Fugue in the Sixteenth Century [1 ed.] 0190056193, 9780190056193

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Fugue in the Sixteenth Century

Fugue in the Sixteenth Century PAU L   WA L K E R

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942241 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​005619–​3 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

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Contents Acknowledgments 

ix

List of Musical Examples 

xi

Introduction 

1

Chapter 1: Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century 

11

Chapter 2: Fugue in the Renaissance Motet 

21

Chapter 3: Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century 

141

Chapter 4: The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance 

257

Conclusion: Fugue’s First Century  Glossary: The Use of Terminology in This Book  Bibliography  Index 

345 351 359 369

Acknowledgments This book is the product of many years of work, during which I have benefited immensely from the support of various music librarians at both the University of Virginia and the University of Notre Dame as I have collected the musical repertories that lie at the book’s heart. In addition, my former student Virginia Chilton assisted me in the early stages of research. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the two anonymous readers from whom Oxford University Press solicited reviews. Their careful reading and thoughtful remarks led to significant additions and improvements in the final manuscript. Undoubtedly my greatest debt of gratitude, however, is to the myriad scholars whose labors in the editing of Renaissance motets, ricercars, and canzonas, most of it transcribed from partbooks, have made this music available to the musical community for study and performance. Without their efforts, the present book would simply not have been possible.

List of Musical Examples 0.1 Johann Sebastian Bach, Fugue #2 in C Minor, Well-​Tempered Clavier, Book I

4

2.1 Josquin des Prez, Ave Maria . . . virgo serena 23 2.2 Loyset Compère, Mon père m’a donné mari 26 2.3 Jean Mouton, Quaeramus cum pastoribus 31 2.4 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Ecce quam bonum 

42

2.5 Jean Richafort, Exaudiat te Dominus 

47

2.6 Thomas Crecquillon, Quaeramus cum pastoribus 

49

2.7 Nicolas Gombert, Dignare me 

80

2.8 Nicolas Gombert, Respice, Domine 

82

2.9 Dressler’s important modal notes 

86

2.10 Marian Antiphon “Ave Maria” 

88

2.11

Nicolas Gombert, Ave Maria 

89

2.12 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Nunc dimittis 

94

2.13 Nunc dimittis set to Mode 8 formula 

96

2.14 Psalm tone 5, set to Psalm 109:1 

96

2.15 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Assumpsit Jesus 

97

2.16 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Ave martyr gloriosa 

97

2.17 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Quare de vulva 

101

2.18 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Veni in hortum meum 

103

2.19 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Domine quando veneris 

106

Nicolas Gombert, Emendemus in melius 

108

2.21 Orlande de Lassus, Vulnerasti cor meum 

115

2.22 Orlande de Lassus, Heu mihi, Domine 

118

2.23 G. P. da Palestrina, Alleluja. Tulerunt Dominum meum 

124

2.24 Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, Afflictus sum 

130

2.20

2.25

William Byrd, Attollite portas 

135

3.1 Luis de Narváez, Fantasia VII sobre ut re mi fa mi (1538) 

145

3.2 Josquin des Prez, Ile Fantazies de Joskin 

148

xii  List of Musical Examples 3.3 Julio Segni, Ricercar 6. Musica nova 

149

3.4 Adrian Willaert, [Ricercar primo in] Re (1543) 

153

3.5 Girolamo Cavazzoni, Ricercar I (1543) 

158

3.6 Jacques Buus, Dulcis ave virgo 

166

3.7 Jacques Buus, Ricercar 9 (1547) 

168

3.8 Jacques Buus, Ricercar1 (Book II, 1549) 

175

3.9 Jacques Buus, Ricercar 1 (Intabolatura, 1549) 

176

3.10

Annibale Padovano, Ricercar [13] del sesto tono (1556) 

180

3.11

Annibale Padovano, Ricercar [11] del terzo tono (1556) 

183

3.12 Giovanni Battista Conforti, Ricercar [2]‌del ottavo tono (1558) 

190

3.13

Jacques Brunel, Ricercar [7]‌del p[rim]o T[o]no  

196

3.14 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Ricercata del Primo Tono 205 3.15 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Coenantibus illis 207 3.16

Claudio Merulo, Ricercar [4]‌del quarto tuono (1567)

216

3.17

Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercar del nono tuono (1589)

223

3.18

Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercar del Primo Tuono (1595) 

231

3.19

Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Ricercar quarto 

245

3.20 Giovanni de Macque, Ricercar del Quarto Tono 250 4.1 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, La la la la la maistre Pierre 

258

4.2 Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Mais languiray je 

260

4.3a Pierre Passereau, Il est bel et bon 268 4.3b

Girolamo Cavazzoni, Il est bel et bon 271

4.4 Florentio Maschera, Canzona sesta (1584)

277

4.5 Florentio Maschera, opening of Canzon sesta (Schmid tablature)

285

4.6 Florentio Maschera, Canzona decima: La Rosa (1584)

286

4.7 Themes by Crecquillon and Maschera 

299

4.8a Claudio Merulo, La Zerata 

303

4.8b

Claudio Merulo, La Gratiosa (1592)

305

4.9 Giovanni de Macque, Canzona 3 308 4.10 Ercole Pasquini, Canzona Franzese 1600 

315

4.11 Ottavio Bariolla, Canzone decima (1594) 

319

4.12 Giovanni Gabrieli, Canzona prima “La Spiritata” (1608)

331

4.13

Giovanni Gabrieli, Canzona VII (1615) 

333

4.14

Giovanni Gabrieli, Ricercare del 10o tono (1595)

336

Introduction Johann Sebastian Bach is widely acknowledged as the single greatest master of fugue of all time, to the extent that his contributions have come for a great many to define the genre. For no musicians does Bach loom larger than for organists, who as a result of the centrality of his music in their repertoire engage above all other musicians regularly and significantly with fugues. Indeed, fugues abound in the non-​Bachian organ literature as well, from the Praeludia of Buxtehude to Mozart’s Fantasia in F Minor, K. 608, to the works of such nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century organ composers as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Reubke, Franck, Reger, Duruflé, and Hindemith. It is in the end more likely than not that any given organ recital will include at least one fugue somewhere on the program. It is not these very public fugues, however, that have over the years tended to define the genre. That role has been filled by the fugues of the Well-​Tempered Clavier (WTC), which Bach conceived not for playing in church before an audience, but for teaching and study in private. These are the fugues that musicians who are not organists tend to know best, and the way they know them is summed up neatly by the music performer, editor, and critic Charles Rosen, who wrote in his introduction to an edition of Bach keyboard (i.e., harpsichord or piano) fugues: [T]‌he fugue . . . is almost without exception conceived for keyboard in the early eighteenth century. Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction and their contrasts. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one who plays it. . . . The keyboard fugue, for Bach, is essentially private. The proper instrument is what one has at home.1

The centrality of the keyboard fugues of the WTC can also be seen in the pedagogy of fugue. Most American universities and conservatories of any size offer music students the opportunity to learn how to write a fugue, usually 1 Charles Rosen, introduction to Bach: The Fugue (Oxford Keyboard Classics, 1975), quoted in Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–​1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. xvii.

Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

2 Introduction within the context of a course called “Eighteenth-​Century Counterpoint” or “Tonal Counterpoint,” sometimes informally known as “How to Compose like Bach.” A  quick look at two popular textbooks for such study, Kent Kennan’s Counterpoint Based on Eighteenth-​Century Practice (1st edition, 1959)  and Robert Gauldin’s A Practical Approach to Eighteenth-​Century Counterpoint (1st edition, 1988), illustrates the point.2 Both authors restrict their musical examples almost entirely to eighteenth-​century music, including, in addition to Bach, the composers Handel, D. Scarlatti, Haydn, and Mozart, but the citations from those other than Bach are largely restricted to the crafting of thematic material. Once the process of writing a fugue is begun, virtually all of the musical examples are taken from the two books of the WTC.3 This approach was probably best summed up over a century ago by the English theorist and pedagogue Ebenezer Prout, who declared in his monograph Fugue: “[W]‌hatever Bach does systematically, and not merely exceptionally, is the correct thing for the student to do.”4 Standing in stark contrast to this Anglo-​American way of teaching fugal composition is the pedagogical approach taken at the Paris Conservatory. The French prefer to guide their students through a completely prescribed “programme,” with precisely the same structure incorporating the same elements in the same order for every fugue. This type is known as the fugue d’école (in English, “school fugue” or “scholastic fugue”), and it is freely acknowledged by its practitioners to be a pedagogical tool, not based on real fugues in the real world. Given these varied approaches to fugue—​for very public performance on the organ, for private contemplation in one’s studio, and for teaching, in various ways, in the classroom—​it is no surprise that opinions vary regarding precisely what the essential characteristics of a fugue are and where the line is to be drawn between a “proper” fugue and a mere pretender. Nevertheless, broad agreement exists on these basic characteristics: (1) a fugue has one principal subject, which is what the fugue is “about,” and may have one or more additional subordinate thematic units; (2) the fugue begins with an orderly Exposition of the subject; (3) in the body of the fugue, the subject reappears, either singly or in groups of entries, separated by passages of various sorts;5 and (4) the system of tonal harmony undergirds all of this, which implies that some statements of the subject can be expected to appear in related keys. Two additional remarks round out this skeletal description. The first is that fugue is generally considered to be 2 I have worked from Kent Kennan, Counterpoint Based on Eighteenth-​Century Practice, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1972) and Robert Gauldin, A Practical Approach to Eighteenth-​ Century Counterpoint (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1988). 3 In Kennan’s book, this material appears on pp. 200–​240; in Gauldin’s, on pp. 212–​226. 4 Ebenezer Prout, Fugue (London: Augener, 1891), p. iv. 5 In English, no particular word serves to designate these groups of restatements, but in German the word Durchführung, which is used for the opening Exposition, is also applied to all later such groups of restatements.

Introduction  3 the most sophisticated manifestation of contrapuntal writing, with the result that composers love to apply such learned devices as stretto, augmentation, diminution, and inversion to their fugue subjects. Second, although for most musicians today the harmonic plan of (1) tonic, (2) related keys, (3) tonic,​brings to mind Sonata Form, the more comparable structural plan for fugue is actually that of eighteenth-​century Ritornello Form, with its indeterminate number of ritornello statements and lack of anything so grand as a true Recapitulation. In fugue, subject statements take the place of the ritornello, while the transitional passages, called Episodes in both, serve, among other things, to effect the desired modulations. We can see how these characteristics operate in practice by examining in detail the C-​minor fugue from Book I of the WTC, shown in its entirety in Example 0.1. The fugue is for three voices, which we may label soprano, alto, and bass, and the independence and integrity of each are strictly maintained until the last two measures, when chords are introduced to lend fullness and finality. A  single voice, the alto, begins the fugue by stating the subject. This subject is in the tonic key: it begins on the tonic note C, emphasizes the dominant note G (downbeat of m. 2) and ends on the mediant note (downbeat of m. 3). Once the subject has been stated in its entirety, the second voice (the soprano) enters with the same subject, but transposed to the key of the dominant. This second statement is termed the “answer.” Such a transposition often requires, as here, that the original intervals of the subject be subtly altered in order to keep the answer close to the tonic key. More specifically, whereas tonic note is answered by dominant note (i.e., transposed up a fifth or down a fourth), dominant note is answered by tonic rather than by supertonic. In this particular answer, the second note is an exact intervallic reproduction, producing F# and signaling the key of the dominant, G minor, but the fourth note is changed from D (supertonic) to C (tonic). All other intervals from the fifth note to the end of the answer are exact renderings of the subject’s intervals. An answer of this sort, in which intervals are altered to remain close to the tonic key, is called a “tonal answer.” Any answer in which no intervals of the subject are altered is called a “real answer.” While voice 2 states the answer, voice 1 continues with counterpoint against it. This counterpoint may, as here, be material that reappears frequently during the course of the piece, usually as counterpoint to the subject, or it may present material that never reappears. In the former case, this thematic material is called a “countersubject.” Both answer and countersubject conclude on the downbeat of measure 5, at which point both continue in counterpoint for two measures using material derived from both subject and countersubject. The final voice enters with the subject (in its original, not its answer, form) at the beginning of measure 7, accompanied by the countersubject in voice 2. Voice 1 states yet another countersubject, though one that is treated rather freely during the course of the fugue.

4 Introduction Example 0.1  Johann Sebastian Bach, Fugue #2 in C Minor, Well-​Tempered Clavier, Book I.

Introduction  5 Example 0.1 Continued

6 Introduction Example 0.1 Continued

All three—​subject, countersubject 1, and countersubject 2—​end with the downbeat of measure 9. These opening eight measures make up the fugue’s Exposition. Standard requirements of a classic fugal Exposition are that (1) the voices enter one by one with the subject, each waiting until the preceding voice has completed its statement before entering; (2) each voice enter with the subject, in either subject or answer form, only once; and (3) the entries alternate between subject and answer statements. Additional options are that (1) the first statement of the answer may

Introduction  7 be accompanied by a countersubject, which then is stated in turn by all voices (except the last) as accompaniment to the next statement of the subject; and (2) there may be an interlude between statements 1 and 2 and statement(s) 3 (and 4). The Exposition is the most strictly regulated portion of a fugue. The remainder is understood to be an alternation between sections in which the subject is stated in its complete form by one or more voices and sections in which it is not present in its complete form. The latter, called “episodes,” may or may not take any of their motivic material from the subject or countersubject. Complete statements of the subject may take place in keys other than tonic, in which case episodes serve to modulate to and from those keys. Statements may also incorporate some sort of learned contrapuntal device that alters the subject in some way but leaves it complete and recognizable. These devices include augmentation, diminution, inversion, and stretto (introducing a second statement before the first has finished). It is generally understood that the fugue will end with some sort of statement of the subject in the tonic key. Any material following that statement can be understood to be a coda. Beginning with measure 9, Bach’s C-​minor fugue proceeds as follows: there are four episodes (measures 9–​10, 13–​14, 17–​19, and 22–​26). Each takes its thematic material from the opening five-​note motif of the subject and the scalar passages of eighth and sixteenth notes in the two countersubjects. These motifs are generally treated in melodic sequence. In addition, the first two episodes modulate to and from the key of the relative major, E flat. The complete statements of the subject that appear in between involve in each case a subject and two countersubjects, distributed among the three voices. In measures 11–​12 (in E flat) the soprano carries the subject, in 15–​16 the alto, in 20–​21 the soprano again, and in 26–​28 the bass. After a brief connecting passage, the final statement of the subject, in its original form and at its original pitch, is stated by the soprano over a C pedal point in the bass and accompanied by a few full chords in the alto. One of the most attractive features of this fugue is its thematic tightness, that is, the presence of material from the subject or one of the countersubjects in virtually any voice at any point in the fugue. What it lacks is use of one of the contrapuntal devices enumerated above. We may conclude our definitional exploration by noting that fugue today is generally distinguished from, on the one hand, the stricter form of imitative counterpoint that is canon and, on the other, the freer, relatively unsystematic type without particular rules known simply as imitation. Often one will encounter a fourth category, usually labeled fugato, that is perceived to have some of the rigor of fugue but, usually, does not offer sufficient length or “working-​ out” to merit the designation. * * *

8 Introduction It is the purpose of this book to identify and study the roots of this classic model for fugue. Our search will take us back to the years around 1500, when composers first became interested in the repetition of melodic material as a fundamental building block of their music. Of course, canon already accomplished this at a certain level, but what musicians came to explore was the ongoing reiteration of brief musical phrases. One obvious way to do this was to start a piece with canonic imitation but then break the imitation off and, after some free counterpoint, bring the opening thematic material back again. This is precisely how the first important writers about the new approach described what composers were doing, and they also simply appropriated the word fuga—​which had hitherto designated canon—​to these efforts. Of course, what the composers created resembles the classic tonal fugue only in some particulars; after all, their harmonic language was that of the old medieval modes, and the genre in which the sixteenth-​century language of fugue was first developed was the motet, which relied on text to shape its overall structure and serve as its title. But it was this music—​first vocal, then instrumental—​that set the course for fugue, and it serves as the subject for this book. In order to resist the temptation to evaluate these works in the anachronistic light of the classic tonal fugue and thus inevitably to find them somehow lacking, we will consider the music on its own terms, but with an eye toward those elements that foreshadow later important developments. Three genres dominated the fugal writing of the sixteenth century. The first was the motet, the genre in which non-​canonic imitation was first established as the fundamental compositional strategy, the other two the instrumental genres of ricercar and canzona. Each receives its own chapter. For the motet, we will observe the first important exemplars of the new approach in the works of early-​ sixteenth-​century French composers such as Jean Mouton. We will watch as Nicolas Gombert expands on these early efforts to establish a kind of motet that was then extensively cultivated by his colleagues Jacobus Clemens non Papa and Thomas Crecquillon and that enjoyed a final flowering at the hands of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus, and William Byrd. Beginning in the years after Gombert’s pioneering efforts, organists active in Italy—​first and foremost Venice, but also Ferrara and, eventually, Naples and Rome—​sought to create a complementary body of instrumental works based on the same compositional principles. They designated their pieces ricercar, i.e., pieces that “research” or study. Important composers include Jacques Buus, Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovanni de Macque, and numerous others. Finally, toward the end of the century, a group of organists centered in Brescia, in extreme northern Italy, created a further new genre, which they called canzona to indicate its roots in the type of simpler imitation characteristic of the French chanson. These composers are less well known today.

Introduction  9 Probably Adriano Banchieri (not a Brescian) is the most familiar figure among them, but important contributors such as Florentio Maschera and Costanzo Antegnati (of the famous family of Brescian organ builders) have tended to remain obscure. Before we delve into these three genres, however, it is important to begin with a careful look at the ways in which sixteenth-​century musicians talked about fugue and what they considered important when working with it. Armed with this understanding, we will then be able both to recognize what musicians of the time saw in the music of our study and to balance that with what we see.

