counterpoint was first conceived by Carissimi and that Bertali's contribution to it consisted merely of eliminating species six and adding the Example 6.2 to species five. If, however, Bertali were the primary author, then Carissimi probably had nothing to do with the material in the three manuscripts, since, as Federhofer points out, it is unlikely that Carissimi, one of the most esteemed musicians in Europe, would have revised a manuscript treatise by

the expatriate Bertali. In this case, Bertali would have to be considered the

sole author, and the two different versions of the material (one with species six, the other without it) might be due to the different purposes for which the three manuscripts were copied. The Vienna Bertali manuscript appears to be a student copy. It was written out by one Christian Schweiggl, who described himself at the time as a student of the Jesuit college in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic).?* The Carissimi manuscript, on the other hand, circulated among professional musicians in north Germany, including Osterreich and possibly Reincken. This suggests that the material actually existed in two different versions—one intended primarily for students and restricted solely to the teaching of counterpoint over a cantus firmus, and the other for more accomplished musicians and including the teaching of fugue. A third possibility is that neither Bertali nor Carissimi wrote the work. The Italian origin of the material, however, and its dissemination entirely in German sources and in the German language actually place these two men among the most likely candidates. Both Carissimi and Bertali maintained strong ties to German musicians: the former, without ever traveling north of the Alps, as composition teacher to German Jesuit priests and visiting composers at the prestigious Collegium Germanicum in Rome;? the latter as violinist, composer, and ultimately court Kapellmeister in Vienna for a total of over forty years.?* Furthermore, the only other known theoretical source attributed to Carissimi, a brief singing treatise first published in Augsburg in 1692 under the title Ars cantandi, also survives only in the German language and seems to have circulated only in Germany." In short, either Carissimi or Bertali was very probably responsible for the material

on species counterpoint and fugue in all three manuscripts. Careful consid-

eration of the evidence suggests that Bertali is the more likely author and that Carissimi almost certainly had nothing to do with the material in the Berlin manuscript that now bears his name. One clue to probable authorship of the three treatments of fugue is to be found in an examination of the relevant geography. First, the three manuscripts share a great deal in common with two Italian treatises produced in northern Italy and published in Bologna: Banchieri's Cartella and Giovanni

Maria Bononcini's Musico prattico of 1673. A direct relationship between

178

Theories of Fugue

the six species of counterpoint in Berlin ms. 170 and Banchieri's similar set

of six in the Cartella has already been pointed out. With Bononcini's book,

the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts share an interest in distinguishing two types of fugue in contrary motion, one in which half steps are preserved, one in which they are not. The final tie, common to all of these treatises, is a particular classification of eight modes first espoused by Banchieri in

the 1614 treatise and sometimes referred to by modern writers as the "eight mode

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tions of the traditional eight modes used in polyphonic performance or for

keyboard accompaniment. It seems not to have been introduced in Germany before the appearance of the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts, although it became rather popular in German treatises and keyboard collections of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.?? While the material in the three Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts shows close ties with Bologna and northern Italy, the sources themselves all seem to have originated in the area around Vienna. Brünn, where the Vienna manuscript was copied, is not far north of Vienna, and Kremsmünster is not far west. The Carissimi manuscript found its way to north Germany probably through Hamburg, where Johann Adam Reincken appears to have become acquainted with it. Although the details remain unclear, Reincken apparently had some sort of connection with Vienna. He copied out a treatise attributed to the Viennese court composer Alessandro Poglietti, a work otherwise known only in Austrian sources, and he wrote a set of variations on the Mayerin theme also set by the Viennese court organist Johann Jacob Froberger.*! Vienna thus represents the most likely place from which Reincken could have acquired a copy of the Carissimi manuscript. The two fundamental concepts of species counterpoint and the eight church keys failed to take firm root in north Germany in the seventeenth century, whereas both were widely used in the south long before 1700. The most famous pedagogic work based on species counterpoint is of course the Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) of the Viennese court Kapellmeister Johann Joseph Fux. Nearly all of the late-seventeenth-century treatises and keyboard collections based on the eight church keys likewise appeared in south

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

179

Germany, including treatises by Poglietti (Vienna),? Falck (Nuremberg), and Janowka (Prague)* and keyboard collections by Kerll (Munich), Speth (Augsburg), and Murschhauser (Augsburg and Nuremberg). The tracing of all Carissimi/ Bertali manuscripts to Vienna and the concentration of their influence in south German lands does not necessarily rule out

Carissimi's authorship. Johann Caspar Kerll, another well-known Carissimi

student, could have been responsible for transmitting them to- Munich and Vienna, where he spent most of his career. Nevertheless, all of these geographical factors favor Bertali. He was born in Verona, a north-Italian city between Bologna and Vienna, and like Bononcini he began his career as a violinist before becoming known as a composer of both string music and sacred and secular vocal works. Furthermore, the many similarities between the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts, Banchieri’s Cartella, and Bononcini's Musico prattico, and the strong ties of the latter two to the Bologna musical academies, suggest that the seeds for our modern theory of fugue and its formal procedures may have first been planted in the Bologna academies. By contrast, nothing links the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts to the music theory of Carissimi's Rome. In fact, the most important theorists to come out of Rome during this period, namely Marco Scacchi and Angelo Berardi, show in their writings neither the influence of Banchieri’s work nor any common ground with the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts. The predominant influence of the Carissimi/ Bertali manuscripts in Vienna and south Germany likewise favors Bertali, whose entire career was spent there. While considerations of geography tend to support Bertali's authorship, a second factor weakens the case for Carissimi still further. Two of Carissimi's most prominent students, Christoph Bernhard in Germany and MarcAntoine Charpentier in France, wrote theoretical treatises, and neither author revealed so much as a trace of influence from Berlin ms. 170. Bernhard could conceivably have been responsible for introducing the material to Hamburg when he arrived there in 1663, but the Tractatus shows no evi-

dence of species counterpoint or Banchieri's eight church keys. Most im-

portant of all, fuga is understood in the Tractatus to be the sixteenth-century style of pervading imitation illustrated in the works of Palestrina, not the monothematic technique described in the Carissimi manuscript. Charpentier's Règles de composition of ca. 1692 likewise have nothing in common with the Berlin manuscript.?? There is evidence of neither species counterpoint nor the eight church keys, and Charpentier devoted most of his brief remarks about imitative counterpoint to the distinction between fuga and imitatione, a topic entirely absent from the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts. In fact, Charpentier directly contradicted the evidence of the Berlin manuscript when he wrote: “The Italians never compose one fugue only, but three or four together which makes their music so admirable."?? Charpentier's remark leads to a third avenue of investigation which casts

180

Theories of Fugue

Carissimi's authorship into extreme doubt. Since the description of fugue in Berlin ms. 170 is so explicit, analysis of the music of the two composers, their colleagues, and their students with these guidelines in mind is a relatively straightforward task. Investigation of these repertories suggests that it is among the instrumental composers of Bologna, Modena, and Vienna

rather than the Roman vocal composers and their disciples that we should

search for the most important developments in the period leading up to the late-Baroque fugue. Imitative counterpoint is not an important feature of the works of Carissimi. It is not present to any extent in that composer's most important genres of oratorio and cantata? nor is it found more than occasionally in his numerous motets.*! Several masses in stile antico survive under his name and include the customary points of imitation, but most are now considered spurious.? Carissimi seems to have used fuga in the way described by his student Bernhard and his fellow Roman Marco Scacchi.* That is, fugal counterpoint was apparently restricted to the stile antico and considered a technique too structurally rigid for the freedom of expression required in the modern style. Furthermore, Carissimi wrote exclusively vocal music, whereas the author of Berlin ms. 170 expressed familiarity with both vocal and instrumental writing. Whereas Carissimi used imitative counterpoint infrequently and almost entirely within the context of pervading imitation in stile antico polyphony, Bertali and his north-Italian colleagues incorporated fugue into a great deal of their instrumental music in stile moderno. Much of Bertali's music is lost, but a representative sampling survives among the twenty-four sonatas for string ensemble that were published posthumously in two volumes under the title Prothimia suavissima.* Sonata 11, one of the longest and most mature, begins with a fugue of thirty-five measures, which is transcribed in Example 6.5. Nearly every rule for fugal composition laid down in the Berlin ms. 170 is illustrated by Example 6.5. The theme's most prominent melodic motion is the descending fifth from dominant to final, and it is given a proper tonal answer. The first half of the piece consists of two points of imitation (measures 1-9 and 12-19), the second of which brings in the three voices in a different order from the first. In the

second half of the work, the harmony moves away from G transposed

Dorian to transposed Dorian on C by means of sequential passagework (measures 22-27), after which (measures 28-30) the theme is stated beginning on that note (the subdominant of the original mode). Finally, the movement closes with a return to G Dorian in measure 31 and a concluding statement of the theme in close stretto between violin I and viola da gamba. Other works for string ensemble by Italian composers of the period, including Tarquinio Merula, Maurizio Cazzati,

and Giovanni Legrenzi, include similar fugal movements. In short, there

can be little doubt that the idea of fugue described by species six of the

181

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

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182

Theories of Fugue

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Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