1

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century The Terminology of Sixteenth-​Century Fugue When toward the end of the fifteenth century composers began to move away from the time-​honored practice of using a borrowed tune placed in long notes in the tenor (and traditionally treated in isorhythm) as the structural basis for their most sophisticated works and instead began to experiment with music constructed according to the repetition of shorter melodic units, they ushered in a new theme-​based approach to composition that has never really been supplanted to this day. There were two principal ways that the repetition of melodic lines had happened in late medieval music: we know them as Stimmtausch and canon. In the former a short segment of music is immediately repeated, with two voices now singing each other’s notes. In the latter, a single line of music generates two or more parts as those parts sing the same melodic line from start to finish but beginning at different times and often on different pitches. What we call canon, musicians of the time generally called fuga, and it was this form of musical repetition that turned out to be the more powerful inspiration for the new ideals. Indeed, already in their first experiments composers began to establish the fundamental principles that to this day underlie the classic fugue. At the same time, musicians also chose to adapt the word fuga for the new approach, and in so doing they gave us the very designation that we still use. It took only about two or three decades at the beginning of the sixteenth century for composers to establish their new preferred structural model, which they did principally within the genre of the motet. At the heart of the model lay what we today call the point of imitation: a section of the motet built upon one textual phrase for which the composer crafted a particular musical phrase that served as the object of musical repetition, passed around among the voices. The motet would then proceed as a series of such sections, seamlessly dovetailed, as it laid out its text phrase by phrase. Despite the name “point of imitation,” not all of these sections necessarily featured an imitative texture; contrasting sections in homophony often served to lend variety and contrast. Nevertheless, imitative counterpoint proved to be the favorite approach, to the extent that we now sometimes use the expression “pervading imitation” to describe the default texture of these works (Durchimitation in German). Before long, writers about music were extolling the virtues of the new non-​canonic “fugue” and even asserting that a Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

12  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century composer who could not master the compositional demands could not be considered to be of the highest caliber. At the beginning of the next chapter we will trace the development of this new model, and we will see that, once established, the model served for most of the music covered in this book. Contemporary writers focused on two topics when writing about the new fugue.1 The first was definitional: how to adapt the old word fuga to the new way of composing, what new vocabulary to introduce in order to talk about the new approach, and how to distinguish the various ways of writing imitative counterpoint from each other. The second was practical: What were the principles that earned fugue its exalted reputation and that an aspiring composer needed to master in order to handle it properly? It is these two that will occupy us in the present chapter. Both also relate to the classic fugue, which likewise must be distinguished from other ways of writing imitative counterpoint and which has its own particular rules, as we have seen. Perhaps surprisingly, given the fundamental differences between the two compositional approaches, each of these two areas of inquiry unites the point-​of-​imitation structure to the classic fugue. In the first, both manifestations of fugue are understood to be distinct from canon, on the one hand, and free imitation, on the other. In the second, fugue’s identity is understood to be established through a proper relationship between the imitation and the harmonic basis of the style. The sixteenth-​century musician who aspired to define fuga in the context of modern composition was the Venetian Gioseffo Zarlino in his Istitutione harmoniche of 1558. Zarlino chose the conservative path of retaining fugue’s older meaning as two or more parts that exactly matched each other; that is, not only could the parts be notated as one, with symbols to indicate time delay and pitch level of any part(s) after the first, but their solmization syllables would also remain identical. In practical terms, solmization will match only if the following part(s) enter at a perfect interval relative to the leading part, i.e., at the unison, fourth, fifth, or octave.2 Canonic writing at imperfect intervals would, Zarlino proposed, be called imitatione. To distinguish true canonic writing from the new repetition of melodic units, he suggested adjectives:  legata (tied or strict) for canon, sciolta (untied or free) for non-​canonic. The four categories that resulted were fuga legata (canon at perfect intervals), imitatione legata (canon at imperfect intervals), fuga sciolta (non-​canonic imitation at perfect intervals), and imitatione sciolta (the same at imperfect intervals). 1 The following is a summary of the findings in Paul Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), c­ hapters 1–​3, to which the reader is referred for further detail. 2 Two parts in imitation at the fourth or fifth will of course match exactly only if the one scale step that differs is avoided. For instance, a canon beginning on C and answered beginning on G will need to avoid the note B, which will map onto F natural, not F sharp, in the answering voice.

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century  13 Zarlino’s proposal did not carry the day, however. Much as his attempt to restrict use of the word canon to “the rule by which such a piece is realized” was (and still is) widely ignored, so too did musicians widely ignore exactness of imitation as a determining factor in judging fugal writing. Ironically, however, Zarlino’s proposal did have one lasting effect. Later writers and teachers who drew inspiration from his work (e.g., J. P. Sweelinck) insisted that fugue had to involve imitation at perfect intervals. The reason, however, had little to do with exactness of imitation and everything to do, as we will see, with proper handling of the modes. Imitation, meanwhile, not only was understood to take place at imperfect intervals, but its handling lacked the sophistication and rigor (read: attention to mode) of fugue. In broad terms, this distinction between fugue and imitation is much like our present-​day distinction. The almost universally accepted adaptation of the word, against which Zarlino fought unsuccessfully, provided instead for its use to refer both to the compositional technique that was the new fugue and to the point of imitation within which it was to be found. From our modern perspective, it is notable that musicians did not choose to make “fugue” a genre designation, as it is for us; because its early development took place within the already established genre of the motet, musicians had no need for a new designation. When composers began to explore the possibilities for fugal writing in instrumental music, on the other hand, they could have titled their pieces “fugue,” but they chose instead the words “ricercar” and “canzona” and let “fugue” continue to refer to the compositional technique or the structural building blocks. Not until the very end of this book will we see fugue serve as a piece’s title. The next most interesting terminological question was what musicians of the time should call the thematic material being imitated. Because, as we will see, musicians’ first attempts with the new style involved starting to write a canon in all voices but then abandoning it, with each voice stating the material only once, there was at first no need for any special vocabulary. Instead, the most prominent writers of the century, Gallus Dressler in Germany and Zarlino in Italy, simply described what was going on. Dressler referred to “the beginnings of canon,” Zarlino to imitation that was truncated at some point. This thought process is directly reflected in the melodic units themselves, which more often than not, at least early in fugue’s development, lack any discernible final note and simply “trail off ” into free counterpoint. In Le istitutioni harmoniche, Zarlino offered a definition of the word soggetto as that which the piece is “about,” but he seems to have had in mind long-​note cantus firmi more than anything else, perhaps a reflection of his teacher Willaert’s clear preference for cantus firmus and canon over fugue. In the end, different composers approached the melodic units of their fugal writing in different ways, as we will discover, and in the sixteenth century no word ever caught on as the favorite term for what we would call a subject.

14  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century In this book, therefore, we will use the word “subject” or “theme” to label the principal thematic material of sixteenth-​century fugue. Needless to say, there is also no terminology of the period to refer to what we call a countersubject, even though many composers employed such a strategy from time to time in their fugal composition. Obviously, the idea of Exposition as the first of several identifiable groups of thematic statements has no sixteenth-​century counterpart, since in the motet each point of imitation is its own autonomous unit and thematic material is almost never shared. Nor does the point-​of-​imitation model have a place for Episodes, and the harmonic basis in the modal system ensures the absence of anything like modulation to related keys. Sixteenth-​century writing, in short, offers little by way of useful vocabulary for talking about fugues of the period, and we are forced to fall back on our own somewhat anachronistic vocabulary as devised for classic fugue. At the back of this book the reader will find a glossary that spells out how various words are used in this effort. What musicians of the time did focus on, and in great detail, was the relationship between fugal writing and the modes. The impetus for this was a fundamental change in thinking about one aspect of mode as applied to polyphony. Students of the medieval modes know that a chant’s mode is determined solely by its very last note, and that how it begins, or what the most prominent notes are in its melodic contour, plays no role in this determination. Contemporary musicians deemed this unacceptable for polyphonic composition, and it was now required that the piece open as well as close in a way that clarified its mode. The handling of fugue in a motet’s opening point of imitation, in other words, bore a crucial responsibility to lay out the mode clearly and unambiguously. The reader can likely see where this is leading. Since, as the followers of Zarlino insisted, it wasn’t fugue unless the imitation took place at a perfect interval, musicians could now all agree that a motet’s opening fugue ought to begin with thematic statements on final and dominant (however understood) of the mode. It is this requirement more than any other that cements the kinship between sixteenth-​ and eighteenth-​century fugue. Later points after the first were absolved of this responsibility, but it was paramount in the opening one. As markers of fugue in the sixteenth century, then, we will be looking primarily at two things: compositional strategies that treat thematic material in ongoing ways, i.e., are not simply “one and done”; and imitative counterpoint that is appropriately crafted for its mode. In preparation for the latter task, let us first take a closer look at sixteenth-​century modality, about which musicians of the period had a lot to say, as well as our own understanding of how it worked in practice. Armed with this knowledge, we will be able both to judge this music on its own terms and to draw parallels to our own precepts for the proper handling of a classic fugal Exposition.

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century  15

Mode in the Sixteenth Century Certain aspects of the medieval modal system were readily adaptable to polyphonic composition. Although the basis of Renaissance music was vertical sonority rather than monophonic line, the idea of a final note which a piece took as its “home base” could remain the same, and musicians continued to talk in terms of final note rather than “tonic chord.” Likewise the dominant note retained relevance, although in this case the old medieval dominant’s derivation from reciting tones and formulas for psalmody posed challenges. Already in 1558, Zarlino proposed eliminating all of these chant-​derived dominants that were not a fifth above the final, but the old Gregorian emphasis on C and A for modes 3 and 4 (the Phrygian) and 8 (plagal Mixolydian) proved remarkably durable, as we will see. Also problematic was the reliance on the white-​note scale supplemented by either B ​flat or B ​natural depending on context. As soon as contrapuntal rules such as “a sixth moving to an octave must be major” took effect, all sorts of ficta notes became necessary and were frequently notated rather than left to the performers’ discretion. Furthermore, the two pairs of modes whose fundamental fifth encompassed the tritone F-​B were inherently unstable in a polyphonic context. Before long, composers of polyphonic pieces with an F final simply succumbed to expediency and placed a B flat in the key signature, indicating not necessarily a transposition of the mode on C but an admission that writing every single necessary B flat was a huge annoyance. The Phrygian modes posed a different but no less intractable problem: cadences on B require F sharp major sonorities to set them up, a problem bumping up against musicians’ long-​enduring preference for flats and the resulting difficulties of tuning for vertical sonorities incorporating too many sharps. Meanwhile, an aspect of medieval modal theory that one might have expected Renaissance musicians to abandon was ambitus, since pieces now had an overall range of at least two octaves and frequently much more. This they by and large did not do, however; most composers and theorists sought to retain the distinction between authentic and plagal and kept the number of modes at eight or, after Glarean, twelve. A significant reason for this retention was likely the continuing importance of Gregorian chant in the world of every liturgical church musician and thus these musicians’ ongoing engagement with its patterns and classifications. As we will see, a great many volumes of ricercari were published throughout the century in collections of eight or twelve works organized by the eight or twelve modes. We will see, as a result, several creative solutions to the problem of authentic vs. plagal in sixteenth-​century fugal writing. In a study, published in 1960, of Palestrina’s handling of mode, Siegfried Hermelink announced his discovery of “a quite stable number of highly

16  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century differentiated, precisely defined tonal types [Tonartentypen] with unmistakable characters, which in their totality form a complete and independent system that emerges from the compositional particularities of the music, and in spite of an ultimate grounding in a traditional complex of notions—​ambitus, modal scale structure, and so on—​is detemined by the simultaneous sounding of the several parts.”3 What Hermelink had identified was in fact a kind of Renaissance counterpart to the old medieval modes, namely, a certain number (he counted twenty) of combinations of—​to use anachronistic modern terminology—​tonic chord and key signature that clearly defined a kind of tonal basis but were neither truly modal in the traditional sense nor truly tonal in the classic sense. It was Harold Powers, in the article cited in note 3, who introduced Hermelink’s ideas to the English-​ language world and gave us the English expression “tonal types.” Powers’s article dwells at great length on the crux of the challenge for scholars who write about “tonality” in sixteenth-​century music, namely, how to understand these tonal types in terms of the vocabulary used by writers of the period, how the modes were understood to relate to polyphonic composition of the day, and what vocabulary we might best use to describe what it is that we perceive composers to be doing. In short, how did (and do) these tonal types relate to Dorian, Phrygian, etc.? Before we can address this question, we must first examine more closely Hermelink’s and Powers’s tonal types. We can begin our investigation most profitably by noting first of all that by a wide margin the two most common key signatures of sixteenth-​century music are the two traditional signatures of Gregorian chant: the signature of no flats and that of one flat. This makes apparent right away that we are not talking about key signature in the post-​1700 sense, where the signature tells us the expected key (with major or minor possibilities) of the piece. Instead, the signature in the sixteenth century tells us what “universe of pitches” our piece inhabits. If we have no flat, then we are in the universe of pitches that incorporates raised B (B natural) as default and B flat as ficta. This universe is known as cantus durus, with durus as signifier of the “hard,” or square, B (eventually rendered by the Germans as h and eventually by everyone as the natural sign [♮]). A signature of one flat indicates the gamut that takes B flat as the default and leaves B natural as the foreigner: cantus mollis, indicative of the “soft” or “round” B (still rendered by Germans as simply B). Within each universe, several different tonal types are possible, and the particular one for a given piece can be determined by the root of the final chord and the major or minor character of this chord in the course of the piece. With these two bits of information—​“tonic chord” and what we might call “system signature”—​we 3 Dispositiones modorum (Tutzing:  Hans Schneider, 1960), pp.  13–​14, quoted from Harold S. Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 1981), pp. 439–​440. The translation is presumably Powers’s, and the square brackets are present in his translation.

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century  17 have all of the information we need to identify the tonal type. We can indicate these types as, for instance, d-​♮, g-​♭, C-​♮, and F-​♭. What we frequently do not have, however, is a clear sense of how the composer might or might not have understood this or that tonal type to stand in relationship to the old modal system, which still formed the basis for all writing about music during the century. Powers was able to point to a number of modally ordered collections of vocal music, and he observed that one of the favorite ways to distinguish between authentic and plagal forms was through the use of high clefs (the so-​called chiavette) for the (high) authentic modes and the traditional SATB clefs for the (low) plagal modes. This solution to the problem was one reason for the increasing use of transposition, always by fourth or fifth. One sees transposition used in this way already in the Gregorian repertory with respect to the two Dorian modes, the plagal form of which was the lowest in range of any of the eight traditional modes and therefore was frequently transposed up a fourth to a more comfortable range. A closer look at the various tonal types will make clear some of the issues in trying to map them onto either the eight-​or the twelve-​mode system. If we look at the expanded twelve-​mode system of Glarean, we see that half have fundamental triads that are major and half have minor. Onto the major ones can be mapped the common tonal types C-​♮, F-​♭, and G-​♮. It can quickly become difficult, however, to distinguish the three tonal types according to modal designations. One of the reasons should be immediately apparent: there are few pieces of the tonal type F-​♮, for the reasons already stated above. Here we see a case where the interpretation of a signature’s meaning can be ambiguous: Is the piece technically in cantus durus but with all of the ficta B flats supplied through the signature, or is the piece actually in cantus mollis and the mode transposed up from C? Unless the composer somehow signals to us which it is that he has in mind, it is generally not possible to be completely certain. In some ways the tonal type G-​♮ is the most interesting of the six “major” modes, not so much because of the need to supply frequent F sharps, but because of the prominence of the note (and chord) C, the old reciting tone (or dominant) of plagal Mixolydian. This characteristic, it turns out, lasted through the Baroque era. The most straightforward modes with minor fundamental triads are two, Dorian and Aeolian, but we find three principal tonal types of this sort: d-​♮, g-​♭, and a-​♮. The first two of these are of course our old familiar Dorian, one transposed, and all seems right with the world. But we also encounter the tonal type d-​ ♭, which, like F-​♭ discussed above, might be transposed Aeolian or untransposed Dorian written by a composer or copyist tired of writing in every single necessary flat for the note B. The two Phrygian modes, also with minor fundamental triads, cause the most difficulty, again as noted above. In the end, it is not surprising that these were the modes that could not make the transition to tonal harmony and were left behind.

18  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century The greatest challenge in understanding the two is, as it turns out, the difficulty in disentangling them from the modes on A. For the most part, the tonal type e-​♮ will, in the absence of other information supplied by the composer, serve here as stand-​in for the two Phrygian modes. Because this is a book about fugue, not mode, we do not need, ultimately, to worry overmuch about modal designations. The tonal types will serve our purpose, which is, after all, to see how the composer matches his imitative counterpoint to the tonal structure that he has set up. So long as we are able to do that, precisely what the composer would have called his tonal structure is of less importance. Obviously, in a modally ordered collection of ricercari we will look more closely at the composer’s understanding of mode, and it can be very interesting to see, when we are able to puzzle it out, how a composer has chosen to render the authentic-​plagal distinction. Nevertheless, in the absence of such clues we can often only speculate. In the end, a composer who did not wish to engage with the intellectual component of modal handling had no need to do so.

A Note on Sixteenth-​Century Counterpoint Today In the same way that students today are taught how to “write like Bach” in courses on eighteenth-​century counterpoint, so are they also, although perhaps less frequently, taught how to “write like Palestrina” in courses on sixteenth-​century counterpoint. The vocabulary that they are taught is of course ours, not that of Renaissance musicians. It is more than a little ironic that the music of Palestrina should be held up as the classic model for the style, since, as we will see in the following chapter, Palestrina’s contributions to the motet fugue came quite late in its development and certainly after its heyday. But when the Monteverdi brothers declared in the years immediately after 1600 that there were two valid ways of composing, the old and the new, Palestrina’s music was the closest to hand in both time and place and could serve well as model for the old. Amazingly, it continued to serve as the model for fugal writing in the treatises of Christoph Bernhard in the 1660s, as the purported model for the stile antico in J. J. Fux’s classic text Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725, and as the actual model for Knud Jeppesen’s classic text The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance, which began life as its author’s dissertation at the University of Vienna in 1922.

About the Musical Examples A surprising percentage of the music covered in this volume was published during the sixteenth century, much of it during its composer’s lifetime. This fact

Fugue and Mode in the Sixteenth Century  19 stands in contrast to the music of the preceding century, before music printing had been developed, and of the following century, when much of the best music circulated only in manuscript. Perhaps in part as a result, almost all of the music discussed here is readily available in reliable modern editions of the last fifty to seventy-​five years. All of the composers of vocal fugue covered in Chapter 2 have Collected Works sets dedicated to them (if not yet completed) in either Corpus mensurabilis musicae, Monumentos de la música española, or as stand-​alone projects. Modern editions of the instrumental works discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 are found in various places, and for some of them facsimile editions are also available. All of these are noted. Because of this ready availability, I have not felt it necessary to offer an anthology of fugal works beyond the musical examples offered within the text. The musical examples included are almost all derived from the myriad modern editions available, with obvious preference given to the most scholarly editions. All of the note values are given as in the original sources, which frequently requires the returning of the various editions’ halved note values to their original values, but which then allows us to trace the evolution of fugal writing from the white-​note motion of the early sixteenth-​century motet to the often very black pages of the late-​century canzona. Some pieces have necessitated a reconsideration of the presence (or absence) of editorial accidentals. Text underlay, a serious headache to anyone attempting to edit vocal music of the period, has been largely left as the earlier editors interpreted it. A good deal is known about the size of choirs and their performance of motets in the sixteenth century. As noted in Chapter 3, the performance of instrumental fugues was almost certainly allowed a reasonable amount of flexibility by the composers. Obviously, fugues in keyboard notation with idiomatic figuration were intended for organ (or harpsichord), but works published in partbooks could, as will be seen, find their way into all sorts of performance contexts, from groups of like instruments to rendering on keyboard with added ornamentation or even to a group of singers. At least that is what most of the publishers tell us.

2

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet Fugue’s Origins The story of fugue begins in the years before and after 1500 along a French-​Italian axis. The composers whose innovations begin that story were from the northern part of French-​speaking Europe but moved freely along this axis; among many, one might particularly single out Loyset Compère, Josquin des Prez, and Jean Mouton. The genres into which they introduced the new fugal counterpoint were the venerable ones of motet and chanson, which had for the better part of two centuries relied for their structure on, respectively, placement of a borrowed cantus firmus in the tenor (although since the mid-​fifteenth century no longer treated isorhythmically) and the fixed forms of French poetry. The particulars of this transformation have recently received considerable scholarly attention that now allows for a much more detailed account of the origins of fugue than ever before. At the broadest level, this transformation signaled a seismic change in musicians’ overall approach to composition. Julie Cumming characterizes it, with a number of references to Tinctoris, as a change in emphasis “from variety to repetition.”1 That is, whereas fourteenth-​and fifteenth-​century composers sought maximum variety in their music—​manifested, for instance, in the differences between the nature of tenor parts and that of contratenor parts, as well as in the variety of rhythms and melodic motion within a part—​now composers began to favor repetition of material and homogeneity of voices. The motivation for this change remains somewhat speculative. Cumming notes the greater appeal that musical repetition might have had for those who were new to sophisticated music and were trying to comprehend it, and she points in particular to the many rulers of smaller Italian courts vying to emulate and compete with the more established courts of the French king and the Burgundian duke. Related to this is her observation that the new emphasis on musical repetition first manifests itself in the simpler, “lesser” genres of chanson and song-​ motet. As for its initial absence from the “higher” genres of Mass and liturgical/​ biblical motet, liturgical considerations must have played a role in this, since 1 Julie Cumming, “From Variety to Repetition: The Birth of Imitative Polyphony,” Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation, vol. 6 (2008), pp. 21–​44.

Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

22  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century church authorities complained often about intelligibility of the words in liturgical music, a problem exacerbated, when repetition predominates, by both the frequent singing of different parts of the text at the same time and the multiple iterations of textual phrases.2 To a historian of fugue, it seems ironic that one of the most sophisticated of compositional techniques should have first arisen within the lowliest genres of the late fifteenth century, but David Fallows has identified one likely reason. Fallows notes the basis of many of the secular works of Josquin and his compatriots in French popular song, which, as he sees it, they used as a means to move away from the extreme, almost arcane sophistication of late medieval music toward “a simpler, more direct style” (e.g., not a rhythmically sophisticated tenor borrowed from another polyphonic piece) capable of the greater expressivity described by Plato.3 In other words, these new, simpler tunes shared few of the archaic melodic patterns of Gregorian Chant and thus aligned beautifully with the direction in which composers had begun to take music ever since the innovation of the functional bass around the mid-​fifteenth century. Further, the elimination of long-​ note cantus firmus as a structural determinant freed composers to organize their pieces in whatever way they chose. To provide musical coherence within the new aesthetic, what better way than to introduce imitation by all voices of some sort of brief thematic material? The stylistic innovation of fugal counterpoint based on popular melody could be said, then, to be the flip side of the textual intelligibility argument: whatever the cost that repetition imposed on comprehension of text, this was more than compensated for by a musical expressiveness capable of deepening the text’s meaning. Once the new approach had proven its effectiveness in the chanson, it was not long after 1500 before it began to supplant the motet’s former reliance on long-​note cantus firmus and canon. Two of the earliest surviving examples of opening fugal imitation are shown in Examples 2.1 and 2.2, both from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The first of these, Josquin des Prez’s Ave Maria  .  .  .  virgo serena, stands at the head of Petrucci’s very first publication of motets, the Motetti A numero trentatre of 1502, and it enjoys today the same high esteem given it during the composer’s lifetime. It has also proven to be the subject of considerable controversy with regard to date and provenance, although general consensus now places it early in Josquin’s career, probably before the mid-​1480s.4 2 On this point see Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470–​1530 (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 174–​179. We will encounter these same arguments again in the context of fugue in the late Renaissance. 3 David Fallows, Josquin (Tournhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), pp. 81–​83. The words in quotation marks appear on p. 82. 4 The most extended study of the piece is Joshua Rifkin’s “Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: Dating Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 56, no. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 239–​350.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  23 Structurally, the motet’s opening is laid out in a beautifully regular, symmetrical fashion, as each voice enters two breve measures after the previous voice’s entrance with precisely the same material. Closer inspection reveals, however, that the opening imitation is closer to canon than to fugue: all voices enter at the unison or octave, and the first eighteen measures of the cantus are replicated exactly (discounting the insignificant rhythmic variant sung by the alto in m. 12) by alto and tenor. Only the bass differs, and then only by truncating the soprano line in order to conclude just as the next series of entries begins in mm. 16–​17. The Sequence that serves as cantus firmus features the customary Example 2.1  Josquin des Prez, Ave Maria . . . virgo serena (Petrucci, Motetti A, 1502). From New Edition of the Collected Works, vol. 23, pp. 20–​21. The edition is my own, adapted from that found in volume 23 of the New Edition of the Collected Works. Unless otherwise stated, all editions are mine, and the note values in them are the original ones. If they are based on other modern editions, those editions are noted.

24  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.1 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  25 Example 2.1 Continued

paired verses,5 so the melodic basis for Josquin’s second set of imitative entries is identical to that for the first. The composer treats the material differently, however: again voices enter at the regular distance of two measures, but now they incorporate a good deal of free counterpoint. Measures 16–​25, therefore, look rather more like fugue to us, with a six-​note subject borrowed from chant and followed in two of the voices by free, non-​thematic counterpoint. The second half of the tune, by contrast, is treated more freely this time, as each voice interprets it in a different way and there is no common melodic profile beyond the first three notes. 5 On the texts of Ave Maria . . . virgo serena and the relationship of Josquin’s melodic material to known melodies, see Fallows, Josquin, pp. 61–​64.

26  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.2  Loyset Compère, Mon père m’a donné mari, (Petrucci, Canti C, 1504). After Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 15/​5, pp. 38–​39.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  27 Example 2.2 Continued

28  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century The second example (2.2), Loyset Compère’s Mon père m’a donné mari, is as little-​known today as Ave Maria . . . virgo serena is famous, but it incorporates one feature that sets it apart as a landmark in the history of fugue, namely, imitation at the fifth, virtually a sine qua non of fugue from that day to this. The answer is real, as one would expect for an opening phrase whose melodic motion remains narrowly circumscribed within the third from final to mediant until the very last note. Compared to Josquin, Compère works much more freely and creatively with his material. Notable in this regard is the foreshortened set of entries of phrase two as the voices pile in at the distance of only a half note. Like Josquin’s Ave Maria, Mon père is almost certainly based on a borrowed tune, in this case a French popular song, and it is a curious coincidence that both cantus firmi begin with their first two melodic phrases repeated.6 Compère handles his second set of entries even more freely than does Josquin. For instance, the entries in mm. 13–​15 occur at a much shorter time interval than those at the beginning of the piece, and those of mm. 18–​19 include two voices (alto and tenor) that do not even state the melody at all. All of this is quite far removed from the world of canonic writing. Thanks to recent scholarship revising Josquin’s birthdate, Compère is now understood to have been the older man, although perhaps by no more than a few years, and his handling of fugue in Mon père is, as we have seen, considerably more flexible and innovative than Josquin’s in Ave Maria. Although we have no motets from Compère’s pen that begin with such a fugal exposition, he had already been experimenting with free imitation in a less systematic fashion in various motets written during his time in Milan in the 1470s. Indeed, Fallows speculates that the Ave Maria setting was for Josquin “another experiment in emulating a senior composer, in this case Loyset Compere [sic].”7 If Fallows is correct, and I suspect he is, it is Compère that we should probably recognize as the true pioneer in fugue’s beginnings. Josquin’s principal contribution, by contrast, may well have been what Jesse Rodin has described as almost an obsession with repetition of musical material. Rodin writes of Josquin’s music: “[P]‌assages incorporating conspicuous repetition depend on an accumulation of energy that is possible only when a series of statements—​at least half a dozen, but often more, and as part of a texture of at least three voices—​trip over one another, building 6 Regarding Mon père’s use of a monophonic tune, which does not survive but can be fairly easily reconstructed, see Amanda Zuckerman Wesner, The Chansons of Loyset Compère: Authenticity and Stylistic Development (dissertation, Harvard University, 1992), p. 185, fn. 61. Although Mon père is not a focus of the article, a succinct summary of the development of Compère’s chanson composition can be found in Amanda Zuckerman Wesner, “The Chansons of Loyset Compère: A Model for a Changing Aesthetic,” in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings (Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1996), pp. 483–​501. 7 Fallows, Josquin, p. 62. Fallows prefers to spell the Compère without the grave accent.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  29 insistently toward a point of arrival.”8 With these elements—​a free and flexible rather than canonic approach to imitative counterpoint, participation in this imitation by all voices, and a single-​minded focus on the continual restatement of melodic material for various musical effects—​was fugue born. It was not long after 1500 that fugal counterpoint began its meteoric rise to a position of compositional dominance, but it was in the motet rather than the chanson that this development took place. Once fugue had established itself in what Joshua Rifkin has called “the classic French-​court motet” of Jean Mouton and his colleagues in the first quarter of the century,9 it came to play an outsized role in the motets of the next generation of composers—​more particularly, Nicolas Gombert, Jacobus Clemens non Papa, and Thomas Crecquillon—​all associated in one way or another with the court of Charles V—​during the decades of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s. During the last four decades of the century, by contrast, fugue’s role in motet writing gradually diminished as musicians began to fret about its effect on both the clarity and the emotional impact of text and as the Italian madrigal began to eclipse the motet in importance among the most innovative composers. Meanwhile, as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, instrumental fugue, manifested first in the ricercar of the 1540s and toward century’s end in the canzona, gradually grew in importance until by 1600 fugue had become first and foremost an instrumental genre, which characteristic it has retained from that day to this. Nevertheless, it was to the motet that sixteenth-​century musicians almost invariably referred when writing about fugue, and fugue’s position as the most admired compositional technique of the century was perfectly summed up at century’s end by one of these writers, Johannes Nucius, in a passage later famously quoted by Michael Praetorius: This figure [fugue] 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.10

8 Jesse Rodin, Josquin’s Rome:  Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 58. This aspect of Josquin’s compositional approach forms the focus of ­chapter 2, “An Obsessive Compositional Personality,” pp. 41–​94. 9 Joshua Rifkin, “A Black Hole? Problems in the Motet Around 1500,” in The Motet Around 1500: On the Relationship of Imitation and Text Treatment?, ed. Thomas Schmidt-​Beste (Tournhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), p. 27. 10 “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

30  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century

Fugue in the French-​Court Motet during the First Quarter of the Century The structural model that French composers established for the motet in the years after 1500 is familiar to all present-​day students of Renaissance music. We generally refer to the fugal writing that lies at its heart as pervading imitation, and the structural building blocks that organize and propel the piece forward as points of imitation. Neither expression is meant to imply that imitative counterpoint is ever-​ present, but rather that it dominates the texture, contrasted from time to time with homophonic writing. Such a motet proceeds as a series of neatly dovetailed sections (the points of imitation), each devoted to a single phrase of text matched with a suitable melodic phrase. In the earliest motets from the first quarter of the century, this fugal imitation happens in one of two principal ways. The more common involves entry of the second voice relatively soon after the first, after which these two voices proceed with a duo of some length before the third voice enters, followed soon after by the fourth to create a second duo. In other words, the fugal imitation is incorporated within the technique of paired imitation, although the first two voices do not always drop out when the second pair commence. Somewhat less common, although more like later fugue, is a scheme whereby the various voices likewise all begin with the same thematic material but enter at regular intervals one after the other. We can see both types at work in Jean Mouton’s four-​voice motet Quaeramus cum pastoribus (Example 2.3): paired entries for the opening of the motet, entries at regular intervals for the opening of the secunda pars. Two aspects of these early composers’ handling of fugue merit particular mention. First, most of their fugal motets open with only as many thematic statements are there are voices, without further engagement with the theme. (This is not the case for Example 2.3.) Second, and partly as a result of this absence of thematic return, it is often difficult to identify the end of the theme in the way we are accustomed to doing for post-​1700 fugue. Let us explore this latter phenomenon in greater detail. Gallus Dressler, writing in the 1560s, described the thematic material of fugue as “the beginnings of canon [initia fugae integrae],”11 and Zarlino indicated that for non-​canonic imitation (that is, sciolta, free) the voices imitated “a 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 . . .” Johannes Nucius, Musices poeticae (Neisse [now Nisa, Poland]: Crispinus Scharffenberg, 1613; reprint ed., Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1976), fol. G1v–​G2r. The translation is my own, as are all translations not otherwise attributed. 11 “[Semifuga] est cantio referens initia integrae fugae . . .” “[Semifuga] is a piece that produces the beginnings of canon . . .” Dressler, Praecepta musicae poeticae, ed. Olivier Trachier and Simonne Chevalier (Paris: Minerve, 2001), p. 164.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  31 Example 2.3  Jean Mouton, Quaeramus cum pastoribus (Antico, Motetti libro I, 1517). From Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 8, pp. 97–​105.

32  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.3 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  33 Example 2.3 Continued

34  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.3 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  35 Example 2.3 Continued

36  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.3 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  37 Example 2.3 Continued

38  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.3 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  39 Example 2.3 Continued

40  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.3 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  41 Example 2.3 Continued

limited part of the melodic line.”12 In other words, these pioneering musicians still seem to have thought in terms of canonic writing when writing non-​ canonic imitation, rather than in terms of creating a theme with a clear beginning and ending which they then treated in imitation. The result of this way of looking at fugue is thematic material that often simply trails off with no obvious final note. A particularly clear example of this phenomenon can be seen in the motet Ecce quam bonum of Jacobus Clemens non Papa, thought likely to have been Dressler’s teacher (Example 2.4).13 Although Clemens’s first three entries 12 “.  .  .  una terminata particella di Modulatione.” Gioseffo Zarlino, Le istitutione harmoniche (Venice: n.p., 1558; reprint ed., New York: Broude Brothers, 1968), p. 213. 13 The edition is derived from Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Opera omnia, vol. 1, part 4:  Missa Ecce quam bonum, ed. K. Ph. Bernet Kempers, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​1/​4 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1954), pp. 28–​29.

42  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.4  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Ecce quam bonum (Berg and Neuber, Novum et insigne opus musicum, Nuremberg 1558). From Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 4/​1, part 4, pp. 28–​29.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  43 Example 2.4 Continued

44  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.4 Continued

pile in on each other in a way not characteristic of later classic fugue, the composer is in fact working in a very orderly and systematic fashion: the first two entries form a well-​devised subject and answer pair that properly emphasize final and dominant of the mode (F-​♭) through use of a tonal answer, and each of the six voices states the theme exactly twice before the opening point of imitation concludes at the downbeat of m. 20. But what, precisely, is it that is being imitated? If we were to apply Dressler’s and Zarlino’s characterization, we would say that strictly speaking the imitation breaks off after the fourth note, since note 5 can vary considerably, both rhythmically and melodically, from voice to voice. On the other hand, the opening textual phrase has five syllables, and the way these are set in the tenor part, with a fifth note on the final of the mode, feels like a theme, perhaps even the original idea with which Clemens began the compositional process. Julie Cumming has uncovered one secret to these composers’ thinking, which is that their fugal writing most often adopts a strategy for text setting that she calls “syllabic-​melismatic.”14 Phrases set in this way begin with several

14 See Julie E. Cumming, “Text Setting and Imitative Technique in Petrucci’s First Five Motet Prints,” in The Motet Around 1500: On the Relationship of Imitation and Text Treatment?, ed. Thomas Schmidt-​Beste (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), esp. pp. 103–​104.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  45 syllables set syllabically, most often until the penultimate syllable, at which point a melisma of variable length on this syllable takes the phrase to its final note and syllable, as we see in the opening phrase of Clemens’s superius. The advantage of such a compositional approach is obvious: since the voices enter at different times, the melisma can be extended or shortened for each voice as needed in order to allow two or more voices to come together in a cadence. Seen in this light, Clemens’s handling of the thematic material in Ecce quam bonum makes more sense. The upper three voices, which together begin the piece, all take advantage of syllabic-​melismatic text setting, with the result that note 5, the second note of these melismas, can move either up or down and be either long or short. Note 5, in other words, is not the end of anything, but serves instead to launch the melisma. Meanwhile, tenor, with no melismas on “bo-​,” states the “theme” in its pure form, and the two bass parts, also without melismas, alter the melodic contour so that the phrase ends with a descending fifth that serves to direct the harmonic movement. Clemens’s treatment of his material may not fit our understanding of what a fugue subject is and how it works, but it is compositionally very clever and extremely effective. We will encounter a good deal of such handling of thematic material in the sixteenth-​ century motet fugue. A quick statistical look at the motets published by Andrea Antico in the years before and after 1520 illustrates composers’ newfound fascination with fugue. Antico was the most important publisher of music of his time, the first after Petrucci, and his four books of motets are completely edited in two volumes of the series Monuments of Renaissance Music.15 In addition to Josquin and Mouton, we find here works by a younger generation of composers, including Jean Richafort, Costanzo Festa, and Jean Lhéritier. Over half of the pieces (35 of 63)  in Antico’s four volumes begin fugally, and of these, fully two-​t hirds (23) feature paired entries. In only two is the opening thematic material stated more than once by each voice. If we look for pieces based on canonic technique or some sort of long-​note cantus firmus, we find only five of the former and three of the latter. The remainder either begin with chordal writing or show insufficient thematic profile to speak of fugue. Clearly the groundwork had been laid for a generation of composers wishing to explore further the compositional possibilities of

15 Volume 8 includes a complete list of contents and most of the pieces, but some appear in volume 4, a complete edition of the so-​called Medici Codex of 1518. See The Medici Codex of 1518, ed. Edward E. Lowinsky, Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), and The Motet Books of Andrea Antico, ed. Martin Picker, Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 8 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

46  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Table 2.1  Points of Imitation in Mouton, Quaeramus cum pastoribus Section

Text

No. of Measures

I

Quaeramus cum pastoribus verbum incarnatum

17

II

cantemus cum hominibus regem saeculorum

9

III

Noe

9

IV

Quod tu vides in stabulo? Jesum natum de Virgine

13

V

Quid audis in praesepio? Angelos cum carmine

13

VI VII

et pastores dicentes

7

Noe

6

non-​canonic imitation and to de-​emphasize long-​note cantus firmus and canonic writing. The general principles of imitative counterpoint present in the motets of this collection are beautifully illustrated in Mouton’s Quaeramus. The piece is set for four voices, divided into two partes (the first ending in m. 73) with an additional full stop in m. 33. There is surprisingly little text repetition within a given voice; in the entire prima pars the soprano repeats only the words “verbum incarnatum” (mm. 7–​13), “Jesum natum” (mm. 40–​44), and “cum carmine” (mm. 51–​55), in each case only once. (This is not to count the exclamatory “noe.”) The points of imitation are correspondingly brief, as shown in Table 2.1. Within this scheme Mouton offers us considerable textural variety: (I) paired fugal imitation, (II) full texture with staggered entries, (III and IV) paired non-​fugal imitation, (V) full texture with pseudo-​homophony, (VI) paired fugal imitation, and (VII) full texture with pseudo-​homophony. Three times (mm. 27–​33, 39–​44, and 67–​72) Mouton repeats the entire texture with two statements in quick succession, but otherwise in only one place (bass, mm. 52–​58) does a voice repeat thematic material. To the modern student this scarcely looks like fugue at all. The opening theme, with its clear beginning and ending and its treatment with a tonal answer emphasizing tonic and dominant, all but completes the list of familiar-​ looking characteristics. Everything else looks extremely unsystematic, and there is no “working with” thematic material whatsoever. But that was soon to change. Indeed, the first experiments in thematic manipulation are already present in Antico’s collections. As noted above, two of Antico’s sixty-​three motets begin with an opening fugal theme that is stated more than once per voice. One of these is Jean

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  47 Richafort’s Exaudiat te Dominus, from the third motet volume of 1520 (see Example 2.5). Here the theme is given two complete sets of entries, both of the paired type. For the second set of entries, the pairings remain the same but the order of entry of the two voices is reversed. That is, the order A-​S-​B-​T is followed by S-​A-​T-​B. Whether or not Richafort’s experiment in thematic return was one of the first, as its date of publication would suggest, it was not long before composers began to explore such possibilities in a significant way.