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Berlin ms. 170 was developed among these men and that Bertali was familiar withit, even though no copy of that material survives under his name. ‚In short, all evidence points to Bertali as the author of the Berlin ms. 170 as well as the two concordances that bear his name. The sources for this

complex of manuscripts can all be traced to south Germany, specifically

the area around Vienna, where Bertali was employed for his entire career. Their influence was also limited primarily to this region, and the source for many of their theoretical ideas can be traced to northern Italy, where Bertali grew up. Finally, Bertali's use of fugue in his instrumental ensemble music fits perfectly with species six of the Berlin manuscript. By contrast, there exists not a single factor (aside from the attribution of Berlin ms. 170) that connects Giacomo Carissimi with any of this material. The importance of the three “Carissimi/Bertali” manuscripts for the study of seventeenth-century fugue in Germany and Italy cannot be overestimated. They prove that a theoretical understanding of fugal writing little different

from our own had been devised by at least 1670 and that it grew primarily

out of the theoretical work of the Bologna theorist Adriano Banchieri. Furthermore, its original conception and early development may have taken place in the Bolognese musical academies, from where it was picked up by composers for instrumental ensemble and spread to the rest of northern Italy, and it acquired its final form in Vienna at the hands of the Italian expatriate Antonio Bertali. The manuscripts provide a ready-made formula for the analysis of fugal techniques in works of seventeenth-century composers with the promise that such a study will reveal still more about the development of the theories themselves. In short, these three treatises may hold the single most important key to proper understanding of the devel-

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

185

opment of fugue in the half century immediately preceding the career of Johann Sebastian Bach. Giovanni Maria Bononcini—Musico prattico (1673) Giovanni Maria Bononcini was born in 1642 in a small town near Modena,

between Bertali’s hometown of Verona and Banchieri's Bologna.“ Whether Bononcini studied with the famous Modenese violinist and composer Marco Uccelini is not known, but at an early age he must have gone to Modena, where he married in 1662 and finally received an appointment as violinist at the Modena Cathedral in 1671. Two years later he was elected maestro di capella of the cathedral, and in the same year he published his only treatise, entitled Musico prattico, in which he described himself as a member of the Bologna Academia Filarmonica. He died five years later in 1678 at the age of only 36. Bononcini is another of the few musicians who, like Bernhard, were equally skilled as composer and theorist. Most of his compositions consisted of sonatas and dance movements for string ensemble, but in the last years of his life he also wrote vocal music, including two collections of cantatas and one of madrigals.^ His treatise was probably the most influential work of Italian theory produced during the hundred years from 1650 to 1750, and it came to be widely known in Germany. Bononcini divided his Musico prattico into two parts, the first devoted to the elements of musical notation and solmization, the second to counterpoint.*? The material of part Il is organized in a manner very similar to that of the Berlin *Carissimi" manuscript. Following a few chapters on consonances and dissonances, chapter 7 presents what Bononcini called contrapunto semplice. He altered the meaning of this term, traditionally used to refer only to note-against-note counterpoint, so that it encompassed all fixed-ratio types, including one-to-one, two-to-one, four-to-one, and even three-to-one counterpoint. He did not use the word “species,” but he organized the four types of contrapunto semplice in ascending order from fewest to most notes. In the following chapter Bononcini introduced the term contrapunto composto to describe all other types of counterpoint. He again identified four types, including contrapunto sciolto (all note values against the cantus firmus, equivalent to Carissimi/Bertali species four), contrapunto legato, contrapunto sincopato, and contrapunto fugato (the same as Banchieri and species five of the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts). As in the Carissimi manuscript, *fugue" proper was given its own section (chapter 10 in Bononcini) following contrapunto fugato.” If Bononcini had numbered

his “species,” they would have added up to nine: four “simple counterpoints”

progressing from one-to-one to four-to-one, four “composite counterpoints” progressing from all note values against the cantus firmus to gradually more

restrictive types leading to “fugal counterpoint" in which a brief theme is brought back many times against the cantus firmus, and fugue itself.

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Theories of Fugue

Despite the similarity of organization employed by Bononcini and Bertali, however, the two theorists taught fugue and fugal counterpoint in completely different ways. Bertali’s method was almost purely practical. He introduced very little terminology and concentrated instead on the how and why of fugal writing. Bononcini, by contrast, offered no “observations" on fugal writing in his chapter on fuga, focusing instead on terminology, with Zarlino's Istitutioni as his model. The contrast between Bertali’s practical approach to imitative counterpoint and Bononcini's more scholarly one suggests that a work intended for publication was still expected to be learned and *philosophical" in the sense that it addressed the key underlying theoretical concepts of music and musical style. Anything that circulated in manuscript, on the other hand, could omit such esoteric discussions and concentrate instead on the practical details necessary to produce a good piece of music. Bononcini attempted both to elucidate the fugal terms found in Italy's most famous treatises of the past and to reconcile those terms with contemporary practice, as certain of his Italian predecessors had done, but he was no more successful than they. Although chapter 10 is entitled *Delle Fughe & Imitazioni,” the chapter begins with a definition of fuga that encompasses all imitative counterpoint: “Fugue is a repetition, carried out by the other parts, of some or all of the figures which are put down on paper for the part that begins to sing.” Bononcini then noted that fuga consisted of many types, and he listed them as fuga legata or obligata, fuga sciolta or libera, fuga propria or regolare, fuga impropria or irregolare (commonly called imitazione), fuga autentica, fuga plagale, fuga retta, fuga contraria, and fuga contraria riversa. Closer examination of the first four types exposes an underlying inconsistency in Bononcini's plan. Fuga legata and fuga sciolta were equated, respectively, with the words canon and soggetto. The former category comprised, according to

Bononcini’s description, all canonic technique; the latter, free imitation at a

perfect interval?! Together, therefore, they embrace all imitative counterpoint except free imitation at an imperfect interval. Bononcini defined the third category, fuga propria, as imitative counterpoint that preserved whole and half steps.? He did not indicate whether this applied to both canon and free imitation, but he used the term only with respect to the latter. Presuming that he intended it to apply only to free imitation and not to canon, then fuga propria would have to be a subtype of fuga sciolta, since, as Zarlino had made clear, all imitative counterpoint that preserves half

steps must take place at a perfect interval, but not all imitative counter-

point at a perfect interval must preserve half steps. . According to Bononcini’s definitions, therefore, fuga propria consists of all examples of fuga sciolta (i.e., free imitation at a perfect interval) in which the imitation is exact, and the reader should logically expect fuga impropria to consist of all fuga sciolta in which the imitation is not exact.

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

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Such is not the case. Bononcini equated fuga impropria with imitazione and defined it with these words: L'imitazione è una replica d'alcune, 6 di tutte le figure poste nella prima parte, che canta, fatta da altre parti; se si replicheranno solamente alcune figure, l'imitazione sarà sciolta; se tutte sarà legata: queste repliche poi si fanno alla seconda, terza, sesta, e settima, à differenza della fuga, che si puó solamente fare all'unisono, quarta, quinta, & ottava.? Imitation is a repetition, carried out by the other parts, of some or of all the figures placed in the part that first sings. If only some of the figures are repeated, the imitation is sciolta; if all, legata. These repetitions are made at the second, third, sixth, and seventh, in contrast to fugue, which may make them at the unison, fourth, fifth, or octave.