Example 2.5  Jean Richafort, Exaudiat te Dominus (Antico, Motetti novi libro III, 1520). From Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 8, pp. 224–​225.

48  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.5 Continued

Fugue in Motets of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s There is no easier way to see the extent to which fugue “took over” the motet in the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s and led to Nucius’s observation of its importance than to look at one of the pieces from those years. As it happens, Thomas Crecquillon composed a parody of Mouton’s Quaeramus cum pastoribus, expanded from four to six voices and published only in 1576, long after its composer’s death (see Example 2.6). Also expanded is the length, from 134 to 196 measures. Naturally, the corresponding points of imitation are longer: (I) 20 mm., (II) 10 mm., (III) 10 mm., (IV) divided into two, each 10 mm. long, (V) 19 mm., (VI) 12 mm. with a different text from Mouton’s section VI, and (VII) 15 mm. Gone are Mouton’s

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  49 Example 2.6  Thomas Crecquillon, Quaeramus cum pastoribus (Opus sacrarum cantionum, 1576). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 63/​5, pp. 83–​94.

50  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  51 Example 2.6 Continued

52  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  53 Example 2.6 Continued

54  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  55 Example 2.6 Continued

56  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  57 Example 2.6 Continued

58  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  59 Example 2.6 Continued

60  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  61 Example 2.6 Continued

62  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  63 Example 2.6 Continued

64  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  65 Example 2.6 Continued

66  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  67 Example 2.6 Continued

68  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  69 Example 2.6 Continued

70  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  71 Example 2.6 Continued

72  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  73 Example 2.6 Continued

74  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.6 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  75 textural contrasts from point to point, replaced by an unrelievedly fugal texture with considerable repetition of both text and thematic material. In mm. 60–​72, for instance, the textual phrase “Quid audis in praesepio” appears twice in soprano, alto 2, tenor, and bass, and three times in alto 3. Most, but not all, of these statements also carry Mouton’s original theme. Again, however, we see unsystematic handling of the fugal imitation, with statements entering at irregular time intervals and on various notes of the mode other than F and C. Even Crecquillon’s opening is irregular: alto 3 and tenor enter with the second phrase of text rather than with Mouton’s opening theme, and although the tenor eventually sings this theme (mm. 7–​10), alto 3 never does. The effect of Crecquillon’s Quaeramus is one of immense complexity with dazzling contrapuntal sophistication and a texture so dense in voicing and loaded with activity that the listener can scarcely take it all in; we might call it Josquin’s “conspicuous repetition” on steroids. It may not look all that much like what we are familiar with from the time of Bach, but to a great many musicians of the mid-​sixteenth century this was fugue, and Nucius’s definition fits it perfectly.

Gombert Takes the Next Steps The composer most responsible for the advance from Mouton’s modest use of imitative counterpoint to Crecquillon’s single-​minded focus on it was Nicolas Gombert. His contribution was summed up nicely by the German theorist Hermann Finck, a teacher of music at Wittenberg University, in his Practica musica of 1556, written while Gombert was apparently still living: Truly in our own time there are innovators, among whom is Nicolas Gombert, pupil of Josquin of fond memory, who shows all musicians the path, indeed, the narrow way to attain fugues and refinement, and is the composer of music altogether different from what went before. Indeed, he avoids rests, and his work is full with harmonies and fugues. To him are added Thomas Crecquillon, Jacobus Clemens non Papa, [and] Dominique Phinot, who most preeminently, most excellently, and in a most refined way are to be valued, in my judgment, in imitating [him].16

16 “Nostro uerò tempore noui sunt inuentores, in quibus est Nicolaus Gombert, Iosquini piae memoriae discipulus, qui omnibus Musicis ostendit viam, imò semitam ad quaerendas fugas ac subtilitatem, ac est author Musices plane diuersae à superiori. Is enim vitat pausas, & illius compositio est plena cùm concordantiarum tùm fugarum. Huic adiungendi sunt, Thomas Crecquilon, Iacobus Clemens non Papa, Dominicus Phinot, qui praestantissimi, excellentissimi, subtiliss[i]‌mique, & pro meo iuditio existimantur imitandi.” Hermann Finck, Practica musica (Wittenberg: Georg Rau, 1556), fol. Aii.

76  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century If, in other words, we recognize in Josquin the composer most responsible for the cultivation of “conspicuous repetition,” then his disciple Gombert could be said to be the person who gave that singular focus structure and thereby set fugue on its course. In 1529, the year that Gombert assumed the position of maître des enfants in the chapel of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and three years after he began his employment there, the composer’s first motet appeared in print in an anthology published by Pierre Attaingnant.17 Nearly every year of the ensuing decade saw more than one published anthology incorporating motets by Gombert, culminating in 1539 with two important volumes devoted entirely to the composer’s motet output (one volume for four voices, the other for five) published by Girolamo Scotto in Venice. Scotto followed these with two further volumes in 1541, again one each for four and five voices. By 1540, meanwhile, Gombert himself had left the emperor’s service, due, according to reports, to pederasty, and was sentenced to the galleys. Although new motets continued to appear, little is known about Gombert’s later years, even including the precise year of his death. Closer examination of Gombert’s published motets of the 1530s confirm Finck’s characterization of Gombert’s music as “full with harmonies and fugues.” The motets of this decade are listed in Table 2.2 according to the year of their first publication. Let us begin our investigation with a few general observations. Excepting only the two motets of 1535—​one of which is for twelve voices, the other for six—​nearly every motet in this list begins with a single voice and a theme that is then presented by each voice in turn as it enters. There is no question, in other words, that Gombert took it upon himself from the very beginning to explore the new technique of fugue bequeathed him by the previous generation. Second, all but one—​Beati omnes (1532)—​of the motets published between 1529 and 1534 are set in the cantus mollis system of one flat and make use of one of only two tonal types: g-​♭ (fully 12 of the 17) and F-​♭ (4). (Beati omnes takes the tonal type G-​♮.) Third, with only three exceptions out of seventeen, the motets of 1529–​1534 offer only one thematic statement per voice, just as we noted in the motets published by Antico in the preceding decade, and one of these three—​Fidelium Deus—​offers but a single additional statement. All of these observations leave the impresssion that, at least at first, Gombert was more interested in exploring fugues than the harmonic possibilities of the modal system and in following the model established by his predecessors. To put it another way, he apparently chose to limit his tonal palette in order to concentrate on the possibilities for fugal writing.

17

The motet is also attributed to Philippe Verdelot in a later source.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  77 Table 2.2  Gombert’s Published Motets of the Years 1529–​1539 15291—​XII. Motetz muslcaulx a quatre et cinq voix (Paris: Attaingnant) Angelus Domini 153210—​Primus liber cum quatuor vocibus. Motteti del fiore (Lyon: J. Moderne) Aspice Domini Dignare me Super flumina 153211—​Secundus liber cum quaotuor vocibus. Motteti del fiore (Moderne) Ave sanctissima Maria Dulcis amica Fidelium Deus Fuit homo Inter natos Quam pulchra es 15329—​Secundus liber com quinque vocibus (Moderne) Beati omnes Egregie martyr Suscipe verbum 15343—​Liber primus quinque et viginti musicales quatuor vocum motetos (Attaingnant) O gloriosa Dei 15346—​Liber quartus XXIX. Musicales quatuor vel quinque parium vocum (Attaingnant) Virgo sancta Katherina 15349—​Liber septimus XXIII. Trium, quatuor, quinque, sexve vocum (Attaingnant) Conceptio tua 153410—​Liber octavus XX. Musicales motetos quatuor, quinque vel sex vocum (Attaingnant) Homo erat 15354—​Lib. Duodecimus: XVII. Musicales ad virginm (Attaingnant) Regina caeli 15355—​Liber decimustertius XVIII. musicales . . . quatuor, quinque vel sex vocibus (Attaingnant) Salvator mundi Continued

78  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Table 2.2 Continued 15371—​Movum et insigne opus musicum, sex, quinque, et quatuor vocum (Nuremberg: Hans Ott)18 Felix Austriae Vias tuas 15383—​Secundus tomus novi operis musici, sex, quinque et quatuor vocum (Ott) Gaude mater In illo tempore loquente 15384—​Primus liber cum quinque vocibus. Mottetti del frutto (Venice: A. Gardano) Hic est discipulus Respice Domine Sancta et immaculata Tribulatio cordis 15385—​Liber cantus (vocum quatuor) triginta novem motetos (Ferrara: J. de Buglhat) Domine si tu es jube Salvum me fac 15382—​Tertius liber mottetorum ad quinque et sex voces (Lyon: Moderne) Gabriel nuntiavit In illo tempore . . . Hic est panis O beata Maria [1539]—​Musica quatuor vocum, (vulgo motecta) . . . liber primus ([Venice:] G. Scotto) [all by Gombert; only newly published motets are listed] Ave regina caelorum Dicite in magni Domine pater et Deus Duo rogavi Ecce nunc tempus Levavi oculos Miserere pie Jesu O gloriosa Domina 18 There is some confusion about the precise identity of the publisher for this and the following volume. It was Ott who commissioned the two from Hieronymus Formschneider, also known by the last name Grapheus, who was merely the woodcutter who prepared the forms for printing while Ott acted as seller and distributor. Formschneider is named as publisher in RISM, but it is not generally the preparer of forms for printing who is so credited. For more on the relationship between Ott and Formschneider, see R. R. Gustavson, Hans Ott, Hieronymus Formschneider, and the Novum et insigne opus musicum (Nuremberg, 1537–​1538) (PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne, 1998).

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  79 Table 2.2 Continued Quae est iste Saluto te Venite filii 1539—​Musica . . . (vulgo motecta quinque vocum nuncupata) . . . liber primus ([G. Scotto]) [all by Gombert; newly published motets only] Adonai Domine Anima mea liquefacta est Anima nostra sicut Audi filia Ave Maria Domine Deus omnipotens Emendemus in melius Gaudeamus omnes Haec dies Hodie beata Virgo Inviolata Judica me Deus Laus Deo O flos campi Pater noster Tota pulchra es Tribulatio et angustia Tu Deus noster Note: Superscript numerals are taken from RISM.

The structural feature at this time most of interest for the study of fugal history is the presence of multiple returns of the theme, and Gombert’s first published motet to incorporate this feature—​Dignare me—​appeared already in 153219 (see Example 2.7). The spacing of the voices’ first entrances is neither that of paired imitation nor of equally spaced entries. Voice 2 (soprano) begins before voice 1 (alto) has concluded its statement, which suggests paired imitation, but tenor and bass do not 19 Gombert’s only other motet from the years 1529–​1534 to include this feature, Virgo sancta Katherina (15346), is for four high voices of the same approximate range and restricts its fugal entries entirely to the pitch D.

80  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.7  Nicolas Gombert, Dignare me (Moderne, Motteti del fiore, 1532). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 6/​5, pp. 93–​94.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  81 Example 2.7 Continued

overlap at all. There are hints of a systematic approach, however. Entries 5 and 6, in bass and tenor, copy exactly those of alto and soprano at the beginning, but bass then enters a third time with the theme before alto (truncated) and soprano provide the final statements. All entrances take place on either D or A, which is, however, not as helpful as it might be in projecting the mode at the very beginning; we will return to this question below. Gombert’s breakthrough in fugal writing seems to have come just after mid-decade. The motets published in 1537 and 1538 show two noticeable developments. One is the expansion of tonal types into the cantus durus system, including types d-​♮, a-​♮, and e-​♮. The other is the much more frequent occurrence of opening points of imitation in which the initial fugal exposition is followed by several further thematic statements. In fact, all four of Gombert’s motets

82  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century included in Gardano’s publication of 1538 share this latter feature. The opening of one of these four, Respice, Domine, is shown in Example 2.8. Here we see a particularly systematic opening point. Each voice states the theme twice, and with the exception of the tenor each states the theme once each on D and G. (A third statement in alto in mm. 15–​17, on B flat, simply accompanies the tenor statement at the third above.) Gombert has also carefully spaced out his opening Example 2.8  Nicolas Gombert, Respice, Domine (Gardano, Primus liber . . . Mottetti del frutti, 1538) From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 6/​10, pp. 104–​105.

Example 2.8 Continued

84  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century entrances according to the pattern of one breve measure between entrances, then two, then one, then finally two for the Bassus entrance. Ensuing entrances likewise follow between one and two measures from each other. With the cadence on G in m. 18 and the move to the second textual phrase, we see completed a beautifully crafted fugue to open the motet. At this point, all of the most significant elements are in place for a proper evaluation of fugue in sixteenth-​century music:  some sort of opening fugal exposition with thematic statements a fourth or fifth apart, attention to the particulars of the mode, and thematic return. We see the fruits of Gombert’s ongoing exploration in the two volumes of his motets published by Scotto in 1539. Now there is, among the previously unpublished works in the volume à 4, an almost even split between pieces in cantus durus and those in cantus mollis, as well as the introduction of two new (for Gombert) tonal types, C-​♮ and C-​♭ Two of the eleven previously unpublished motets—​Ecce nunc tempus and Quae est iste—​begin with fugues that feature thematic return, but it is in the volume à 5 that Gombert appears particularly eager to further his exploration of fugue. Of the eighteen new works included, fully five feature thematic return: Emendemus in melius, Gaudeamus omnes, Haec dies, Hodie beata Virgo, and Tribulatio et angustia. Interestingly, he returns to the cantus mollis system for most of the volume, including all five of the motets with extended fugal opening. It seems clear that it was in cantus mollis that Gombert felt most at home when exploring fugue.

Gombert, Crecquillon, Clemens, and the Golden Age of the Fugal Motet I: Fugue and Mode As Finck noted in the quote given above, two of the most prominent composers to follow and “imitate” Gombert were Jacobus Clemens non Papa and Thomas Crecquillon.20 The two were about two decades younger than 20 In an article entitled “Crecquillon, Clemens, and Four-​Voice Fuga” (Beyond Contemporary Fame:  Reassessing the Art of Clemens non Papa and Thomas Crecquillon, Turnhout:  Brepols, 2005, pp. 293–​345), John Milsom attempts to distinguish between the two composers’ handling of fugal writing, but his final paragraph (p. 341) includes this remark: “At the Utrecht conference where an early version of this paper was read, delegates had the welcome opportunity of hearing works by Clemens and Crecquillon sung in alternation during a concert. . . . [T]‌his particular listener found himself uncertain—​at that time, at least—​about how to distinguish between those two composers.” This observation matches my own experience gained through analysis and study of the two composers’ handling of fugue, and consequently their fugal motets will be treated together in this book. By contrast, two Italian composers of the next generation, Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli, first and second organist, respectively, at St. Mark’s, Venice, approached the genre of ricercar in very different and distinctive ways even though they worked side by side in the same institution, as we will see in the next chapter.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  85 Gombert.21 Crecquillon joined the chapel of Charles V about a year or two before Gombert left it, and he served until probably 1550 in various capacities, including the same role of unofficial court composer formerly played by Gombert.22 Clemens appears to have had some sort of working relationship, perhaps indirect, with Charles V, mostly inferred from three state motets he wrote for the emperor, but there is no official record of employment. Instead, Clemens was that rarity of rarities, a northerner who never traveled far from the Low Countries. The earliest of both composers’ motets to appear in print date from the second half of the 1540s, when the two men were probably already in their thirties, and by the time of their deaths in the mid-​1550s they had produced a staggering number of motets with fugal opening: counting only those with thematic return, nearly half of the motets of each composer begin with fugue, and many more begin with simple one-​ off fugal expositions. We have to this point singled out fugal structure as a way to focus and direct our study, but the time has come to address the question thought to be most important for fugal writing by the single most useful guide to the fugues of these composers: the Magdeburg cantor Gallus Dressler. Dressler’s pronouncements survive in a treatise in Latin for which a single manuscript copy survives, with the date 1563, and any uncertainty regarding the music that Dressler has in mind is dispelled once one realizes that nearly all of the musical examples cited are by Clemens, who some have thought for this reason to have been Dressler’s teacher.23 In his writing about fugue, Dressler stressed one aspect above all others: the relationship between imitative writing and the modes. This sounds like familiar territory to a student of post-​1700 fugue, since for us fugue is also intimately bound up with a piece’s tonality as defined by tonic and dominant. Dressler’s modes are not, however, principally defined by a final note with its dominant a fifth above, as Zarlino first proposed five years earlier in Le istitutioni harmoniche, but rather by a combination of this newer model with the older set of modal characteristics inherited from the Middle Ages, 21 We have only approximate birth dates for all three of these composers. 22 It is important to keep in mind that although Charles and our three composers were native to the Low Countries, Charles did not have a physical home for his court, which traveled extensively, due in part to his rule over virtually all of central and western Europe. When Gombert joined the chapel, for instance, the court was in the middle of a seven-​year stay in Spain. This was followed by four years in central Europe (Italy, the Empire, and the Netherlands, 1529–​1533), then a period of back and forth between Spain and the Netherlands, with an interlude spent at the Diet of Augsburg. For details, see Mary Tiffany Ferer, Music and Ceremony at the Court of Charles V (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2012), passim. 23 See Paul Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 23–​53, for a full explication of Dressler’s theoretical work. The source is Dressler’s Praecepta musicae poeticae, cited above.

86  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century including the old reciting tones of the original eight modes. He referred to these older modal notes as the repercussions of the mode, and he defined the notes that we today designate tonic and dominant as those comprising the mode’s characteristic species of fifth or fourth. For Dressler, all of these notes were well suited to play an important role in fugal writing. Example 2.9 Example 2.9  Dressler’s important modal notes.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  87 reproduces the chart devised by Harold Powers to illustrate Dressler’s important modal notes.24 These notes, then, served as what Dressler called the “basis of fugal writing [fundamenta fugarum],” and he indicated that the composer’s thematic material should make prominent use of them. We today of course speak in terms of the fugue’s subject being “in the key” of the piece and starting on tonic or possibly dominant. Dressler made no comparable rule about starting notes. Nor would a sixteenth-​century musician have thought of the fugal answer being “in the key of the dominant” as we generally teach it. Joachim Burmeister, for instance, simply advised keeping in mind “the boundaries of the mode” when crafting a fugal subject.25 In the seventeenth century, Antonio Bertali even advised that an appropriate mode for the subject be identified only after the subject was selected.26 What Dressler did stress, however, was that the primary reason to match fugal imitation to the mode was to make that mode clear to the listener from the very outset. As a result, it was extremely important that the opening fugue (i.e., point of imitation) pay careful attention to mode, whereas later fugues in the course of the piece need not be quite so constrained. This was of course a new way of looking at mode: the assignment of mode to a particular Gregorian chant had, by contrast, taken no account whatsoever of the chant’s opening notes. As a result of the new thinking, though, we should expect to find the most systematic fugal writing at the beginnings of motets, which is precisely where we will focus our attention. Although the decision about the proper mode was an important one, as Dressler’s treatment of fugue makes clear, it is often a vexing one for us today, and it seems to have been so during the sixteenth century as well. In his book The Language of the Modes:  Studies in the History of Polyphonic Music, Frans Wiering reports several different ways proposed during our period for the determination of a piece’s mode: choice of final chord, placement (i.e., high or low) of final bass note, range of tenor part, prominent use of important modal notes, and others.27 Lurking in the background of all polyphonic modality is, of course, the uncomfortable fact that the modes, as is well known, were not devised for polyphony at all but for Gregorian chant, especially Psalm tone and Magnificat tone formulas and their melodic connections with proper antiphons. As was noted in the Introduction, not only do the Gregorian melodic patterns often confound our ideas of how a particular mode should behave, but the manner 24 From Harold Powers, “Mode, section III,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. 25 See Walker, Theories of Fugue, p. 94. 26 Ibid., p. 173. 27 Frans Wiering, The Language of the Modes:  Studies in the History of Polyphonic Music (New York: Routledge, 2001).

88  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.10  Marian Antiphon “Ave Maria,” opening phrase. From Liber Usualis, p. 1861.

in which they begin played no role in modal determination and need not match at all with the most prominent notes of the mode itself. Although Gregorian chants did not serve all that frequently as fugue subjects during the three decades under consideration, they are found here and there, and Gombert’s use of one of them confronts us immediately with the kind of tension that could arise when a Gregorian tune received fugal treatment. Gombert based one of the five-​voice motets found in Scotto’s 1539 publication on the well-​known Marian antiphon Ave Maria (see Examples 2.10 and 2.11). A person unfamiliar with the Gregorian original (unlikely in Gombert’s day but likely enough in ours) would find the fit of fugal theme and mode to be most puzzling. The tonal type is g-​♭ and the opening point of imitation cadences in m. 16 on a perfectly conventional dominant chord (d), but the voices begin the piece with entrances on F and B flat, and it looks as if Gombert has paid no attention to mode at all. As soon as one looks at the Gregorian melody itself, however, all becomes clear. Because the original chant melody ends on D and has the octave ambitus D-​D, it is mode 1, and the opening motive with its leap down of a fourth from F to C is irrelevant to that determination. Gombert’s one-​flat signature and the tonal type g-​♭ tell us that the composer has transposed the original chant up a fourth, as stated by the tenor, with the F-​to-​C opening changed to B flat-​to-​F. This transposition results in a designation of transposed mode 1 on G, but the entrances retain the chant’s original beginning on F (untransposed) or B flat (transposed), not G and D as one might expect.28 It is worth noting that Gombert’s handling of the relationship between fugue and mode in this instance follows the most esteemed of historic precedents. A setting of the same “Ave Maria” chant by Josquin shows exactly the same relationship between fugue and mode:  tonal type g-​♭ with opening thematic statements (one per voice in paired fashion) on F and B flat.29 The opening of Gombert’s motet also illustrates a second difficulty, namely, the identity and nature of its thematic material. In this case, we know exactly what Gombert chose for his theme, and the opening phrase of this Gregorian 28 Cristle Collins Judd refers to this phenomenon as “chant-​based tonality.” See her article “Josquin’s Gospel Motets and Chant-​Based Tonality” in the book Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. Cristle Collins Judd (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 109–​154. 29 Josquin des Prez, “Ave Maria,” in New Edition of the Collected Works, vol. 23: Motets on Non-​ Biblical Texts:  De beata Maria virgine, ed. Willem Elders (Utrecht:  Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 2006), pp. 12–​13.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  89 antiphon is stated plainly and clearly several times, most obviously in the bass in mm. 8–​11 and 13–​16. Other statements, however, are much less plain and clear. No less than the very opening statement represents one of these. Here, the upward leap of a fifth from the syllable “Ma-​” to the syllable “-​ri-​” is filled in with stepwise quarter notes, after which the movement from A up to B flat is

Example 2.11  Nicolas Gombert, Ave Maria (Musica . . . quinque vocum . . . liber primus, 1539). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 6/​7, pp. 144–​148.

90  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.11 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  91 Example 2.11 Continued

92  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.11 Continued

ornamented with a quick turn, and the final A on the syllable “-​a” appears to be on the downbeat of m. 5, separated from its preceding B flat by an entire scale beginning an octave lower. The second statement of the theme, in the Altus, is even more ambiguous in its contour, to the point that the last two notes of the Gregorian original (E flat and D in this transposed version) make no appearance at all. And yet the first three notes of the theme are always stated unequivocally at the beginning of each thematic entrance, entrances are almost always preceded by a rest, and the listener has no difficulty recognizing when the theme is making an appearance. Gombert’s “Ave Maria” fugue may represent an extreme example of thematic flexibility, but it is far from unusual. One final remark concludes our investigation of this particular fugue. One might expect that m. 16 would begin a second point of imitation, in which the second Gregorian phrase would be treated in similarly extended fashion. As mm. 16–​25 of Example 2.11 shows, however, this does not happen. The Gregorian “gratia plena” phrase does form the basis for Gombert’s melodic lines for these words, but already in m. 20 he has abandoned them for “Dominus tecum,” which is likewise abandoned after only five measures. Nothing approaches the systematic thematic treatment present in the opening point, despite the obviously imitative texture. If we turn now to the tonal types found in the fugal motets of Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens published in the 1540s and 1550s (and including the few from Gombert’s pen that appeared in the 1530s) we find that the two types initially favored by Gombert, g-​♭ and F-​♭, continued to dominate in the fugues

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  93 Table 2.3  Tonal Types Found in Fugues by Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens, with Number of Fugues per Type g-​♭ 59 fugues

F-​♭ 49 fugues C-​♮ 23 fugues

G-​♮ 14 fugues d-​♮ 12 fugues a-​♮ 10 fugues e-​♮ 9 fugues d-​♭ 9 fugues C-​♭ 3 fugues

Note: Crecquillon and Clemens also wrote a small number of motet fugues in tonal types with two or three flats which are not considered here.

of his two successors, such that over half of the fugues of these three composers take one of these two types (see Table 2.3). Although fugues based directly on a Gregorian melody, like Gombert’s Ave Maria, are relatively rare, the influence of chant formulas and medieval modal theory turns out to be pervasive. It was, after all, the case that by 1558, when Zarlino first attempted to redefine the principal notes of each mode as final and dominant a fifth above, all three of our composers were no longer living. We will see the influence of Zarlino’s pronouncement later, toward the end of the century. We can see perhaps most clearly the influence of older modal patterns in the fugues composed in the tonal type G-​♮ derived from modes 7 and 8, the so-​called Mixolydian. Not one of our composers’ fourteen fugues in this tonal type fits the standard model for a later fugue in G major. Most (ten in all) begin with thematic entrances on G and C, instead of the G and D that we might expect. Of these, four (Gombert’s Descendi in hortum meum, Crecquillon’s Dum aurora finem and Sub tuum praesidium, and Clemens’s Mulierem fortem) are built upon themes that begin on G and outline—​either by step or leap—​the fifth up to D; all four are given real answers beginning on C. Five motets, on the other hand (Domine ne memineris, Gaude felix Anna, Georgi martyr inclite, Nunc dimittis, and Veni electa mea, all by Clemens), are built on themes that begin on G and proceed up by step or leap only to C. As if emphasizing C rather than D were not problematic enough, all five are then given real answers, which means that the answering voice emphasizes the fourth C-​F. (Example 2.12 shows one of these.) The four motets with opening entrances on G and D (Crecquillon’s Andreas Christi famulus and Delectare in Domino and Clemens’s Maria Magdalena and Stella coeli)

94  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.12  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Nunc dimittis (Liber tertius cantionum sacrarum, 1559). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​19, p. 9–​10.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  95 Example 2.12 Continued

prove just as troublesome: each of the four begins with a theme that leaps up a fourth, that is, either D-​G or G-​C, and is given a real answer. Even the one fugue whose theme does not emphasize the species of fourth and fifth, Clemens’s Deus stetit, is answered beginning on C rather than D. Such a handling of the G mode makes sense, however, when we consider the Psalm tone formula for mode 8, with its reciting tone on C. The canticle “Nunc dimittis” is generally chanted to this formula, as Example 2.13 shows, and if we compare the theme of Clemens’s motet (identified by Dressler as mode 8)30 with it we can only conclude that the composer had the chant formula in mind when he created his theme. The note C features much more prominently in the 30 See Bernhard Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony Described According to the Sources, transl. Ellen S. Beebe (New York: Broude Brothers, 1988), p. 133 and pp. 188–​189.

96  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.13  Nunc dimittis set to Mode 8 formula. From Liber Usualis, p. 764.

Example 2.14  Psalm tone 5, set to Psalm 109:1 (Vulgate). From Liber Usualis, p. 131.

formula than does D, and that prominence is reflected in every one of the fourteen fugues in G-​♮. If, by contrast, we examine the many fugues in g-​♭ derived from the transposed modes 1 and 2, we find a much different approach despite the fact that they share with the fugues in G-​♮ a common species of fourth and fifth. Of these fugues only four (Gombert’s Hortus conclusus, Crecquillon’s Servus tuus, and Clemens’s Ego sum and Tulerunt) can be found with thematic entrances on G and C, whereas no fewer than thirty-​seven begin with entrances on G and D. The only other pattern to figure prominently is one with entrances on D and A (found in fifteen motets). The prominence of the pitch A at first seems anomalous, but Dressler includes it as a secondary cadence note for mode 2, as the chart in Example 2.9 indicates. If we add to these fugues in “transposed Dorian” the twelve fugues in d-​♮ that is, untransposed Dorian, we similarly find thematic entrances on the notes forming the species of fourth and fifth (D and A) and the “supertonic” note E, also given by Dressler as a cadence note for mode 1. The other popular tonal type is F-​♭, most likely derived from the Lydian modes 5 and 6.  The important notes identified by Dressler for these modes include only F, A, and C, and the fifth Psalm tone in particular stays almost exclusively with these notes (see Example 2.14). One would expect composers to handle this mode in a correspondingly more straightforward way, and indeed only four of these fugues do not feature thematic entrances on F and C. One also finds tonal answers, with themes that begin with the upward fifth F-​C answered by the fourth C-​F, but these are no more common than are similar

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  97 Example 2.15  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Assumpsit Jesus (Phalèse, Liber octavus cantionum sacrarum, 1555). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​16, p. 110.

Example 2.16  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Ave martyr gloriosa (Phalèse, Liber septimus cantionum sacrarum, 1555). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​14, p. 97.

tonal answers in g-​♭ and d-​♮. Instead one often finds subject-​answer pairs that incorporate prominent use of B flat or G, as can be seen, for instance, in the opening imitation of Clemens’s Assumpsit Jesus (Example 2.15) and Ave martyr gloriosa (Example 2.16), respectively. It is difficult to find justification for either B flat or G as important modal notes. Clearly, their presence is principally the result of the use of real answer for either F or C. Three of the fugues in these modes, all by Clemens, even incorporate entrances on F and B flat only. The so-​called Phrygian modes on E seem to have been much less popular for fugal writing: only nine fugues carry a final of E and only ten a final of A, in both cases with no flat in the signature. As a reciting tone the note B was always avoided in favor of A (for mode 4) or C (for mode 3), so it is not surprising that fugues in these two modes almost all favor entrances on E and A. In only one case (Crecquillon’s Cur Fernande pater) do we find entrances on E and B.

98  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century A few fugues prove a bit more difficult to relate to one of the original eight modes of Dressler’s tonal universe, including several with two or three flats in the signature and even a few with partial signatures (i.e., different signatures in different parts). A complete investigation of all modal possibilities lies beyond the scope of this book, however, and in any case is unnecessary to its argument. We can summarize these three composers’ handling of fugue and mode by saying that because they worked from the more traditional understanding of the eight modes, they had at their disposal many more “important modal notes” than just our tonic and dominant. Not only, in other words, does their fugal writing show greater flexibility in its imitation than that of later eras, but the older melodic patterns of Gregorian Chant and its reciting formulas lurk only barely below the surface.

Gombert, Crecquillon, Clemens, and the Golden Age of the Fugal Motet II: Structural Considerations Almost certainly the aspect of fugal writing about which sixteenth-​century musicians had the least to say but about which we today are the most interested is that of formal structure. Students of the time were presumably expected to investigate this aspect on their own, since nearly every essay on fugue concludes with the advice that beginners should study examples by the greatest masters in order to hone and refine their craft. We have already seen the importance of Gregorian melodies and formulas in the creation of thematic material; we have noted (in Gombert’s Ave Maria) one composer’s flexibility in treatment of the subject; and we have mentioned how frequently the subject’s final note(s) can be both difficult to identify and loosely handled. Let us now look more closely at some additional factors:  the length of the opening point of imitation, the number of thematic statements, and the temporal relationship of subject and answer, among others. Just how, in other words, do these fugues work in toto?

Number of Voices When, at the end of the sixteenth century, Joachim Burmeister offered a step-​by-​ step guide for writing a fugal exposition, he chose the standard four-​voice scoring of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass for his model,31 and four voices have largely remained the norm for teaching fugue from his day until ours. Furthermore, the

31 Burmeister, Hypomnematum, fol. G2r–​G2v. Burmeister revised this guide on pp. 57–​58 of his Musica poetica. For a modern edition and translation, see Joachim Burmeister, Musical Poetics, ed. and transl. Benito Rivera (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 158–​163.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  99 largest portion by far of surviving motets by our three composers are scored for four or five voices, so it is not surprising that most of their fugues are also for four or five voices. What is a bit surprising, however, is that two of the composers—​ Gombert and Crecquillon—​actually wrote more fugues for five than for four voices, all of them wrote at least one for six voices, and Crecquillon even wrote one for eight (Andreas Christi famulus). In other words, not only were four voices not the overwhelming choice for scoring, but the composers seem to have made an effort to incorporate fugue into some of their grandest and most imposing works, reflecting in yet another way Nucius’s praise for fugue as the pinnacle of compositional sophistication.

Temporal and Contrapuntal Relationship of Subject and Answer The model of paired imitation inherited from composers of the previous generation encouraged the overlapping of the first two thematic statements. Indeed, despite the relative scarcity of true paired imitation in our fugues, it is overwhelmingly the case that the second thematic statement begins before the first has completely stated the theme. In such cases, it is clear that the composer has worked out the way in which the two forms—​what in the classic fugue we call subject and answer—​will combine in counterpoint, and the imitation is not so much about the varied treatment of a single theme as it is about the contrapuntal combination of two imitative voices. All of the fugues are, without exception, in duple meter, and the time interval between the first two entries ranges from half a breve to two breve measures in length, with one instance (Clemens’s Domine omnes qui te derelinquunt) of two and a half breve measures. Allowing for uncertainties of final note, most themes fall into the one and one half to three breve range. These observations lead to two further observations: First, subject and answer forms not infrequently differ from each other in certain particulars, especially their endings, and these differences are often retained throughout the fugue; and, second, sometimes the theme seems to have two distinct motives, with two distinct phrases of text, which mostly appear consecutively but may occasionally be separated in the nature of subject and countersubject. This latter phenomenon will be considered below. Finally, it is by no means to be expected that the second entrance will be of the answer form a fourth or fifth away; often two or more statements on the same note precede the first statement of the answer. Overall Structure The opening fugues of these motets fall anywhere between eleven and over thirty breve measures in length; the longest, Clemens’s Respice in me, is thirty-​ eight. Gombert shows a clear preference for a length of under twenty breves, Crecquillon a preference for a length over twenty breves, and Clemens about

100  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century equal preference for the two. By comparison with later fugue, but perhaps not surprising after one has examined Crecquillon’s Quaeramus above (Example 2.6), the number of thematic statements in a relatively short span can be considerable. Gombert’s Hortus conclusus, for instance, introduces seventeen thematic statements in a mere eighteen measures, and several of Clemens’s fugues nearly match that record. In contrast to the temporal regularity of entries that characterizes the imitative writing of the previous generation, thematic entries in these fugues are as a rule not regularly spaced. An opening such as Clemens’s Quare de vulva eduxisti me (Example 2.17), in which each voice enters two measures after the previous voice and only after the theme has been stated in its entirety, is the exception rather than the rule. The fugue from Clemens’s Veni in hortum meum (Example 2.18), in which the first three entries pile in on each other at the space of half a measure, may seem extreme in its thematic density but is not uncommon. Not surprisingly under these circumstances, stretto rarely figures as a contrapuntal device introduced toward the end of a fugue to increase excitement. Indeed, one encounters virtually none of the traditional forms of thematic manipulation in these fugues at all: inversion, augmentation, and diminution are all conspicuous by their absence. We have seen in Richafort’s Exaudiat te (Example 2.5) a fugue in which each voice states the subject twice but with the order of entries changed for the second set. Such orderly structural planning in our fugues is much less common than one might expect. There are a number of fugues laid out similarly to Richafort’s, with two thematic statements per voice, but these are greatly outnumbered by fugues with no discernible “symmetry” of thematic statement. One conspicuous exception is Gombert’s Gaudeamus omnes, whose mm. 13–​22 offer an exact reprise of mm. 1–​10, but with the addition of free counterpoint to fill in the original rests. In other words, the whole fugue divides neatly into two nearly identical halves. Study of this body of fugues yields no preferred organizational plan, however, and just about every conceivable layout of thematic statements is represented by one piece or other among them. Although more than half of the fugues restrict their thematic entrances to only two starting notes, a significant minority incorporate as well statements on a third note, or even more. Often the additional note is an important modal note: for instance, twelve fugues in g-​♭ include thematic statements on G, D, and A. But such is not always the case. An extreme example is Clemens’s Mirabile mysterium, another piece in g-​♭, whose first three thematic entrances occur on D, G, and C, with later statements on E flat and A. It is all but impossible to generalize about such later entries in these fugues, and it seems as if Dressler’s injunction to pay careful heed of the mode at the beginning of the piece was understood by composers to be satisfied through the piece’s very opening measures. Already before the end of the first point of imitation, composers on occasion

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  101 Example 2.17  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Quare de vulva (Liber quartus cantionum sacrarum, 1559). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​19, pp. 55–​56.