Taken by itself, this definition concurs with similar definitions in the writings of Artusi, Tigrini, and Sweelinck. Integrated with the rest of Bononcini’s chapter, however, it makes no sense, because there exist three different techniques with which imitazione/fuga impropria might be paired. In the first place, the division of imitazione into legata and sciolta suggests that it should be paired with fuga, just as it was in Le istitutioni, and that the two techniques of fuga and imitazione should be given equal weight. Bononcini expressly contradicted this possibility by making imitazione a subtype of fuga (that is, fuga impropria) and pairing it with another subtype (fuga propria). This pairing of fuga propria with fuga impropria is itself not substantiated by the respective definitions, however. Fuga propria is exact imitation, but no mention of inexact imitation appears in the definition of imitazionelfuga impropria. Instead, this technique is described as imitation at the imperfect intervals, and thus it should properly be paired with yet a third category, fuga sciolta, which is defined as imitation at a perfect interval. In effect, Bononcini's imitazionelfuga impropria tries to function simultaneously as the opposite of three different fugal techniques— fuga, fuga sciolta, and fuga propria. The actual layout of Bononcini's material suggests that, notwithstanding the various definitions, his real understanding of imitative counterpoint was much closer to the threefold system of Pontio and Cerreto than to Zarlino's original fourfold plan. Under the broad heading of fuga as imitative counterpoint in general, chapter 10 is devoted primarily to “fugue proper" and its various types (pp. 81-88), by which Bononcini seems to have understood free imitation at the perfect intervals constructed as a

series of points of imitation. At the end of the chapter, he tacked on the

second technique, *imitation" (pp. 88-89), with a meaning probably very similar to that described forty years earlier by Schonsleder, i.e., the imitation of brief motives employed in a very free and unstructured manner. After an intervening chapter on invertible counterpoint, Bononcini devoted

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Theories of Fugue

all of chapter 12 to the third category, canonic technique. In short, had

chapter 10 begun with definitions of canon, fugue proper (fwga propria), and imitation (fuga impropria) as the three primary categories of imitative

counterpoint and then been followed by individual discussions of each, the

material on imitative counterpoint would have made perfect sense.

But Bononcini was clearly familiar both with Zarlino's original four categories and with the earlier theorist's concern for exact vs. inexact imitation, and he felt compelled to work all of this into his book. Bononcini was unable (indeed, it was impossible) to reconcile Zarlino's plan with his own, and his forcing of the traditional fuga legata, fuga sciolta, imitazione legata, and imitazione sciolta into his underlying threefold system caused the inconsistencies already noted. For instance, he attached fuga legata to all canon, rather than to canon at the perfect intervals or canon that featured exact imitation. This of course left no room for imitazione legata, which he nevertheless insisted on defining as canon at the imperfect intervals. Furthermore, neither term appears in chapter 12, where the word canon is used exclusively. Fuga sciolta is free imitation at the perfect intervals, which fits neither the corresponding definition of fuga legata (according to which it should refer to free imitation in general) nor Zarlino's original definition of it as exact imitation. Imitazione sciolta appears to be the proper technique to contrast with it, since the one involves free imitation at imperfect intervals and the other at perfect intervals, but this pairing is never suggested in the book. Finally, the attempt to introduce exact vs. inexact imitation as distinct from imitation at perfect vs. imperfect intervals likewise failed. The latter two categories are represented by fwga sciolta and imitazione sciolta but never paired, while the category of inexact imitation (which should presumably be fuga improprialimitazione, i.e., the opposite of fuga propria) is never actually defined. In short, without Zarlino's four terms or mention of exact vs. inexact imitation, Bononcini’s Musico prattico would have presented a clear and consistent picture of Italian fugal theory in the 1670s. With them, the work simply proves both the incredible persistence of Zarlino's authority and the incompatibility of that theorist's original plan for imitative counterpoint with "fugue" and *imitation" as they had come to be used by most Italian musicians of the Baroque. The remaining types of imitative counterpoint defined by Bononcini refer exclusively to *fugue proper" and are clear and unambiguous. Fuga autentica and fuga plagale are simply Diruta's authentic (ascending) and plagal (descending) subjects.** Like Bertali, Bononcini described two types of imitation in contrary motion: fuga contraria, in which whole and half steps are not reproduced exactly by the answering voice, and fuga contraria riversa, in which they are reproduced exactly. The second type is accompanied by a chart (reproduced in Example 6.6) showing which notes of the first voice must be matched with which notes of the inverted voice, and

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

189

Bononcini pointed out that B must always be answered by F (and vice

versa) if the half steps are to appear in their proper place.

Example 6.6. Proper pairing of notes in fuga contraria riversa. (Bononcini, Musico prattico, p. 84.)

Finally, Bononcini added the adjective perfetta to describe tonal answers. These, he noted, were considered “perfect” even though they did not involve exact imitation, *because they embrace all of the notes of the octave that forms the mode [of the composition]."?" He further undermined his own attempts to reintroduce Zarlino's fuga and imitatione by placing this technique not under fuga impropria, i.e., inexact imitation, but under fuga propria or regolare, exact imitation. Bononcini did not follow Bernhard in recommending that tonal answers be used primarily for themes that

move by leap. He allowed for tonal answers with both themes that moved

primarily by step or third (fugae compostae) and themes with leaps of a fourth or fifth (fugae incompostae), and he provided two examples of each (Examples 6.7 and 6.8). A few additional terms appear in chapter 12 on canon.” Bononcini noted in passing that the word canon originally meant rule and that canonic pieces

were so called because they were written “with rules." He adapted canone

sciolto o libero and canone legato o obligato from Picerli,9 to refer, respectively, to canon in which all sorts of consonances and dissonances were used and canon in which only certain ones were used. He introduced Zarlino's guida and consequenti to label the leading and all following voices, respectively, and he identified a canone infinito or circolare as one that could be performed ad infinitum. The chapter concludes with a brief guide to the writing of canons (pp. 100-101) followed by a great many study canons by the author (pp. 101-108) and a list of additional examples found in the works of composers as far back as Josquin des Prez (p. 109). Bononcini offered little practical advice for the writing of non-canonic imitation. In the section on *fugue proper," he noted that at the beginning of the piece the second voice should enter neither too soon nor too late, that in the middle of the piece the voices could be as close together as desired (i.e., in stretto), and that the tenor and soprano voices should cor-

respond to each other, as should alto and bass. These remarks are similar

190

Theories of Fugue

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Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

191

to those found in Le istitutioni and suggest that Bononcini was strongly

influenced by that work in his decision to emphasize terminology and avoid

practical details. Elsewhere in the book, Bononcini added that at the beginning of the piece the voices should normally enter not closer together than one measure [battuta], and that statements of the theme in the middle of the piece should be preceded by a rest.*! Before proceeding to a discussion of the modes, Bononcini concluded his presentation of counterpoint with one example each of two-voice, three-

voice, and four-voice writing.? All are imitative and appear to fit somewhere

between

Bernhard's series of points of imitation and Bertali's

monothematic series of expositions. The two-voice exercise (pp. 110-11),

for instance, consists of three points of imitation. The opening theme never

returns after the opening point of imitation, and the second and third points

of imitation are built with a common theme that bears no resemblance to theme 1. The four-voice exercise (pp. 115-19) presents its opening theme in two points of imitation (one at the beginning, the other at the midway point of the composition), but it also includes other points of imitation featuring unrelated themes that are never combined with the opening theme or with each other. No monothematic fugue of the sort offered in the Carissimi manuscript is to be found. For the study of fugal theory, Bononcini's Musico prattico is a much less significant document than are the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts. No new theoretical ideas or practical suggestions appear in Bononcini's work, and the preoccupation with terminology simply underscores the incompatibility of Zarlino's original plan for imitative counterpoint with the state of

fugal composition in the 1670s. Nevertheless, the work had a tremendous

impact north of the Alps, where Bononcini became the last Italian theorist to exert any significant influence on Baroque fugal theory. His terms crop up in a number of German treatises and were nearly all incorporated into Johann Gottfried Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732. The importance of the Musico prattico to German musicians was felt to be so considerable that in 1701 it became one of the few works of Italian theory up to that time to be published in German translation.™ German Theorists Johann Jacob Prinner—Musicalischer Schlissl (1677)

The theoretical writings of Antonio and Christoph Bernhard all exerted a theory of the 1660s and 1670s. The ment of fugue during this period came figure, Johann Jacob Prinner. Born in

Bertali, Giovanni Maria Bononcini, decisive influence on south-German most extensive south-German treatfrom the pen of an otherwise minor 1624, Prinner received at least some

192

Theories of Fugue

of his musical training in northern Italy (Sienna) and held positions as or-

ganist in Kremsmünster (1652-59) and Kapellmeister in Graz before com-

ing to Vienna in 1670.*^ Although praised highly by the Imperial court Kapellmeister Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer, Prinner was unable to obtain a position at the nearby court of Kromériz (German: Kremsier; now in the Czech Republic), and not until 1680, at the age of 56, was he placed in the

service of the Emperor as harpsichord instructor to the Archduchess Maria Antonia. Prinner remained in Vienna on the Imperial payroll until his death in 1694.

Although much of his career was associated with organ and harpsichord playing, Prinner composed no keyboard music that has survived. He was apparently proficient as a string player, and a number of ensemble suites are to be found in the Krométíz archive. Aside from a group of strophic songs for soprano and continuo, his only other surviving work 1s a manuscript treatise entitled “Musicalischer Schlissl [sic]” and now located at the Library of Congress under the call number ML 95.P79.° The treatise, dated 1677, is one of the first treatises to discuss fugue exclusively as a genre of keyboard music. Prinner was clearly trained within the north-Italian/ Viennese tradition of Banchieri, Bertali, and Bononcini. The first half of the treatise consists of thirteen numbered chapters discussing fundamental topics of music theory, in which he included both species counterpoint (chapter 9) and the eight church keys (chapter 6). The second half, where Bernhard's influence is most apparent, is divided into four unnumbered sections, devoted successively to thoroughbass, imitative and invertible counterpoint, a dictionary of musical terms, and tips on organ playing. Bernhard's musical figures are prominent in the dictionary, and Prinner also relied heavily on the northern theorist's discussion of invertible counterpoint. The Musicalischer Schlissl is primarily a practical work; some of its most valuable information concerns the fundamentals of violin playing

and the various skills, such as transposition and modulation, required of organists. Nevertheless, Prinner paid careful attention to the theoretical issues of imitative counterpoint, and he attempted to strike a balance between, on the one hand, the categorization and description of various types of fugue and, on the other, the practical description of how a musician should go about creating one. In the section on fugue, Prinner finally made explicit the threefold division of imitative counterpoint into canon, fugue proper, and imitation that lurks beneath the surface of Bononcini's Musico prattico. Like Bononcini, Prinner used fuga to refer to all imitative counterpoint, and in his opening paragraph he noted the word's derivation from the verb “to flee."59 He divided the technique into two main types, labeled “regular” and “irregular." “Irregular fugue” was called fuga imitationis, a technique that Prinner dismissed with one sentence:

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

193

Die arth der fugen ist also Unterschidlich, nemblich fuga imitationis oder ein fuge in einen Jedwedern buchstaben dass angefangene Subiectum nachmachet Jedoch bey denen derzugehórigen reglen nicht Verbindlich bleibet, sondern nach gefallen hin und her gehet.* Fugue is of various sorts, namely [first of all] fuga imitationis or a fugue [which] imitates the beginning subject in every letter but does not remain strictly bound by the rules associated with [regular fugue], rather it moves around as it likes

To illustrate his meaning, Prinner added the exercise reproduced in Ex-

ample 6.9. Prinner's fuga imitationis clearly describes the same sort of unstructured imitation of brief motives embraced by Schonsleder's imitatio nearly half a century earlier. Since the key characteristic of the technique

was an absence of rules, so that the composer was free to proceed as he

wished, additional remarks were unnecessary. Prinner divided *regular fugues" into two types. For the first, he coined the term gemeine Fugen (common fugues) because, as he put it, “they are produced universally by all composers and organists.”# The second, canonische Fugen, Prinner considered less important, since they were too difficult for students and could seldom be used at the organ. For the sake of completeness, however, he set aside several pages near the end of the section for canonic technique. Complicated terminology was avoided, and a step-by-step guide suggested how to facilitate canonic writing by adding notes a few at a time to each voice.” By far the most important material in Prinner's section concerns gemeine Fugen. These he characterized as the type *that can be improvised by all

organists, who show their art by performing the most beautiful subjects with

their countersubjects, so that when one person gives another a theme for a fugue, the latter can proceed immediately off the top of his head.""? Near the

end of the section, Prinner wrote out an entire Fuga primi toni as an example of a common fugue."' Although statements of its theme are not grouped into points of imitation as neatly as are those of the fugue in the Berlin Carissimi manuscript, the two pieces are otherwise very similar in style. Prinner's fugue

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194

Theories of Fugue

is likewise based on the tripartite model that begins with statements of the theme at final and dominant followed by harmonic movement away from the mode with statements of the theme outside of final and dominant before the theme finally returns at its original pitch to conclude the fugue. Prinner focused his “theorizing” on the first two entries of the theme. The Scacchi-Siefert quarrel and its aftermath had apparently reached as far south as Vienna, where it prompted Prinner to write thirty years later that musicians continued to disagree about “which is better, whether one should ob-

serve the mode more than the solmization.”” After pointing out that at the

beginning of a gemeine Fuge all voices were required to enter on either final or dominant (although in no particular configuration), Prinner expressed a preference for preserving solmization at the expense of mode. To support his case, he composed two brief points of imitation, one built upon the five-note stepwise theme with solmization re-mi-fa-sol-la, the other upon its inversion. (See Examples 6.10 and 6.11.) Both were given real answers as prescribed for such themes by Bernhard, and Prinner justified the second in this

way:

Aus dem vorgesetzten Exempl mechte mir aber einer Vorwerffen, und sagen, wie

das das [sic] erste subiectum Primi toni, das andere aber secundi toni seye, also

das es sich nicht in dem ersten sondern in dem andern ton Ende, dass ist gewiss ein guete frag, und braucht einer spitzfindigen ausslegung, Ich beandtworte aber solche auf dise weis, das, ich anfangs Vermeldet ehe ich das subiectum in anfang in das exempl gesetzt habe, das man, sovill miglich bey der solmisation Verbleiben solle. Wan man dan darbey verbleibet, wie khan man dan anders Verfahren als auf Vorgeschribene manir. Bleibt man aber nicht darbey, und will den tonum observiren, so müste man der solmisation zu khurz thun.?

From the preceding example [6.11] one might wish to reproach me and ask how the first subject can be of the first mode but the second of the second mode, i.e., so that it ends in the second mode rather than in the first. That is certainly a good question and requires a subtle explanation. I answer in this way: at the beginning [of the section] I announced, before I set the subject in the beginning [of] this example, that one should remain as much as possible with the solmization. If one then remains with it, how can one proceed if not in the manner shown above? If one does not remain with it, however, and wishes to observe the mode,

he would have to make the solmization too short.

Prinner recognized that the themes of Examples 6.10 and 6.11 could not be given tonal answers without, as he put it, “shortening the solmization” (i.e., answering the theme's five steps with only four through the use of either a repeated note or a chromatic progression). He disapproved of this solution, but because he was primarily interested in monothematic fugues as described by Bertali rather than the Renaissance style of pervading imitation still advocated by Bernhard, Prinner was also unable to accept the

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

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Prinner, Two examples of real answers.

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for use in real answers.

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

197

fourths and fourths by fifths, and he added that the adjective “perfect” was occasionally used (as we have seen in Bononcini) to describe any combina-

tion of subject and answer that exactly filled the octave ambitus of the

mode." He did not repeat Bernhard’ rule for matching different types of themes with different types of answers, nor did he suggest that tonal answers worked best at the beginning of a composition while real answers

were best reserved for the body. In short, the predominance of arguments

in favor of real answers and the lack of serious attention paid to tonal answers leave the reader of Prinner's text with the impression that, like Siefert, Prinner acknowledged the existence of tonal answers but preferred never to use them because they “destroyed” the solmization of the theme. This impression is directly contradicted by ten pages of examples placed

near the end of the material on gemeine Fuge." Prinner offered between

ten and twenty examples of subjects and answers for each of the six modes with finals on D, E, F, G, A, and C. Each subject appears directly above its answer in order to indicate that either version may begin the composition, but beyond that not a single observation from Prinner's text is borne out by the almost 100 examples. Tonal answers outnumber real ones almost two to one (sixty tonal, thirty-five real); in fact, nineteen of the twenty examples in the D mode are tonal. As a result, the solmization for which Prinner professed such concern is preserved in only about one third of the examples. Even more startling is Example 6.13 from the D mode, in which the same theme used by Prinner in Example 6.11 is given an answer that *cuts short" the solmization in the very way that Prinner had earlier condemned.”* The modes are frequently not paired according to the chart of Example 6.12. In particular, the F mode seldom introduces a B flat and is never paired with the B flat mode, while the G mode is frequently paired with the D mode to which an F sharp has been added. In addition, musica

ficta is often introduced in ways not explained in Prinner's text. For in-

stance, a B flat is frequently added to the D mode, making this mode a transposition of rather than an *equivalent" to the A mode. Finally, one

example in the G mode even violates the rule about all voices beginning on

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final and dominant—its voices begin instead on final and subdominant.

Example 6.13. Prinner, tonal answer in the

on fuga, pp. 9.)