102  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.17 Continued

allowed themselves the liberty of moving to notes other than those called for by the theorists.

Additional Thematic Material Given the relative brevity and frequent thematic density of many of these fugues, it is not surprising that the presence of more than one theme is not common. Nevertheless, a surprising number of fugues do incorporate one or even two additional themes, even if these are virtually always relatively brief and treated extremely freely. Example 2.17 above shows one such piece. Here the principal theme was clearly designed for the text “Quare de vulva,” with one note per

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  103 Example 2.18  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Veni in hortum meum (Waelrunt and Laet, Sacrarum cantionum quinque et sex vocum, Liber secundus, 1555 [= RISM 15557]). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​16, p. 135.

104  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.18 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  105 Example 2.18 Continued

syllable, while the second theme carries the text “eduxisti me,” also syllabically, and Clemens handles the two as separate entities. Two unusual fugues deserve particular mention for their handling of additional thematic material: Clemens’s Domine quando veneris (Example 2.19) is the only fugue to incorporate two additional themes, and Gombert’s Emendemus in melius (Example 2.20) is built using almost no non-​thematic material at all. Note that in all cases the countersubjects carry exactly the same number of notes as their textual components and that although the melodic integrity is by and large kept intact, the rhythm is treated extremely freely.

Contemporaries of Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens One looks in vain in the works of these three composers’ contemporaries for anything remotely comparable to the kind of thorough, systematic exploration of fugue that we have just examined. A likely person to have followed up on the earlier innovations of Josquin, Compère, and Mouton would seem to have been Claudin de Sermisy, an almost exact contemporary of Gombert, who began his career in the French Royal Chapel under Mouton and served the French king for the remainder of his career until his death in 1562. Sermisy, however, moved in quite a different compositional direction, with much emphasis on the so-​called Parisian chanson and its largely homophonic textures. A retrospective collection of his motets published by Attaingnant in 1542 includes among its twenty-​ eight works not a single piece that takes fugal writing beyond its state in Antico’s

106  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.19  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Domine quando veneris (Liber sextus cantionum sacrarum, 1559). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/​20, pp. 54–​55.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  107 Example 2.19 Continued

108  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.20  Nicolas Gombert, Emendemus in melius (Motecta quinque vocum, 1539). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 6/​7, p. 61.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  109 Example 2.20 Continued

110  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.20 Continued

publications of twenty years earlier. Instead, we see in the motets that begin with a fugal exposition the imitation of only very brief motives of three or four notes, as well as a great many works that eschew such imitation altogether. Clearly, Sermisy the composer was much more focused on sensitive text setting than on complex musical architecture. A third contemporary of Gombert and Sermisy, Adrian Willaert, also began his career in Paris as a student of Mouton, but by the mid-​1510s he had already made Italy his home, and he ultimately served the Venetian Republic from 1527 until his death in the same year as Sermisy. A search through Willaert’s approximately 175 motets yields precisely two that incorporate fugue as we have been studying it. What predominates instead is considerable cultivation of canon, and when we recall that Willaert’s pupil Zarlino argued for a traditional definition of fugue as exact imitation of one voice by another, whether from beginning to end of a piece or in a briefer, truncated form, we are left to wonder whether Willaert himself perhaps preferred to preserve not only the older, traditional understanding of fuga as canonic writing but the very phenomenon of canonic writing itself. Younger than all of these composers was Cipriano de Rore, who like his fellow northerner Willaert—​apparently the major influence on his early compositional style—​chose to make his career south of the Alps. Also like Willaert, Rore showed in his motet writing little interest in fugue. Of the over fifty motets attributed to him, only eight incorporate fugue, and six of these are said in New Grove II to be of doubtful authenticity. As is well known, Rore turned his attention early

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  111 on to madrigal composition, which suggests a Sermisy-​like preference for sensitive text setting over musical architecture. One final prominent contemporary composer, the only one not from northern Europe, was the Spaniard Cristóbal de Morales, whose most prominent position was as a member of the Papal Chapel Choir during the decade 1535–​1545 before ill health forced him to return to Spain. The numbers regarding fugue are similar to those of Willaert and Rore: of Morales’s nearly 100 motets, fewer than ten incorporate the technique. In short, only the three northerners working for Charles V and in the Low Countries made fugue the centerpiece of their motet writing. For their contemporaries in the field of sacred vocal music, fugue was a technique of minor and at most occasional interest.

The Twilight of the Motet Fugue: 1560–​1600 With the deaths of Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens in the second half of the 1550s, the heyday of fugue-​based motet writing drew to a close. Never again would a composer of motets so single-​mindedly introduce fugue into such a great percentage of his works. Certainly one of the reasons for this decline was the concern expressed by humanists that the music of the time was less expressive and persuasive than that of the ancients, and that composers’ fixation with fugue was a major impediment to this expressiveness. Vincenzo Galilei said it this way in his Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music published in 1581/​1582: Let us add to the impediments mentioned above [composers’] fugues.  .  .  . [Composers] introduced a variety of rests without caring whether a voice sings the beginning of a text—​prose or verse—​while another voice sings the middle or end at the same time, or even the beginning, middle, or sometimes the end of another verse or thought. They often pronounce the same words many times over without reason, repeating four and six times the same thing, the syllables of the same word, one in the sky, another on earth, and if there are more, in the abyss. . . . They will often drag one of these syllables under twenty or more different notes, mimicking the warbling of birds and another time the howling of dogs. How much imperfection this causes, and how it takes away much force from the expression of the affections, which are moved naturally in someone by a similar feeling, it is hardly necessary to argue further.32 32 “. . . aggiunghiamo in oltre à sopradetti impedimenti, che per fare quelle lor Fughe . . . hanno per ciò osservare introdotto la diversita delle Pose ò pause che dire le vogliamo, senza punto curarsi che nell’istesso tempo cantando una di esse parti il principio delle parole, ò in prosa ò in versi che elle siano, canti un’altra non solo ò il mezzo ò il fine del medesimo; ma il principio ò il mezzo, e talhora il fine d’un altro verso ò concetto. [P]‌rofferendo molte volte contro à ciascun dovere, oltre

112  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century It is striking to note that all of the composers of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s who worked principally south of the Alps seem to have avoided fugue in their vocal works, perhaps a reflection of widespread concern in Italy for the effective delivery of text and its expressive potential. In the end, for the sort of “expression of the affections” that Galilei sought, the Italian madrigal turned out to be the perfect vehicle, and when Claudio Monteverdi shortly after 1600 wrote to defend the new stile moderno, he traced its roots to Cipriano de Rore and madrigal composition. Against this new ideal, neither fugue nor motet could maintain the position of preeminence they had enjoyed at mid-​century. And yet fugue did not simply disappear from motet composition. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of history that the composer most widely associated with this style since that time, Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina, published his first motets only in the 1560s. A look at the presence of fugue in motets of the last four decades of the century reveals a number of surprises. Given the clear geographical divide between motet composers active north of the Alps writing a plethora of fugues and those in the west and south largely ignoring the technique, one would expect the north to have continued as a haven for fugue. Furthermore, because both Gombert and Crecquillon had been employed primarily at the imperial court of Charles V, one might have expected this court to continue to promote cultivation of the motet fugue. Events conspired against this, however. Charles abdicated the throne in 1555–​ 1556. His successor, his nephew Maximilian II, did indeed bring with him to the imperial chapel his own composer, Jacobus Vaet, who had formerly served Charles, and Vaet did indeed follow his precedessors in cultivating fugue, but he died in 1567 at the age of about thirty-​seven, and when Maximilian extended an offer to Palestrina, the Italian declined. The composer who succeeded Vaet was instead Philippe de Monte, a northerner who had worked primarily in Italy and focused almost exclusively on madrigal composition. A statistical comparison is striking: About a third of Vaet’s motets begin with fugue, whereas among Monte’s motets one finds a number of instances in which each voice states a theme once only, but of more fully developed fugue al replicare quattro & sei siate l’istesso, le sillabe della medesima parola, nel cialo una, nella terra l’altra, & se piu ve ne sono, nell’abisso. & ciò dicono essere ben fatto per I’imitatione de concetti, delle parole, & delle parti; strascinandone bene spesso una di esse sillabe, sotto venti & piu note diverse, imitando talhora in quel mentre il garrire degli uccelli, & altra volta il mugolare de cani, la qual cosa di quanta imperfettione sia causa, & quanta forza si levi per ciò all’espressione dell’affetto, nel quale naturalmente si commuove il simile in chi ode, non è mestiero altramente ragionarne.” Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1581; reprint ed., New York: Broude Brothers, 1967), p. 82. Translation by Claude V. Palisca in Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 204.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  113 one finds almost no examples at all. Vaet’s opening fugues scarcely differ at all from those of his three predecessors. They range from ten to almost thirty breves in length, they exhibit comparable thematic density, the second voice enters between half a breve and two breves after the first, and the handling of mode is comparable. Had Vaet lived a long life, the history of fugue might have unfolded differently. Also at this time an alternative style of motet writing had appeared on the scene that proved to be both popular and long lasting. In 1550 Adrian Willaert published his collection of Psalm texts set for two choirs, and the Venetian vogue for polychoral writing that he thereby set in motion lasted for 200 years and spread well beyond northern Italy, eventually spawning such masterworks as the motets of J. S. Bach. Fugue, with its emphasis on intricate craftsmanship and fineness of detail, played virtually no role in this style, which depended instead on breadth and contrast of sonority and grandeur of effect. Before long, all composers of motets were offering pieces for multiple choirs. The composer of his period who might have been most expected to carry on the tradition of the fugal motet was Orlande de Lassus. Lassus was the last of the great northerners and apparently a friend and colleague of Vaet,33 and his handling of fugue was singled out for praise by both Seth Calvisius and Joachim Burmeister, the leading writers on music in late Renaissance Germany. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that although fugue is present and skillfully handled in Lassus’s motets, it is far from the central feature it had been for his northern predecessors. Closer examination will make this point clear. Among Lassus’s nearly 500 known motets, now completely re-​edited in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance,34 only just over fifty, that is, slightly more than ten percent, begin with fugue. Even adding the motets that begin with a single thematic statement in each voice (and occasionally one additional statement) brings the total to only a quarter, vastly below the percentages of his northern predecessors. Lassus’s motet fugues also exhibit a certain modesty of design: over three-​quarters of them come to cadence in under twenty measures, and over half bring in the second entry in only half or even one-​quarter of a breve. All of this suggests a judicious, even cautious use of fugue, reining in the extravagance of his predecessors’ fugal work as criticized by Galilei. And yet, despite this carefulness, Lassus made important contributions to fugue. 33 On this point see The New Grove II, s.v. “Jacobus Vaet,” written by Milton Steinhardt. 34 Published by A-​R Editions, Madison, WI. The various volumes are scattered throughout the series.

114  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century The best guide to Lassus’s fugues can be found in the writings of Joachim Burmeister, published in the years just after the composer’s death. Burmeister was among the first to describe fugal writing not as the “beginnings of canon” that were “broken off at some point” but as the contrapuntal treatment of a theme, for which he used the word affectio. Virtually all of Lassus’s fugues fit this description. The theme may be as brief as only three notes, but rarely is one in doubt about where and how it ends. Most often the theme is fit to one or two words, and its note values are generally semibreves and minims. This way of conceptualizing thematic material leads logically, then, to the use of two themes in the opening fugue, a phenomenon which Lassus introduced repeatedly and to which Burmeister gave the name metalepsis.35 Scholars of fugue are of course familiar with the phenomenon of countersubject, that is, of each voice entering first with a principal theme and then immediately thereafter stating a subordinate theme, but Lassus generally introduces his themes much more flexibly and often prefers to give them equal status. In most cases the two will be divided such that some voices enter with one and some with the other. Example 2.21 shows one of Lassus’s double fugues. Here we see that, whereas the top three voices enter with the text “Vulnerasti cor meum,” set to theme 1, the lower three voices enter with “soror mea, sponsa” set to theme 2. After several statements of theme 2 in mm. 4–​10 this theme finally gives way to theme 1, which is then stated in stretto in all six voices. In this fugue Lassus does seem to treat his themes as “principal” and “subordinate.” Theme 2 is shorter and appears only five times—​not in all voices—​ whereas theme 1 maintains its melodic profile throughout and both begins and ends the fugue. Nevertheless, theme 2 is no countersubject. It is clearly not crafted to accompany statements of theme 1, and neither soprano voice ever states it. Another way to create two different thematic profiles is through the use of melodic inversion, which Burmeister called hypallage.36 Inversion appears to have been Lassus’s favorite contrapuntal device; nearly a third of his fugues incorporate it. There is no need to offer an illustration of this straightforward technique, but another fugal strategy described by Burmeister requires comment. One of the reasons for the relatively small number of fugues in Lassus’s motets is the considerable number of pieces in which the voices enter one by one with what looks like a fugal theme but quickly proves to have insufficient



35 Walker, Theories of Fugue, pp. 97–​101, and Burmeister, Musical Poetics, pp. xxiv–​xxxiii & 163.

36 Walker, Theories of Fugue, p. 101, and Burmeister, Musical Poetics, pp. xxiv–​xxxiii and 163.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  115 Example 2.21  Orlande de Lassus, Vulnerasti cor meum (Mottetta sex vocum, 1582). From Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 141, pp. 35–​37.

116  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.21 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  117 Example 2.21 Continued

thematic integrity. An initial glance at Example 2.22, the opening point of imitation of Lassus’s Heu mihi, Domine from his first published collection of motets in 1556, illustrates this technique. One’s initial impression is of a straightforward fugue: all voices enter with the opening text and a melodic line that first rises then immediately falls, and this phrase returns several times in various voices within a point of imitation that is longer than most of his fugal ones. But closer inspection reveals insufficient melodic and rhythmic profile to speak of a proper theme. Even at the beginning of the piece there are three different melodic versions of just the first three notes—​rise and fall of a minor third in tenor 1 and bass, of a minor second in alto and tenor 2, and a combination of the two in soprano—​and further permutations appear in later statements. Although this does not look like fugue to us today, both Burmeister and Calvisius admitted such writing into the fugal fold. Burmeister labeled it apocope, the rhetorical figure whereby a letter or syllable is excised from the end of a word, generally for the sake of poetic meter or rhyme.37 For Calvisius it

37 Walker, Theories of Fugue, pp. 101–​103, and Burmeister, Musical Poetics, pp. 163–​165.

118  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.22  Orlande de Lassus, Heu mihi, Domine (Il primo libro de mottetti a cinque et a sei voci, 1556). From Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 114, pp. 29–​31.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  119 Example 2.22 Continued

120  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.22 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  121 Example 2.22 Continued

122  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century was “fugue of diverse melodic motion” (“fuga diversae modulationis”), and his description matches Lassus’s Heu mihi perfectly: 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.38

One can speculate that for the sort of expressive freedom he sought, Lassus found such a free handling of imitative counterpoint helpful. And for the listener, not looking at a score, the small thematic differences may have seemed insignificant to the perception of fugal counterpoint that both Burmeister and Calvisius described. Nothing about Lassus’s handling of the modes differs significantly from that of his predecessors, although it is worth noting that his preference for answer by inversion often weakens even further the polarity of final and dominant advocated by Zarlino. Also worthy of note is his extensive incorporation of fugue into pieces with more than five voices: twelve of his fugues are for six voices, and one—​Edite Caesareo Boiorum of 1568—​is for eight. One final remark:  Lassus seems over time to have become ever more judicious in his fugal writing. His first two published collections (1556 and 1562)  present eleven fugues between them, his last two (1585 and 1594) a total of only three. Although it is not clear when he composed them, the motets published posthumously by his sons (1597, 1601, and 1604) include only one very modest fugue, Fratres qui gloriatur. In sum, it was not principally on fugue that Lassus’s enormous reputation rested. * * * If we turn now to Lassus’s great contemporary, Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina, we see a composer whose background would scarcely suggest a future as the standard-​bearer for fugue in the late Renaissance motet. Palestrina was born and lived his entire life in or near Rome, his teachers were not leading composers of the day, and his career unfolded in the shadow of the papacy at a time when the Council of Trent was urging composers to write music that properly emphasized comprehensibility of text. Certainly his most illustrious predecessors in the Papal Chapel, Morales and Costanzo Festa, had not

38 “Diversae Modulationis Fugae fiunt, quando comites cum duce suo, vel motu, vel figurarum quantitate discrepant, fugam tamen non obscure ostendunt . . . Calvisius, Melopoeia sive melodiae condendae ratio (Erfurt: Georg Baumann, 1592), fol. H5r–​H5v.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  123 cultivated fugue to any great extent, and his great contemporary Victoria, the Spaniard who spent many years in Rome, wrote almost no fugues at all. And yet, in other ways Palestrina was well suited to his calling. He was clearly in touch with the ultramontane world; he was the emperor’s first choice as replacement for Vaet in 1567, which offer he ultimately declined. And he was an organist and contributed a set of ricercars, as we will see in the following chapter. Whatever the reasons, fugue appears in a larger portion of Palestrina’s motets than in the motets of any of his contemporaries. Of the just under 200 motets that Palestrina published during his lifetime,39 fully a third of them (I count sixty-​seven) qualify as fugue, and another third (sixty-​six) begin with one statement per voice but lack thematic return. To attain these totals one need make no allowance for such irregularities as not all voices beginning with the same theme or significant flexibility of melodic or rhythmic contour. Furthermore, in contrast to the relatively modest lengths of most of Lassus’s opening points of imitation, over three-​fourths of Palestrina’s fugues extend to twenty or more measures, and the second statement enters at least one breve after the first likewise three-​fourths of the time. Palestrina shared little of Lassus’s ongoing interest in imitation by inversion, but he did share his contemporary’s understanding of a proper theme with clear final note, as well as interest in two themes. Whereas Lassus, as we have seen, often treated his two themes as equals and allowed some voices to enter with one theme and others with the second, Palestrina most often treated his two themes in the way we today would label subject and countersubject. About a third of his fugues have some sort of countersubject, and one—​Beatus vir qui suffert—​even boasts two. A particularly clear example of Palestrina’s fugal architecture can be seen in Example 2.23. Example 2.23 could serve as a textbook illustration of the classic fugal opening. The subject has a clear final note, it is given a real answer, all statements after the first wait to enter until the preceding statement has concluded, and every statement of the subject is accompanied by a statement of at least part of the countersubject. By no means are all of Palestrina’s fugues so “perfectly” laid out; the textual restriction of this motet’s opening to the single word “Alleluja” may contribute in part to Palestrina’s almost extreme fixation on architecture. Nevertheless, in piece after piece Palestrina demonstrates the kind of thematic and formal clarity that have allowed his oeuvre to serve as the ideal, “classic” model for Renaissance counterpoint.