D mode. (Musicalischer Schlissl, section

198

Theories of Fugue

Prinner's difficulty with abstract thinking and relating theory to practice reflects the no-man's land between modality and tonality in which he was clearly trapped. Bernhard's consociatio and aequatio modorum had taken the old system as far as it could go, and Prinner's attempts to simplify

Bernhard and bring his theories into line with current musical practice took

the system beyond its breaking point. As it stands, the chart of Example 6.12 is faithful neither to the modal system nor to the tonal system, but adding the kind of musica ficta that appears in Prinner's brief examples would bring it very close to eighteenth-century tonality. The intuitive perception of Prinner's ear more than compensated for the muddled logic of his mind. As a result, the ninety-odd examples of real and tonal answers offer much practical information to the modern scholar who studies them carefully. Although conjunct motion (mostly seconds and thirds) predominates, there is to be found within that restriction a wealth of theme types and nearly every conceivable kind of answer, including two or three alternatives for some themes. A number of observations can be made: themes in the D mode almost always feature B flat instead of B natural and are usually treated like the modern minor; all but one of the themes in the D mode are answered tonally; fourteen of the seventeen themes in the E mode are given real answers and often, but not always, feature the *subdominant" A; almost no B flats are used in the F mode, and fifteen of its twenty themes have tonal answers; real and tonal answers are evenly split in the G mode; frequent F sharps in the G mode tend to erase its Mixolydian character; most of the answers in the C and A modes are tonal (fifteen of twenty-one); and themes supplied with two alternative answers are not necessarily given one real and one tonal answer. Further study of Prinner's examples would best be undertaken in the context of contemporary south-German keyboard fugues, but there is no question that Scacchi would have criticized the ambiguous modal situations created by many of them, and Bernhard would certainly have recommended that some should not be introduced at the beginning of a composition. Johann Adam Reincken—Erste Unterricht zur Composition (1670) The last German theorist from the third quarter of the seventeenth century to be considered is the Hamburg organist, composer, and theorist Johann Adam Reincken. Reincken lived from 1623 until 1722, and represents a direct link between Sweelinck's pupil Heinrich Scheidemann and Johann Sebastian Bach. He studied with the former and eventually succeeded him as organist of the Katherinenkirche, while he heard the latter perform when Bach was at the height of his career as an organist.” In the 1660s and early 1670s he participated with his colleagues Weckmann and Bernhard in the weekly concerts of the Collegium Musicum, and in 1678 he co-founded with Johann Theile the first public opera house outside of Italy. Although

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one of the most highly-respected performers of his day, Reincken left be-

hind fewer than a dozen known keyboard pieces.# His other surviving works include six ensemble sonatas published under the title Hortus musicus

in 1687*! and one sacred vocal composition.” As a theorist, Reincken is usually described simply as *a commentator on Sweelinck's composition primer,”® but his interest and abilities in music theory were far more wide-ranging than such a characterization would suggest. Before World War II the Hamburg library possessed three theory manuscripts in Reincken's hand.# Most of this material consisted of copies of other treatises, but Reincken made his own contribution to music theory in one of them (Hamburg Ms. ND VI 5384) dated 1670. Reincken's study of fugue in this manuscript shows that he was acquainted with the most important theoretical ideas of seventeenth-century Italy, namely the Diruta/ Scacchi theory of tonal answers and the north-Italian/Bertali monothematic fugue. In his own writing, Reincken chose to delve more deeply into certain specific aspects of each. Thus, the material on fugue does not constitute a thorough, systematic outline of either the underlying theoretical concepts and terminology (as in Zarlino and Sweelinck) or the practical rules for writing a fugue (as in Bertali). Rather, Reincken addressed the topic in a series of five brief, loosely-related sections, each devoted to a particular problem of fugal writing. These included (1) how to handle the opening imitation, (2) the use of stretto, (3) imitation in inversion, (4) fugue with

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Example 6.14.

A real answer would be incorrect at the beginning of this piece, Reincken pointed out, although in the middle of the piece it would be permissible. Reincken went on to say that other altered versions of the theme could also be allowed later in the piece, and he offered several such versions, as shown in Example 6.15. Such thematic freedem might accompany a movement away from the mode, as described in the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts, but

Theories of Fugue

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at the end of the piece the composer was obliged to return to the original

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Reincken then proceeded to tackle the more difficult problem of how to

answer themes that moved by step. Like Prinner, he was interested primarily in monothematic fugue. He was unwilling, therefore, to follow Bernhard in disallowing such themes at the beginning of a piece, but neither did he choose Prinner's *solution" of simply disregarding the mode. Instead, Reincken experimented with several configurations of subject and answer and noted which ones remained most faithful to the mode and which ones violated the ambitus most blatantly. He first put down an example that he considered, if not entirely incorrect, at least “disagreeable to the ear." (See Example 6.16.) To begin a fugue with this configuration of subject and answer in the first mode (D Dorian) would be undesirable because the answer enters on the “supertonic” note E. In order to improve the example, Reincken suggested swapping subject and answer and reassigning the theme to mode 9 (A Aeolian).** He illustrated with Example 6.17.9 Here the subject enters on the dominant of mode 9 and is answered at the final. The answer is thus a *subdominant" real answer, but the voices enter on the proper notes of the mode and the offending “subdominant” note is much less prominent than the *supertonic" of the previous example. Reincken then returned to the *bad" example and showed how it might also be made more acceptable in the original mode by placing the offend-

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

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ing “supertonic” E in a less conspicuous position below the top voice (Example 6.18). Reincken concluded his study of real and tonal answers with a few random comments. He noted disapprovingly that many composers “in the modern style” preferred not to worry about tonal answers and the projection of mode, which by this time had come to be considered one of “the old rules." He remarked that modes 1 and 2 (authentic and plagal D Dorian) were the modes in which tonal answers were most commonly used, especially if the theme touched on the dominant or included a B flat.? He finished with a few words about the principal cadence notes to be used in fugues (final, dominant, and *mediant"). The second section addressed the technique of stretto introduced in the Berlin *Carissimi" manuscript. Reincken began with a description of species counterpoint clearly based on the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts,” but rather than paraphrase or copy out the six species, he focused on the tech-

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nique that intrigued him most. Like Bertali, he noted that stretto writing required a great deal of freedom in the handling of imitation. Reincken

first wrote out several examples in which the intervals were imitated ex-

actly, including Example 6.19. Exact imitation in stretto writing was a rarity, however. Much more common, according to Reincken, was Example 6.20, in which the opening second of the upper voice is answered by a third in the lower voice, and the upper voice's half note is answered by a quarter note. Reincken gave such free alteration of the answering voice the name fuga mixta, in contrast to the more directe type in which exactness of imitation prevailed. À composer should feel free to alter intervals and rhythms in stretto imitation.

Example 6.20.

Reincken introduced the Latin expression fuga inversa and the German expressions umbgekehrte Fuga and umbgewandte Fuga for imitation in inversion.”' He showed no interest in exact vs. inexact imitation of the sort described by Bertali's fuga contraria and fuga riversa, and recommended

instead that the composer feel free to introduce the same sort of intervallic

and rhythmic alterations allowed in stretto writing. No rules were given, and the student was directed to the works of good composers for further ideas on the construction of these fugues. | In the fourth section, on fugues with two themes, Reincken drew an explicit connection with invertible counterpoint. These fugues were called contrafugen. Since the goal was to explore various combinations of the

Fugue in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

203

two themes, Reincken advised the composer to work out the combinations beforehand in invertible counterpoint in order to make the task of compo-

sition easier. Again, the composer should feel free to alter intervals and rhythms of the themes for the sake of part-writing. The first four of Reincken's sections show many similarities with Bertali's description of fugue. Both theorists were interested exclusively in the newer monothematic fugue rather than in Bernhard's series of points of imitation; both recognized the overall fugal *form" as one that began and ended with

a strong affirmation of mode and theme; both encouraged movement away

from the mode and freer treatment of the theme in the middle; and both

favored the use of stretto. The primary difference is to be found in the

much greater prominence given by Reincken to the opening imitation, a topic relegated to one of the very last “Observations” in the Berlin Carissimi manuscript. In this sense, Reincken's study of fugue represents an important advance on the north-Italian model. The regularity of the exposition in an eighteenth-century tonal fugue—with its alternation of tonic and dominant, and fitting of the subject/answer combination into the key— forms one of its most fundamental characteristics. Reincken's emphasis on this portion of the fugue, although undertaken within seventeenth-century modality, reflects its growing importance, and his thoughtful consideration of the problems inherent in preserving both mode and imitation made an important contribution to theoretical writing on this topic. In so doing,

Reincken became one of the first writers in either Germany or Italy to take the

theory of tonal answers as created for stile antico vocal music and transfer it in its many details to the monothematic fugue of the middle Baroque. In the fifth and final section, Reincken did actually *comment on" and *update" Sweelinck's translation. The topic was invertible counterpoint, a technique that drew the attention of an entire group of contemporary northGerman theorists. Centered in Hamburg, these men worked primarily from Sweelinck's Compositions-Regeln to develop a new sort of fugue based on the treatment of two or more themes in a continuous display of invertible counterpoint. To understand Reincken's contribution, we must turn now to the work of these musicians.