39 I have restricted the study to the published motets because they are the most readily available in modern edition, for which I have consulted the Complete Works edited by Raffaele Casimiri.

124  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.23  G. P. da Palestrina, Alleluja. Tulerunt Dominum meum (Il primo libro dei mottetti a 5, 6, e 7 voci, 1569). From Palestrina, Opere complete, vol. 5, pp. 35–​36.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  125 Example 2.23 Continued

126  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.23 Continued

In one important respect, however, Palestrina’s “Alleluja” fugue does not proceed as we might expect, namely, in its handling of mode. His Italian colleague Gioseffo Zarlino had argued in 1558 that the modes of the sixteenth century should be characterized not by their old reciting and other tones (as outlined by

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  127 Dressler in Example 2.9) but by only final note and its dominant, which should be a fifth above the final in every case, including for the modes on E.40 This is of course the theoretical basis underlying the later theory of fugal answers, and one might have expected a composer as attuned to clarity and perfection as Palestrina to have adopted it. The opening of Alleluja: Tulerunt does not fit it, however. True, the first two entrances begin on dominant and final notes (D and G) of the tonal type G-​♮, and the remaining three voices likewise enter on one of these notes. But the descent of a fifth is given a real answer which takes us to a very prominent C, and the emphasis on the C-​and F-​major triads in mm. 15 and 17 is matched by thematic entrances on the notes E (soprano, m. 15) and A (alto, m. 17), notes that do not even make Dressler’s expanded list. Clearly the prominent C of Psalm Tone 8 still exerted its powerful influence. Indeed, a survey of all 60-​odd fugues turns up very few tonal answers, with one notable exception. All but one of Palestrina’s seven fugues in the tonal types on d, either with or without a flat in the signature, begin with tonal answers, and all but one of these feature themes that include a prominent leap between final and dominant. (The motets in question are Nativitas tua, O quam metuendus est, Sancte Paule apostole, Sanctificavit Dominus, and Surge propera.) If, by contrast, we survey the almost thirty fugues in g-​♭ (apparently Palestrina’s favorite tonal type), we find only a handful of tonal answers, and there are none at all in F-​♮ or C-​♮ and only one in G-​♮. Like the fugues of Lassus, then, those of Palestrina fit comfortably within the modal practices of Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens. Finally, while Lassus seems to have lessened his engagement with fugue as his career progressed, Palestrina’s engagement seems, if anything, to have increased. The collection of Offertories that he published in 1593 (generally classified under “liturgical works” by scholars and not counted among the motets, which lead I have followed) includes among its 62 pieces 27 fugues and an additional 35 that begin with one statement per voice, while only 6 fail one of those tests. It is not surprising, then, that when as late as the 1660s the German writer Christoph Bernhard focused on Palestrina’s works for his theoretical writings on fugue he chose this collection from which to draw illustrative examples. * * * A third contemporary, Francisco Guerrero, also engaged extensively with fugue in his motet writing. Although Guerrero was of the same generation as Lassus and Palestrina (all three were born between 1525 and 1532), and in fact published his first book of motets in 1555, one year before Lassus’s first book and almost a decade

40 For Zarlino’s chart, see his Le istitutioni, 1558 ed., p. 310; part IV translated as idem, On the Modes, trans. Vered Cohen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 38.

128  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century before Palestrina’s, his music has in modern times languished in relative obscurity, and only about two-​thirds of his motets are currently available in scholarly edition.41 Examination of them shows, however, a composer who gave fugue greater prominence than Lassus, and Guerrero’s interest seems to have increased in the course of his career: of the twenty-​one motets from his first published collection that are currently available, only two begin with fugue, although an additional ten begin with a single statement per part. Among the available motets from the 1589 collection, on the other hand, true fugues outnumber the single-​entry type nine to five, and only six motets begin in non-​imitative fashion. There is nothing remarkable about Guerrero’s handling of mode. Most of his fugues are in g-​♭ but with real answers; in fact, the tonal answer makes but one lonely appearance among his twenty available fugues. We find examples of fugues with two themes (including one from 1555, Veni Domine et noli tardare) and of fugues employing inversion (Gaudent in caelis and O doctor optime of 1570 and Hic est discipulus of 1589), but these techniques do not assume the importance they held for his two contemporaries. All three of these composers died in the decade of the 1590s, and with them the intensive cultivation of motet fugue on the continent. Jacobus Handl, the Bohemian composer who died in 1591 at a young age, favored the grand Venetian style for his motets, and fugue plays only a small role in his output. Tomás Luis da Victoria, also of this younger generation, lived until 1611, but despite his years in Rome he also showed little interest in fugue. Before closing the book on fugue in the Renaissance motet, however, we must examine one last outpost of its cultivation: England.

Fugue in Renaissance England Fugue came late to England. During the years around 1500 when Josquin, Mouton, and others were laying the groundwork for the fugal motet, English composers preferred to emphasize such liturgical genres as the Mass and Magnificat and to put their finest efforts into large-​scale votive antiphons that emphasized grand sonority, in particular a wide range from highest to lowest parts, and textural contrasts between this full sound and sections for reduced forces sung by soloists. Imitative counterpoint played virtually no role in this

41 Francesco Guerrero, Motetes I-XXII, ed. José M. Llorens, Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 36, (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 1978); idem, Motetes XXIII-XLVI, ed. José M. Llorens, Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 45 (Barcelona : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 1987); idem, Motetes XLVII-LXXV, ed. José M. Llorens, Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 68 (Barcelona : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 2003).

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  129 music, which continued instead to place much emphasis on Gregorian cantus firmi. Then, in 1534, just as Gombert was publishing his first fugal motets, Henry VIII broke with Rome, plunging the English Church and church music into an era of uncertainty that eventually descended into chaos with the severely Protestant six-​year reign of Edward VI, followed by the very Catholic five years of Mary. This almost twenty-​five-​year period that finally ended with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 coincided almost exactly with the period of activity of Gombert, Crecquillon, and Clemens, during which time the complete abandonment of Latin under Edward, followed by a return to pre-​Reformation liturgical English church music under Mary, had allowed almost no opportunity for the cultivation of fugal motets in the new continental manner. Elizabeth’s decision to steer a middle course for the English Church reintroduced stability, which finally allowed composers to take account of stylistic developments on the continent and introduce these developments into their own music. Of particular importance was Elizabeth’s provision for Latin as well as English church music,42 and English composers quickly turned their attention to the Latin motet and, naturally, its fugues. By this time, of course, the most important composers of motet fugue were no longer the three northerner pioneers, all now dead, but Lassus, Palestrina, and Guerrero, whose first publications of motets had just begun to appear. Lassus’s music appears to have quickly become well known in England,43 but another agent in the introduction of fugue to English music was the Italian-​born Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, who as a boy moved with his family first to France and then to England and who served the English queen from 1562 until 1578. Ferrabosco was an estimable composer and is survived by thirty-​seven motets, none of which was published.44 The primary musical influence on Ferrabosco is generally said to be Lassus, and in the ten motet fugues we find a great many of the same style characteristics, especially a fondness for inversion (four fugues) and for fugue with two themes (six). But Ferrabosco did not follow the northerner’s lead in preferring closely interlocked opening statements; instead, his opening theme generally unfolds unaccompanied, in the way preferred by Palestrina, and his fugues tend to extend to over twenty or even thirty measures. His Afflictus sum, shown in Example 2.24, illustrates these points clearly. In structure, Afflictus sum resembles Lassus’s Vulnerasti cor meum in Example 2.21: Not all voices begin with theme 1, and the two themes are used relatively independently of one another, although theme 1 carefully maintains its melodic 42 See Joseph Kerman, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 28–​29. 43 Ibid, p. 344. 44 The larger numbers found in The New Grove and in the introduction to Corpus Mensurabilis, no. 96, are attained by counting each pars of a multi-​partite motet with a separate number. For consistency I have not followed this practice.

130  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.24  Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, Afflictus sum, (New York Public Library, MS Drexel 4302). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 96/1, pp. 18–​19.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  131 Example 2.24 Continued

132  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.24 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  133 Example 2.24 Continued

profile, whereas theme 2 is handled extremely freely. But the regularity of the first three entries and avoidance of thematic overlap for these entries is not so characteristic of Lassus. One thing is beyond doubt: by the 1560s and 1570s most composers of vocal music had come, when writing fugue, to think in terms of clearly delineated themes carefully fit to just a few words of text. It is difficult to date precisely English music of the 1560s and early 1570s, since little was published, but the first important genre to introduce fugue seems to have been what we today refer to as the psalm-​motet and which we associate most closely with Robert White (d. 1574) and William Mundy (d. ca. 1591) in the decade of the 1560s. White’s setting of Psalm 122 (Ad te levavi)45 and Mundy’s of Psalm 14 (Domine quis habitabit)46—​presuming that they date from this time—​are probably, therefore, among the first English experiments in motet fugue. William Byrd’s monumental eight-​voice setting of Psalm 119, Ad Dominum cum tribularer, is also thought to date from this decade; it begins with one of his grandest vocal fugues, indeed one of the few eight-​voice fugues of the entire century.

45 Robert White, Six-Part Latin Psalms, Votive Antiphons, ed. David Mateer, Early English Church Music, vol. 29 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1983), p. 68. 46 William Munday, Latin Antiphons and Psalms, ed. Frank Ll. Harrison, Early English Church Music, vol. 2 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1983), p. 94.

134  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century We are on much firmer ground with the collection of Latin motets published by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in 1575 under the title Cantiones sacrae and the two later volumes with which Byrd, after Tallis’s death, followed it in 1589 and 1591. Fugue commands a significant presence in all three, not quite to the extent that we have observed in Palestrina’s oeuvre but in greater concentration than in Lassus’s. These fugal motets have been the subject of extended study by Joseph Kerman47 and only a few remarks need be made here. Although the numbers are not great—​fitting our definition are four fugues by Tallis in the 1575 collection and ten total by Byrd—​the variety of approach is notable and suggests wide knowledge of contemporary trends on the continent. Both composers craft their themes with clear endings, and Tallis in particular shows a penchant for symmetrical layout of thematic material and a minimum of non-​thematic counterpoint. His Salvator mundi I, for instance, comprises two sets of entries, the second of which brings in the voices in the same order as the first but at different time intervals. His Absterge Domine and In jejunio et fletu both open with fugues that include almost no free counterpoint at all. In Byrd’s motets one finds many of the favored techniques of the time: prominent use of inversion (Libera me Domine of 1575), two themes with a rest between them as in Lassus (Domine secundum actum meum of 1575), standard layout of subject and countersubject as is common in Palestrina (Defecit in dolore of 1589), fugues with closely spaced initial entries (Domine secundum actum meum of 1575, half a breve) and widely spaced initial entries (Memento Domine of 1589, three breves), brief fugues (Fac cum servo tuo of 1591, 12 measures), and long fugues (Domine secundum actum meum of 1575, 32 measures), all based on clearly defined themes. Such variety within a modest number of pieces suggests an attitude of experimentation and can produce a certain quirkiness, but one also encounters classically laid-​out fugues worthy of Palestrina. Let us look at one of Byrd’s fugues, the opening of Attollite portas from 1575 (Example 2.25). Aside from a few quirks of English text-​setting and harmony (notably the simultaneous cross-​relations of mm. 14 and 20), this piece fits neatly into the continental tradition. The tonal type is G-​♮ and the first two voices enter on D and G, but the first statement emphasizes not D and G but D and A, the answer is real, and we see also two prominent entrances on C (mm. 8 and 16, tenor). In short, the modal considerations of mid-​century remain at work. Structurally, nothing surprises. The theme is well crafted to fit its text and has a clear final note, the overlapping of the first two statements is more characteristic of Lassus than Palestrina, and the theme’s rather unusual melodic profile, with upward 47 Joseph Kerman, “Byrd, Tallis, and the Art of Imitation,” in Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. Jan LaRue (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 519–​537, and Kerman, Masses and Motets, esp. pp. 133–​160.

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  135 Example 2.25  William Byrd, Attollite portas (Cantiones sacrae, 1575). From The Byrd Edition, vol. 1, pp. 52–​55.

136  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.25 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  137 Example 2.25 Continued

138  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 2.25 Continued

Fugue in the Renaissance Motet  139 fifth followed immediately by upward third, is all Byrd. Clearly, although the English engaged with fugal writing later than their continental counterparts, it took them not too long to get up to speed. By 1600 only Victoria and Byrd, of all the composers discussed in this chapter, were still living. Victoria cultivated fugue scarcely at all, and Byrd had by this time turned his attention to the briefer settings of Mass Propers that make up his Gradualia and published no further motets. Only a few years later, the Monteverdi brothers coined the expression prima prattica to designate the old, traditional style, the cultivation of which now became something of an exercise in historicism known as the stile antico. In short, the new century dawned on a musical landscape in which fugue was destined to play a role considerably different from that with which it had begun three-​quarters of a century earlier.

3

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century The First Imitative Ricercars and Fantasias When musicians today encounter Michael Praetorius’s description of fugue and ricercar in the volume of his Syntagma musicum devoted to terminology (part 3, 1619), they recognize immediately the kinship with our own understanding of fugue. Praetorius’s definition of these terms cites that of Johannes Nucius given at the beginning of the preceding chapter, which he amplifies with his own remarks (switching between Latin and German): 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 gef ''uhrt werden könne. 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.1 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 1 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, vol. 3 (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619; reprint ed., Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958–​1959), pp. 21–​22 [the latter is misnumbered 24].

Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

142  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century 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, artful, 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.”

Praetorius’s equating of fugue and ricercar was a terminological innovation of the early seventeenth century. In the preceding century musicians had used ricercar primarily as a genre designation in instrumental music, whereas fugue, as we have seen, referred primarily to a compositional technique or to a section of a piece based on that technique, in addition to its original use as a genre designation for a piece based on strict canon.2 Nevertheless, the two had always carried similar ideals: since the Italian verb ricercare means to investigate or research, it could readily be applied in a musical context to suggest something extremely sophisticated and “well worked out,” the same characteristics that Nucius had ascribed to fugal technique in his treatise published only a few years earlier. What the Italian ricercar “worked out” was not initially imitative counterpoint, however. The first datable pieces to be given this designation appeared in a lute publication, Francesco Spinacino’s two-​volume Intabolatura de Lauto of 1507, and imitation is nowhere to be found there. Instead, the pieces are brief and preludial in nature, designed to allow the player to “try out” the instrument itself and its tuning before playing a more substantial piece. A great many of such ricercari were published for lute and other plucked string instruments in the first half of the century, and beginning in the later 1530s they acquired a second designation, fantasia, that began to appear interchangeably with ricercar. “Fantasy” of course implies to us a considerable freedom and even willfulness, but for musicians of the time its meaning was more closely linked with that of invention, as used much later by Bach, namely, a composition of whatever level of complexity without recourse to any preexisting material. Although fantasia as a designation came rather later to lute music than ricercar, its use may be even older. One of the first important instrumental pieces to begin imitatively and then proceed as a series of points of imitation is the work by Josquin des Prez entitled in its single manuscript source Ile Fantazies de Joskin.

2 See Paul Walker, “‘Fugue’ as a Genre Designation in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Schütz-​ Jahrbuch (Jahrgang 28, 2006), pp. 207–​230.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  143 Contemporary keyboard composers likewise applied the designation ricercar to toccata-​like pieces, in this case with running sixteenth notes in one hand and block chords in the other. Probably the best known of these are by Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, published in his collection Recerchari Motetti Canzoni of 1523. There each of two ricercars precedes an intabulated motet in the same mode, and there can be little doubt that the two free works are intended, despite their formidable length, as preludes to the pieces that follow them. Although Apel finds “complete points of imitation” in these two ricercars,3 his description seems exaggerated; at best, these sections are comparable to inner points in a contemporary motet and exhibit little structural organization. Four surviving ricercars by Giacomo Fogliano, thought to date from the 1520s and 1530s, are said to be structured as “short points of imitation in a greater number of entries” in the article on Fogliano in New Grove, but this too seems rather overstated.4 Not a single one of the four begins with the kind of fugal exposition found at the beginning of the motets in Antico’s published collections of the 1520s, and, to my eye at least, chordal texture overwhelmingly predominates.5 At the same time that Gombert began publishing his first motets and offering to the musical world his own experiments with more systematic incorporation of fugue, composers of lute, keyboard, and instrumental ensemble music similarly began to publish ricercari and fantasie that featured imitative counterpoint in the tradition begun by Compère, Josquin, Mouton, and others of the preceding generation. The first of these were three volumes for plucked string instruments published between 1536 and 1538: Francesco da Milano’s Intabolatura di liuto (1536), Luis Milán’s Libro de musica de vihuela de mano, intitulado El maestro (1536), and Luis de Narváez’s Los seys libros del Delphin de musica (1538, also for vihuela). Francesco’s collection includes fourteen ricercars, of which only one (#14) begins imitatively. The two Spaniards prefer the designation fantasia, but both made more extensive use of fugue: six fugal fantasias out of forty for Luis Milán, and an impressive ten of fourteen for Narváez. The latter’s enthusiasm for fugue may have come directly from contacts with Gombert and other contemporary Flemish musicians: in the same year (1526) that Gombert entered Charles V’s chapel (during one of the chapel’s several residencies in Spain), Narváez entered the service of Charles’s secretary, and Narváez also made more than one trip with his patron to the Low Countries.