Chapter 7

Invertible Counterpoint and the Hamburg Circle of Theorists Sweelinck’s legacy to north-German musicians took two primary forms and extended over two generations. The first, his teaching of organ playing and composition, came to fruition in the work of his direct students, especially Heinrich Scheidemann and Jacob Praetorius of Hamburg (and Samuel Scheidt, farther away in Halle). The second, his teaching of Zarlinian counterpoint, played a surprisingly influential role among Sweelinck's students' students, Matthias Weckmann and Johann Adam Reincken, as well as among their colleagues Christoph Bernhard, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Theile. Not all of these men were from north Germany: Weckmann and Bernhard came north from Dresden, where they had worked under Heinrich Schütz; Theile was born and raised in the Thuringian town of Naumburg, and had also briefly studied with Schütz. But in the 1660s and 1670s all five lived in close contact in Hamburg and Liibeck,! and together they undertook a systematic exploration of the possibilities inherent in learned counterpoint, in particular the combining of invertible counterpoint with fugue. What they thereby created took many forms, the most significant of which led to the fugal countersubject and the permutation fugue. The theoretical basis for their study is recorded in two of the so-called “Sweelinck theory manuscripts," formerly housed in the Hamburg Stadtsbibliothek and missing since World War II. Both contained the material derived by Sweelinck from Zarlino, including that on fugue discussed

above in chapter 2, as well as information derived from Zarlino's chapters

on invertible counterpoint. In addition, one of the manuscripts, Hamburg Ms. ND VI 5384, in Reincken's hand, contained the latter's remarks on fugue discussed in the preceding chapter. The other, Ms. ND VI 5383, most

of which was copied by Weckmann, included new material on invertible counterpoint most likely written by Weckmann himself. It is with this latter material, and the way in which it is derived from Zarlino's chapters on

invertible counterpoint in Le istitutioni, that we must begin.

Zarlino was one of the first theorists to discuss the technique of invertible counterpoint, to which he dedicated two chapters of Le istitutioni. In

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chapter 56, he dealt exclusively with invertible counterpoint for two voices;

in chapter 62, he discussed invertible counterpoint for three voices. Zarlino referred to both as contrapunto doppio, by which he understood a canon

whose two or three voices were also performable when harmonically inverted.? The original version, in which voice A appeared above voice B, Zarlino called the principale or principal version; the inversion, in which voice B appeared above voice A, he called the replica, i.e., the *answer" or "repetition." A piece of triple counterpoint generally allowed for more than one replica. Zarlino identified two types of invertible counterpoint, the first in which both principale and replica proceeded in ordinary motion, the second in which the replica proceeded in contrary motion from its principale. He further subdivided the first type into two, namely at the twelfth and at the tenth. Double counterpoint at the octave was not mentioned.? The several rules that Zarlino provided for writing invertible counterpoint at the twelfth can be summarized briefly: (1) the sixth should be avoided, since it inverts to a dissonance [the seventh]; (2) the distance between voices should not exceed a twelfth; (3) the voices should not cross; (4) 7-6 suspensions should be avoided [since they become 6-7 progressions when inverted]; (5) 2-3 and 4-3 suspensions may be used [they invert to 11-10 and 9-10 suspensions]; and (6) a minor tenth should not proceed to either an octave or a twelfth.f Zarlino observed further that the inversion could be effected either by raising the lower voice an octave while dropping the upper voice a twelfth or by raising the lower voice a twelfth and dropping the upper voice an octave. Zarlino's rules for counterpoint at the tenth included the following: (1) parallel consonances must be avoided [parallel thirds and sixths invert to parallel octaves and fifths]; (2) no suspensions may be used; (3) an isolated sixth is permissible; (4) voice crossing is permissible so long as the interval between them does not exceed a fourth; (5) the distance between voices may exceed a tenth but not a twelfth; and (6) fourths and fifths must be handled very carefully." To these he added a few warnings about specific instances of voice leading, and he advised the student to write both principale and replica simultaneously to avoid errors. Again, Zarlino pointed out that the inversion could be effected by moving one of the voices a tenth and the other an octave, and he described how to make triple counterpoint by adding a voice in parallel tenths above the lower voice of a two-voice principale. The second major type of invertible counterpoint, 1.e., in contrary mo-

tion, could be effected at any interval. Zarlino warned that suspensions

should always be avoided, and he added a few recommendations about specific interval progressions.? The chapter included examples of all three

types of invertible counterpoint, to which Zarlino added still further ex-

amples in his 1573 edition. In chapter 62, Zarlino composed several canons in triple counterpoint to show how a composer might approach this

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difficult technique. For each example, he enumerated several rules of the

same sort as those given for double counterpoint. Sweelinck translated faithfully Zarlino's rules for counterpoint at the twelfth, tenth, and in contrary motion. All of the rules from chapter 56 can be found on pp. 62-64 of the modern edition,’and Zarlino's many ex-

amples from the 1573 edition fill pp. 62-68. Immediately thereafter (pp.

69—71), Sweelinck placed the three-voice examples and their explanations from Zarlino's chapter 62. Although elsewhere in the treatise Sweelinck incorporated several canons by himself and his English colleague John Bull,

no new examples of invertible counterpoint were added.

Following this material in Ms. ND VI 5383, Weckmann added his own study of invertible counterpoint, entitled Kurtze doch deutliche Regulen von den gedoppelten Contrapuncten.? His rules for counterpoint at the twelfth included five of Zarlino's six rules.!! In addition, Weckmann suggested that two voices could be expanded to four by adding one voice in parallel thirds above the top voice and another in parallel thirds below the bottom voice. Although the five rules appeared in the same order as in Zarlino and Sweelinck, the text was copied from neither source. For counterpoint at the tenth the author included only two rules, both borrowed from Zarlino/Sweelinck: the prohibition against both suspensions and dissonances of any kind, and that against parallel thirds and sixths.'? Weckmann’s approach to invertible counterpoint differs in two funda-

mental respects from that of Le istitutioni. First, all of the examples in the

Kurtze doch deutliche Regulen are relatively short, frequently only two or three measures in length, with a few of eight or ten measures. They are in no way comparable to Zarlino's canonic examples of twenty to twenty-five measures. Second, nearly ninety percent of this portion of Ms. ND VI 5383 addresses invertible counterpoint at the octave, a topic never mentioned by Zarlino or Sweelinck. The predominately “fugal” nature of the examples and the emphasis on counterpoint at the octave suggest strongly that the author was no longer interested primarily in the principale and replica of two-voice canons and that he had instead turned his attention to the task of writing fugues with two themes. Before considering the details of invertible counterpoint at the octave, we must next examine the treatments of invertible counterpoint in the writings of Bernhard and Reincken. Bernhard's discussion of invertible counterpoint exists today appended to manuscript copies of both the Tractatus and the Ausführlicher Bericht.” Bernhard introduced inversion at the octave but devoted little attention to it. He noted only that the interval of a fifth must be avoided, since its inversion, the fourth, was considered a dissonance in two-voice writing. His rules for counterpoint at the twelfth are essentially identical to Zarlino's, although in somewhat different order. Those for counterpoint at the tenth omit several of the earlier theorist's rules. Bernhard repeated Zarlino's advice about adding a third voice in parallel tenths with the lower voice, and

Invertible Counterpoint and the Hamburg Circle of Theorists

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he also adopted nearly all of Zarlino's rules for invertible counterpoint in contrary motion. He concluded his discussion with two original chapters: the first describing how to expand a two-voice composition to four by adding voices in parallel thirds to each of the original voices; the second, how to handle quadruple counterpoint. For the latter, Bernhard described three different methods: ordinary, in contrary motion, and in retrograde motion. In general, therefore, Bernhard was interested primarily in the principalelreplica approach to invertible counterpoint, and he followed rather faithfully the model of Le istitutioni.

The fifth section (Gehrmann ed., pp. 54-55) of Reincken's 1670 discus-

sion of fugue presents a very different picture. Reincken focused exclusively on the writing of fugues with two or more themes. He made no mention of particular intervals of inversion, but showed in his examples that he was especially interested in inversion at the octave. He gave only two rules. The first prohibited the use of the fifth, to account for inversion at the octave, the second prohibited the use of the sixth, reflecting Zarlino's and Bernhard's primary restriction for inversion at the twelfth. Of the five brief examples included in the text, two (the first and last) inverted at the octave, while the other three inverted at the twelfth. Inversion at the tenth was entirely absent. Reincken was therefore suggesting that a composer of

contrafugen should try to make his two themes invertible at both octave

and twelfth in order to allow the greatest possible flexibility in combining the themes throughout the piece. In short, Reincken's treatment of invertible counterpoint has nothing to do with Zarlino's principale and replica of two-voice canons, even though Reincken himself copied out Sweelinck's translation of that material in part II of the same 1670 manuscript.

Both composers wrote music that directly reflected their respective in-

terests in invertible counterpoint. Bernhard's Prudentia prudentiana of 1669 is a perfect example of quadruple counterpoint that could serve to illustrate his chapter on the subject.'* The piece is based on a hymn by the fourth-century Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius and takes as its cantus firmus the tune to which this hymn was customarily sung at Hamburg funerals. The first three verses of the hymn are set for four voices, and each verse has a unique principale with its accompanying replica version (the latter called by Bernhard revolutio). These three pairs are composed in quadruple counterpoint according to Bernhard's plan. That is, the first revolutio differs from its principale by exchanging soprano with bass and alto with tenor; the second exchanges the same voices in contrary motion; the third in retrograde. Although the voices are not canonic as in Zarlino's contrapunto doppio, the idea of principale followed by replica is the same. Reincken, by contrast, is not survived by a single exercise of this type. On the other hand, each of the six sonatas in his published collection Hortus musicus includes a fugue, and each fugue is based on two themes that are written in double counterpoint. In the three-voice fugue of the fifth sonata,

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Theories of Fugue

for instance, the first theme is given five points of imitation of the sort

described by Bertali. Each point of imitation brings in the voices in the order soprano-alto-bass,"and the second theme is introduced as a “countersubject” with the second statement of the theme. The two themes

are written in double counterpoint at the octave, with every statement of theme 1, except the first, accompanied by a statement of theme 2 either above or below it.

Weckmann's material on double counterpoint at the octave reveals an

interest in all applications of the technique: the harmonic inversion of canons as found in Zarlino and Sweelinck, Bernhard's principale and replica of non-imitative counterpoint, and Reincken's contrafugen. It even includes several fugal and canonic examples with no inversion. A few rules are given, the most prominent of which is the warning to avoid all fifths, but the text

is brief and the presentation of material relatively unsystematic.'* Most of

the information is to be gleaned from the numerous examples that filled the treatise. These include non-imitative examples of double counterpoint at the octave, complete with principale and replica (the latter called either Verkebrung or Evolutio, Example 7.1); brief examples labeled Fuga, complete with their Verkebrungen (Example 7.2); examples labeled Canon, also with Verkehrungen (Example 7.3); and canons without any invertible counterpoint (Example 7.4). Also included are short fugal examples of triple and quadruple counterpoint (Example 7.5). Two of Weckmann's observations were directly related to the relationship between imitative counterpoint and the modes as outlined by Scacchi

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point to the modes had no precedent in Zarlino or Sweelinck, but clearly

derive instead from Marco Scacchi and the Italian theory of tonal answers. Weckmann's music also displays nearly all of the techn iques presented in the Kurtze doch deutliche Regulen. His organ works show an uncommon interest in canon, especially against a cantus firmus." Furthermore, themes that begin imitative compositions are nearly always given tonal answers, as for instance in his two unquestionably authentic keyboard fugues, a “Fantasia ex D" and a "Fuga ex D.”?! Furthermore, in his "Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe," written in 1663 in respo nse to an outbreak of the plague, we find a three-voice fugue laid out as a continuous unfolding of three themes in all conceivable harmonic inver sions.? The work is a study

TI

Invertible Counterpoint and the Hamburg Circle of Theorists

213

in invertible counterpoint: there is scarcely any non-thematic material in the entire movement, as Example 7.8 illustrates, and one might call it an

“invertible-counterpoint fugue.”

Johann Theile, the last and youngest member of the circle, came to be known during his lifetime as “the father of contrapuntists,” and it was widely believed that it was he who had taught learned counterpoint to Buxtehude in the 1670s.? This claim must now be laid to rest, but there is no question that Theile, more than any other member of the Hamburg circle, adopted the various techniques of invertible counterpoint and placed them at the very heart of both his teaching and his composition. Through him, Weckmann's study of invertible counterpoint survived into the eighteenth century, when it finally passed into the hands of Johann Gottfried Walther. Theile's role in the transmission of this material, as well as his original contributions to the subject, will be considered in the following chapter, along with the work of several of his north- and central-German contemporaries.

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Part III

German Fugal Theory of the Mature Baroque, 1680-1740

Chapter 8

Fugal Theory, 1680-1710 By the end of the 1670s, a great many strands existed from which a German author might choose to weave his own theory of fugue. During the previous forty years, Italian theorists had introduced important new developments to Germany, especially Diruta's theory of tonal answers, introduced by Marco Scacchi in the 1640s, and the north-Italian model for monothematic fugue, introduced by Antonio Bertali in the 1650s and 1660s. German theorists of the third quarter of the century focused most of their attention on these innovations, but the traditional German approach to imitative counterpoint, espoused by theorists from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, did not die. After 1680, German fugal theory

experienced a renewed interest in the older writings, and several theorists

of the years before 1710 not only revived some of the older terminology but attempted to integrate the old with the new, the Italian with the German. With the exception of Johann Gottfried Walther's Praecepta der musicalischen Composition of 1708, the German writings of this period have been to a large extent overlooked by scholars of fugue and fugal theory.! This oversight is probably due in large part to the relative obscurity of the sources, over half of which never appeared in print.? (See Table 8.1.) Each of the manuscript treatises survives in only one copy, and there is no evi-

dence that any of them attained the kind of broad circulation enjoyed by

Bernhard's manuscript treatises among musicians of the previous generation. Thus, although the influence of the later treatises was often considerable, it was generally limited to small geographic areas, and the sources betray pronounced regional differences in their approach to fugal theory. The north-German writers relied primarily on the resources of the Hamburg circle; in south Germany, the influence of Bertali and the north Italians remained strong. The central-German theorists took as their point of

departure the discussion of real and tonal answers in Bernhard's Tractatus. North Germany

Johann Philipp Fôrtsch—Musicalischer Compositions Tractat The task of updating Sweelinck's translation in the second half of the sev-

Theories of Fugue

222

Table 8.1. Chronological list of German treatises with discussions of imitative counterpoint, ca. 1680-1710 Author

Title

Format

Date

Fórtsch

Musicalischer Compositions Tractat

ms.

1680s

Werckmeister

Musicae mathematicae

publ.

1686

Theile

Musicalisches Kunstbuch

ms.

1691

Beer

Schola phonologica

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1690s

Speer

Grundrichtiger Unterricht oder

publ.

1697

Werckmeister

Cribrum musicum

publ.

1700

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Fundamenta compositionis

ms.

1703

Continuatio ad manductionem

publ.

1707

Walther

Praecepta der musicalischen

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1708

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enteenth century was finally undertaken by a musician who arrived in Hamburg in 1678 to participate in the very earliest productions of Reincken's and Theile's opera. Johann Philipp Fórtsch led a fascinating and productive life as a singer, translator, composer, Kapellmeister, teacher, physician, and political figure, and he is one of the few German Baroque musicians to have been given a modern biography of monograph length.? Fórtsch was born near Frankfurt am Main in 1652 to a distinguished Protestant family. He may have received his first musical training at the Frankfurt Gymnasium under Johann Andreas Herbst, the Frankfurt Kapellmeister and music teacher at the Gymnasium. Fórtsch studied medicine at the University of Jena and music with Johann Philipp Krieger (probably in Bayreuth or Halle)* before embarking on extensive travels through France, Holland, and Germany that eventually led him to Hamburg. There he first contributed to operatic productions as a singer and librettist. In 1680 he succeeded Theile as court Kapellmeister to Duke Christian Albrecht in Gottorf,

Fugal Theory, 1680-1710

223

northeast of Hamburg, and later in Hamburg itself. The Duke was a generous supporter of the opera, and Fórtsch composed twelve operas for Hamburg between 1684 and 1690, as well as a large number of cantatas, probably written between 1686 and 1688.5 At the same time, Förtsch turned his attention once again to the study of medicine, in which he was granted a degree from the University of Kiel in 1681. From 1682 he held a dual appointment as Kapellmeister and court physician, and in 1689 he finally relinquished the Kapellmeister post to his student Georg Osterreich. Although Förtsch lived until 1732, there is no evidence that he involved himself with music in any substantial way after his last opera was produced in 1690.

Fórtsch's most important music treatise, entitled Musicalischer Compositions Tractat, survives in manuscript in the hand of Georg Österreich; no date for either the conception or the copying of the treatise is given. Writing in the early nineteenth century, G. W. Fink noted a marginal reference to Wolfgang Caspar Printz's Satyrischer Componist and concluded that Fórtsch's treatise was conceived sometime after 1696." His conclusion is accepted by Weidemann,? but it rests on two fundamental errors. Not only were the marginal notes almost certainly added later by Österreich,? but the first edition of Printz's book appeared in two installments in 1676 and 1677.19 A second published work consulted by Fortsch, Bononcini’s Musico prattico, appeared only three years before, in 1673. Aside from these two books, Fórtsch based most of his theory on the writings of Sweelinck and

the Hamburg circle. The most likely date for the Musicalischer Composi-

tions Tractat is sometime between Fórtsch's arrival in Hamburg in 1678 and his abandonment of a musical career in 1689. It seems unlikely that he would have written a composition treatise after he had turned his full attention to medicine. Fórtsch divided the treatise into four major sections: (I) intervals, consonances and dissonances, and the modes; (II) styles of music, ornaments of music, and general rules of composition (extensively derived from Bernhard); (III) fugue; and (IV) invertible counterpoint and canon.!! The theory of imitative counterpoint outlined in sections III and IV took for its basis Sweelinck's four categories of gebundene Fuge, freie or ungebundene Fuge, gebundene Imitation, and freie or ungebundene Imitation. Förtsch restricted Fuge to the perfect intervals and Imitation to the imperfect intervals but made no mention of exact vs. inexact imitation. The adjectives gebunden and ungebunden were defined just as in Sweelinck. Förtsch grouped both gebundene Fuge (canon at a perfect interval) and gebundene Imitation (canon at an imperfect interval) under the general heading canon, to which technique he devoted many pages at the very end of the treatise. Concerning freie Imitation he had nothing more to say, and the rest of section III

addressed exclusively the technique of freie Fuge.

Fórtsch divided freie Fugen into three categories based on whether the

224

Theories of Fugue

piece treated one theme, several themes, or one theme in contrary motion.

The first he called einfache Fugen (simple fugues), the second vielfaltige Fugen (multiple fugues), and the third Contrafugen. Reincken's influence is apparent in the special concern for fugues with two or more themes, and Fórtsch also repeated Reincken's suggestion that a composer should write

his two or more themes in invertible counterpoint to facilitate the task of

composing. The other important influence on this portion came from Bononcini. Fórtsch included the Italian theorist's distinction between exact and inexact imitation in contrary motion, took note of the Italian term contraria riversa, and reproduced Bononcini's chart for fuga contraria riversa. He also introduced Diruta's authentic (ascending) and plagal (descending) subjects, terms undoubtedly acquired through Bononcini.” The proper use of tonal and real answers, for which Fôrtsch borrowed Bernhard's terms consociatio and aequatio modorum, was given a great deal of attention. Fórtsch began with the customary requirement that the voices should enter on final and dominant and that entries on the “mediant” should be reserved for the body of the work. Final and dominant should ordinarily be distributed in such a way that soprano and tenor shared one while alto and bass shared the other, although neither the voices nor the two notes were obliged to enter in any particular order. In fact, the composer might begin with three successive entries on the final (or the domi-

nant) if he so desired. More important than the configuration of entries

was the subsequent motion of each voice. Fórtsch insisted that a theme ought to proceed either from final to dominant or from dominant to final, and that it should be given a tonal answer. As an exception, he permitted themes that ascended from final only up to the “mediant;” if they ascended further, they had to proceed to the dominant. Several examples, including the four given as Examples 8.1-8.4, were offered in illustration. Fórtsch was less tolerant of real answers than either Bernhard or Reincken. Real answers that overstepped the mode's ambitus were, as he

Fórtsch, Four examples of consociatio modorum.

Example 8.1. “Von der Final in die 5. hinauff." (Compositions Tractat, fol. 15v; Fink ed., p. 450.)

Fugal Theory, 1680-1710

225

Example 8.2. “Von der finali in die 3 und weiter hinauff.” (Compositions Tractat,

fol. 16r; Fink ed., p. 450.)

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Example 8.4. Von der Finali hinauff ohne springen in die 5.” (Compositions Tractat, fol. 16r; Fink ed., p. 450.)

himself admitted, “nothing new." He allowed them when the theme pro-

ceeded by step and noted, like Prinner, that the placement of half steps should be preserved “when possible." Nevertheless, Fórtsch made little distinction between imitation at the beginning and in the middle of a piece, and he made clear through both his text and his examples that he preferred tonal answers in most contexts. In this respect, his thinking was closer to Diruta's original plan than to the rules of German theorists of the period. Förtsch also offered some general guidelines for the overall design of a fugue. The theme, which he called Subjectum, should be no longer than two measures, except in the stile grave, where four-measure themes were permissible. A fugue with four voices required at least twenty measures for its working out, but it should not extend beyond forty measures. Fórtsch was one of the first German theorists to recommend that the theme be

226

Theories of Fugue

occasionally silent, and that “other passages, especially syncopated ones” (andere absonderlich syncopirende Gänge) be interspersed between statements of the theme.! The theme might then re-enter in an “unexpected” way. For additional ideas and guidelines, the student was advised to copy out good Concerten by other composers and to study particularly the keyboard fugues of Frescobaldi and the works of the Stuttgart Kapellmeister Samuel Capricornus. The many details of construction that Förtsch offered for freie Fuge contrast markedly with the complete absence of such information for freie Imitation. One can infer from this silence that differences between the two techniques went far beyond their superficial definitions as “imitative counterpoint at perfect intervals” and “imitative counterpoint at imperfect in-

tervals.” Implied in this juxtaposition is the contrast between imitative coun-

terpoint that properly projects the mode (by beginning on the perfect interval formed between final and dominant) and imitative counterpoint that does not. This leads further to, on the one hand, imitative counterpoint that obeys certain rules and follows certain procedures determined by considerations of mode and overall structure and, on the other, imitative counterpoint that is handled freely without such considerations. For Zarlino, fuga was restricted to perfect intervals in order to avoid inexact imitation.

For Förtsch, Fuge was restricted to perfect intervals in order to ensure that

the imitation and the mode fit together properly. Freie Imitation, by contrast, must have involved the same sort of unstructured imitation of brief motives that Italian and south-German theorists had described since the early seventeenth century under the term imitatione. The study of fugue in Förtsch’s Musicalischer Compositions Tractat is significant in two important respects. Comparison with Bernhard’s Tractatus of only twenty years earlier shows just how thoroughly the north-Italian monothematic fugue of the Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts had supplanted the traditional “series of points of imitation.” Even though Förtsch was, like Bernhard, exclusively a composer of vocal music, his understanding of “fugue” differed in no significant respect from the model of the violinist Bertali and the organist Reincken. To put it another way: by 1680 the last vestiges of fuga as “Renaissance motet style” had all but faded away. Förtsch was also one of the first theorists successfully to adapt Zarlino’s fugal terminology to Baroque imitative counterpoint. In this endeavor, he succeeded where Bononcini had failed because he completely eliminated the single feature of Zarlino’s system that had no place in Baroque fugue, namely, exactness of imitation. With this change, Förtsch completed the transformation of Renaissance fuga into Baroque fugue begun by Artusi, Tigrini, and Sweelinck almost a century earlier when they erroneously equated exactness of imitation with interval of imitation. Förtsch’s distinction between gebundene Fuge and gebundene Imitation may seem arbitrary, but it does not lead to inconsistency, while the distinction between

Fugal Theory, 1680-1710

227

freie Fuge and freie Imitation carries important connotations of mode and structure. His solution to the terminological problem actually amounted to a redefinition of the old fuga sciolta and imitatione sciolta incorporating ideas developed by the Italian theorists Scacchi and Bertali. In a single stroke,

Fôrtsch managed, whether consciously or accidentally, both to revive the

traditional terminology of Sweelinck and Zarlino and to bring it into line

with current musical thinking.

Finally, Fórtsch shared with the theorists of the Hamburg circle a great enthusiasm for invertible counterpoint and canon. These two topics fill the extremely lengthy fourth section of the Compositions Tractat,"and they also form the basis for three other manuscript treatises that survive under Förtsch’s name. Two Berlin manuscripts in Walther's hand, Mus. ms. 6473 M and Mus. ms. 6474 M, comprise collections of canons and form a part of the Bokemeyer collection.'® A third manuscript, Berlin Mus. ms. theor. 910, was copied by Georg Osterreich and consists of two treatises on triple counterpoint by Theile and Förtsch respectively. Both are brief; the latter includes an entire fugue with three themes, preceded by a cursory explanation showing how the themes were worked out in invertible counterpoint before the process of composition was begun. (See Examples 8.5 and 8.6.) The piece is not constructed entirely of thematic material in the manner of Weckmann's *Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe;" rather, it follows more closely the series of points of imitation described by Bertali and Reincken. Theme À is presented in measures 1-8, theme B in measures 7-13, and theme C in

measures 12-18. The three points of imitation overlap, and theme A

is

brought back in measures 11-13 so that all three themes are sounding simultaneously. The configuration of the voices at this point matches that of Example 8.5.

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Example 8.5. The three Subjecta of the fugue.

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