3 Apel, History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. & rev. Hans Tischler (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 168. 4 H. Colin Slim, article “Giacomo Fogliano,” New Grove. 5 For a modern edition of Fogliano’s four ricercars, see Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, “Ricercari, Mottetti, Canzoni,” and Jacobo Fogliano, Julio Segni & Anonimi, “Ricercari e Ricercate,” ed. Giacomo Benvenuti, Italienische Klassiker der Musik, vol. 1 (Milan:  I classici musicali italiani, 1941), pp.  59–​69.

144  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Lute and vihuela are not obvious vehicles for the presentation of imitative counterpoint. As the title of Francesco’s publication specifically indicates, this music was notated in tablature, which tells the player where to put his fingers but gives no indication of voicing, and indeed transcription of the music into staff notation involves a certain amount of speculation with regard to stemming, voice leading, and even the precise number of voices. Within these constraints, the composers handle fugue much as does their Flemish contemporary Gombert, that is, with up to about twelve thematic statements in an opening point of imitation no more than about fifteen measures in length. Example 3.1 shows the opening point of imitation of one of these pieces, Fantasia VII of Luis de Narváez, with the subject identified by the composer as ut re mi fa mi. I have notated it on two staves with all of the requisite rests added in order to show how the voicing appears to be conceived, and its note values and the frequency of its barlines are made commensurate with the standard notation of contemporary motets. Several features of this point of imitation remind us of features with which we have become familiar from our study of motet fugues. All entrances begin on either final or dominant of the tonal type C-​♮, the piece begins with standard paired imitation, and thematic statements pile in on each other (nine in only fifteen measures). The subject, however, seems less like the vocal themes we have seen and more suited to the problem of producing four-​voice counterpoint on a plucked string instrument; that is, it is brief, entirely stepwise, and with a well-​defined ending. Beyond this, there is one major characteristic of Narváez’s fugue that distinguishes it from all motet fugues of the period, and this characteristic is inherent in its subtitle. Because the composer identifies his subject with solmization syllables, the listener might reasonably expect it to assume some importance in the piece and not simply disappear after the first fifteen measures. This expectation is met. Although Narváez introduces other thematic material after the opening point, ut re mi fa mi returns at least eight times throughout the piece’s remaining sixty-​six measures, all but once at either the top or the bottom of the texture for maximum effect. Narváez also makes sure to bring the subject in near the end in the top voice as a final reminder, followed by three measures that bring the piece to a conclusion. From their very first years of experimentation with fugue, in other words, composers of instrumental music clearly recognized the technique’s potential for providing coherence in the absence of text. It was this feature—​the return of thematic material after the opening point of imitation—​that, more than any other, set instrumental fugue on a very different course from its vocal counterpart and that makes the study of the sixteenth-​century ricercar and fantasia so central to the history of the pre-​Bach fugue.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  145 Example 3.1  Luis de Narváez, Fantasia VII sobre ut re mi fa mi. (Los seys libros del Delphin de musica, 1538). From Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 3, p. 14.

As admirable as Narváez’s ability to create four-​voice counterpoint on a vihuela might be, the future for instrumental fugue was not going to lie in music conceived for plucked strings and notated in tablature. When in Venice in 1540, a year after Gombert’s two dedicated motet volumes were issued in the same city by the Scotto firm, Adrian Willaert and several students and colleagues published a volume of twenty ricercars (plus one cantus firmus piece) in four partbooks intended, according to the title page, for “singing and playing on organs and other instruments,” they were offering a sort of instrumental counterpart to the motet;

146  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century that is, the pieces were conceived for the kinds of instruments that were capable of delineating and sustaining musical lines and rendering counterpoint as precisely and effectively as any vocal ensemble. Before we turn to this collection, however, which its contributors called Musica nova, a word or two about our approach to the vast repertory it spawned is in order. In earlier years, beginning perhaps in 1942 with Gordon Sutherland’s landmark dissertation Studies in the Development of the Keyboard and Ensemble Ricercar from Willaert to Frescobaldi, it was taken almost for granted that subdividing the large quantity of instrumental ricercars by idiom made the most sense. This approach is fundamental to Willi Apel’s History of Keyboard Music to 1700 and a follow-​up dissertation by Apel’s student Milton Swenson entitled The Four-​Part Italian Ensemble Ricercar from 1540–​1619 and was based on the distinction between notation in some sort of keyboard or open score and notation in separate partbooks.6 As the title page of Musica nova makes clear, however, even from the earliest years such a distinction seems not to have been recognized by the composers (or at least their publishers). Of course, the task of playing at a keyboard from four separate partbooks would seem almost superhuman, but recent research has demonstrated that this was indeed a skill expected of some organists.7 Furthermore, there is no question that organists who preferred to play from, for instance, German Organ Tablature would in any case have renotated for their own use pieces that were originally in staff notation, whether partbooks, keyboard score, or open score. More recent scholars have therefore advocated the abandonment of such a distinction, and in this book we will follow their lead. The distinction between pieces notated in some form of tablature and those in staff notation, on the other hand, remains useful. Sutherland’s pioneering work on the imitative ricercar also introduced a threefold classification of the genre: (1) ricercars that proceed straightforwardly as a series of themes, each confined to its point of imitation and never thereafter returning; (2) ricercars with themes that do return later in the piece after their initial points have concluded; and (3) monothematic ricercars. This scheme has proven its usefulness over the years and has been adopted by nearly all later scholars, but for a book about the history of fugue it seems sensible to offer a subtle but important change to category (2). For our purposes we will restrict this category to ricercars whose opening subject returns after an absence, and we will also include as a subcategory ricercars whose opening subject is present at or very near the end of the piece. Both of these phenomona are of course important

6 Apel addresses the question directly on pp. 174–​175 of his History of Keyboard Music to 1700. 7 See Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work:  The Craft of Musical Composition 1450–​1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 48–​56.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  147 components of the post-​1700 fugue and prove to be important ways in which the ricercar contributed to the genre’s pre-​1700 history. Let us turn now to the collection Musica nova of 1540. This collection survives with only one partbook, but fortunately a later printing by Jacques Moderne of Lyon under the title Musique de Joye survives complete and preserves all but two of the original pieces.8 Of the twenty-​one pieces in Musica nova, twenty are identified as ricercars, and pride of place is given to Adrian Willaert, the composer of the first ricercar in the collection, who is represented by a total of three. His former colleague at San Marco, the organist Julio Segni, contributed by far the largest number (thirteen, including the two incomplete ones), with two contributions from Girolamo Parabosco (a student of Willaert at the time, later organist at St. Mark’s), and one each from Girolamo Cavazzoni and two otherwise little-​known Frenchmen, Nicolaus Benoist and Guilielmo Golin. Much ink has been spilled over the extent to which the imitative ricercar did or did not “derive” from the contemporary motet. The evidence of Musica nova, and of its lute and vihuela predecessors, suggests that the motet fugue and the imitative ricercar grew to maturity at the same time, and that both took as their inspiration the imitative writing found primarily in motets of the generation of Josquin, Mouton, and Gombert, as discussed in Chapter 2, which they developed in their own distinct ways during the 1540s and 1550s. Instrumental composers did not have to rely entirely on earlier vocal works for their models, however. Among the few earlier instrumental works to begin with the same sort of imitation was the previously mentioned Ile Fantazies de Joskin (see Example 3.2).9 In her article on Josquin’s “Chansons for Three or Four Voices” for The Josquin Companion, Louise Litterick characterizes this piece and the similar La Bernadina as “instrumental chansons” and argues that this genre included also some chansons that despite the presence of text were likewise intended primarily for instrumental performance.10 Josquin’s Fantazies takes the standard three voices of the late fifteenth-​century chanson and begins with the imitative entrance of all three parts, one statement per part, after which a cadence in m. 12 closes this opening point and the theme disappears. Further points of imitation,

8 For a modern edition of the whole collection, see Musica nova accommodata per cantar et sonar sopra organi et altri strumenti: composta per diversi eccellentissimi musici. In Venetia, MDXL. Edited by H. Colin Slim. Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 9 For a modern edition, see The Collected Works of Josquin des Prez, vol. 27: Secular Works for Three Voices, ed. Jaap van Benthem and Howard Mayer Brown (Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1987), pp. 24–​25. The original is found in the manuscript Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2856, fol. 113'–​114. 10 Louise Litterick, “Chansons for Three and Four Voices,” in The Josquin Companion, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 342–​346.

148  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.2  Josquin des Prez, Ile Fantazies de Joskin. (Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, ms. 2856.) From The New Josquin Edition, vol. 27, pp. 24–​25.

of which there are three, introduce canonic writing between the top two parts but no further instances of free imitation shared by all parts. Of the eighteen ricercars in Musica nova to survive complete, a full twelve begin in either just this way or with only one additional thematic statement. A further four fail to show even this level of imitation, leaving only two to feature more extensive thematic return: Ricercar 1 by Willaert and Ricercar 6 by Julio Segni. Example 3.3 gives the opening point of imitation of Segni’s Ricercar 6. Like the opening of Narváez’s Fantasia VII, Segni’s features paired imitation, restricts

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  149 Example 3.3  Julio Segni, Ricercar 6. Musica nova (1540). From Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 1, pp. 21–​25.

150  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.3 Continued

thematic statements to entrances on final and dominant of the tonal type (d-​♮), and offers considerable thematic density (twelve statements in seventeen measures). Perhaps the most noticeable feature of all three fugues, however, is the unambiguous identity of their subjects. Josquin clearly indicates the final note of his subject by following it with a rest, as does Narváez for his opening statements in alto and bass and Segni for his in soprano and tenor. Furthermore, both Narváez and Segni have paid attention to the pitch of this last note and its relationship to the mode: the version of Narváez’s theme that begins on the final ends on the mediant; that of Segni ends on the dominant. This evidence suggests that composers of instrumental fugue tended to think less in terms of “the breaking off of the imitation at some point,” as motet composers so often did, and more in terms of a well-​defined theme, conceived in its entirety at the pre-​compositional stage, that formed the basis for the imitation. One final observation merits attention: in

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  151 none of the ricercars in Musica nova does the opening subject return after the first important cadence. Although Narváez’s Fantasia VII hints more at the future of the imitative ricercar/​fantasia than do the pieces in Musica nova, this future was not destined to unfold within the realm of vihuela and lute music and their tablature notation. To be sure, later fugues for plucked strings can be found here and there in the works of Domenico Bianchini (Ricercar 6, 1546),11 Alonso Mudarra (Fantasie 1 and 27, 1546),12 Francesco da Milano (Fantasie 37 and 39 of 1547),13 Simon Gintzler (Ricercar 3, 1547),14 and Valentin Bakfark (Ricercar 2, 1553, and Fantasia 7, 1565),15 to name only those composers whose works are available transcribed into mensural notation. Keyboard ricercars by Spanish composers and notated in so-​called Spanish keyboard tablature likewise show an approach to fugue similar to that found in lute tablature. The preferred genre designation in Spanish was tiento, roughly the same in meaning as ricercar, and the twenty-​ six known tientos of Antonio de Cabezón (d. 1566) include several fugal ones similar in style to the lute ricercars we have seen.16 Also in the same style is a set of six pieces designated ricercar and intended specifically for plucked keyboard instrument, published as late as 1576 by the Neapolitan composer Antonio Valente in his Intavolatura de Cimbalo.17 Conceptually, none of these pieces moves beyond the model set up by the earliest examples of Milán and Narváez. Meanwhile, a series of organists in northern Italy began shortly after 1540 to develop the genre of ricercar in important new ways that had significant ramifications for the history of fugue. 11 Mod. ed. by Arthur J. Ness in “Domenico Bianchini: Some Recent Findings,” in Le Luth et sa Musique, ed. Jean-​Michel Vaccaro (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 106–​107. 12 Mod. ed. by Emilio Pujol in Alonso Mudarra: Tres libros de música en cifra para vihuela, Sevilla, 1546, Monumentos de la música española, vol. 7 (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas, 1984), pp. 1–​2 and 66. 13 Mod. ed. by Arthur J.  Ness in The Lute Music of Francesco Canova da Milano (1497–​1543) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 116–​119 and 121–​123. 14 Mod. ed. by Adolf Koczirz in Österreichische Lautenmusik im XVI. Jahrhundert [von] Hans Judenkünig [et al.] und Unika der Wiener Hofbibliothek, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 37 (Graz: Akademische Drucks- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959), pp. 62–​63. 15 Mod. ed. by István Homolya and Dániel Benkö in Valentini Bakfark Omnia Opera (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1976–​), vol. 1, pp. 8–​14, and vol. 2, pp. 14–​23. 16 All twenty-​six are edited in Antonio de Cabezón, Collected Works, vol. IV/​2: Tientos, ed. by Charles Jacobs (Brooklyn, NY: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1972). For a facsimile page showing Cabezón’s notation, see Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–​1600 (Cambridge, MA: the Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), p. 53. 17 For a complete edition, see Antonio Valente, Intavolatura de Cimbalo (1576), ed. Charles Jacobs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). A facsimile page showing Valente’s notation can be found in Apel, Notation, p. 51.

152  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century

The Imitative Ricercar in the 1540s Michael Praetorius, in the quote given at the beginning of this chapter, noted the Italian origin of the word ricercar, and indeed, despite Adrian Willaert’s apparent role as the godfather of the genre, the vast majority of ricercar composers were Italian. This fact stands in stark contrast to the complete dominance of northern composers in the early decades of the motet fugue. It seems hard to escape the conclusion, therefore, that musicians south of the Alps were from the beginning concerned about problems of text comprehension in fugal writing and preferred to reserve the technique for textless music. Certainly this seems to have been the case for Willaert, who after 1540 went on to further exploration of the imitative ricercar but largely avoided introducing fugue into his vocal music. In the decade following the publication of Musica nova, we find several composers of diverse background experimenting with the imitative ricercar. These include two northerners representing Venice, the maestro di capella Willaert and the organist of St. Mark’s Jacques Buus, the organist Girolamo Cavazzoni from Mantua, and the gambist Guiliano Tiburtino from Rome. Compared with the number of fugal motets produced during this decade, the number of ricercars/​fantasias is not large:  Willaert published fourteen, Buus twenty-​two, Tiburtino thirteen, and Cavazzoni only six. Of these, most begin imitatively, but many do not meet all of our criteria for fugue. They are nevertheless of considerable importance in fugue’s history, as a closer look at one of Willaert’s ricercars (Example 3.4) will make clear. Here we see a piece whose opening shows insufficient thematic profile among the three voices to qualify as a proper fugal exposition. The first six notes of bass and cantus match nicely, but tenor enters with a completely different rhythm and with only the first four pitches of the bass’s opening. Nevertheless, if one scans the piece to see what appears whenever a voice enters after a rest—​a classic identifier for fugue—​one observes that most of the time the voice will enter with the four-​note scale that begins the piece. Instances are legion and include both rectus and inverted examples: m. 7, bass; m. 12, bass and tenor; mm. 17–​19, all three voices; mm. 21–​22, soprano and bass; mm. 57–​60, all three voices; and many in between. Indeed, exceptions, such as m. 7, soprano, are uncommon. We also find few internal cadences, which, together with the lack of clear thematic profile, produces a rather different kind of piece from the fugal motet based on clearly delineated themes matched to their texts and divided one from another through easily perceived cadences. Scholars in recent times have come to call Willaert’s way of working in this ricercar “thematic transformation.” That is, the thematic material with which the piece opens is subjected to myriad manipulations, mostly rhythmic but

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  153 sometimes also affecting even the sequence of intervals. In the end, the commonality among the various entrances has been reduced to the basic idea of a four-​note scale. Examples can be found of instrumental fugues by Willaert constructed on the model of the northerners’ motets and Narváez’s fantasias (e.g., the ricercars in Fa or Sol in the same collection), but the way he works in the Ricercar in Re seems to be more characteristic.

Example 3.4  Adrian Willaert, [Ricercar primo in] Re (Gardano, Motetta trium vocum, 1543). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 2, pp. 139–​143.

154  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.4 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  155 Example 3.4 Continued

156  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.4 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  157 Example 3.4 Continued

In the same year that Willaert’s Ricercar in Re first appeared in print, Girolamo Cavazzoni published four imitative ricercars in a collection of his works entitled Intavolatura, cioe Recercari, Canzoni, Himni, Magnificati. Cavazzoni’s father, Marc-​Antonio, had been an organist and twenty years earlier had published two of the few non-​imitative ricercars for keyboard. Girolamo followed his father’s career path, although in the preface to this first publication he was still able to refer to himself as a mere boy (fanciullo). He later found employment, probably in Urbino and certainly in Mantua, but he seems never to have worked in Venice. A second volume of keyboard pieces followed later in the decade, but it included no further ricercars. The first of Cavazzoni’s ricercars appears complete as Example 3.5. In Willi Apel’s History of Keyboard Music to 1700, this piece is given the following, quite straightforward diagram laying out its structure, where the capital letters refer to new themes, the double vertical strokes to section breaks, the horizontal lines to non-​thematic counterpoint, and the wavy line to passagework: A || B || C || D—​|| E—​~~ —​, with section breaks to be found at mm. 16, 41, 56, and 67. This all looks very neat and tidy and corresponds precisely with what we

158  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.5  Girolamo Cavazzoni, Ricercar 1 (Intavolatura, cioe Recercari . . . , 1543). From G. Cavazzoni: Orgelwerke (1959), vol. 1, pp. 3–​6.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  159 Example 3.5 Continued

160  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.5 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  161 Example 3.5 Continued

162  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.5 Continued

would expect in a contemporary motet, namely, a series of clearly defined and self-​contained points of imitation, each determined in the case of the motet by its particular textual phrase. Close examination of the piece reveals a much messier and far more interesting picture, however, one that has as much in common with Willaert’s Ricercar in Re as with a Gombert motet. Cavazzoni’s piece begins straightforwardly enough in a way that looks comfortably like a fugue. We see a clearly delineated eight-​note subject that enters in orderly fashion in the four voices from top to bottom. It is true that the handling of mode is somewhat irregular, with the second voice entering on E instead of the more expected D final of the mode, but the first statement of the subject emphasizes the important modal notes, and everything else is as it should be. What happens next, however, is more Willaert than Gombert. Soprano enters in m. 13 with only the first five notes of the subject stated in slow notes that bear no

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  163 rhythmic resemblance to the initial subject. This takes us to a cadence on D in the middle of m. 15, following which a new subject enters, again in soprano, and is stated a whopping fourteen times (Apel somehow finds seventeen). This subject has little rhythmic profile of its own and appears in various rhythmic guises, but its melodic movement is clear and is maintained throughout. The phenomenon of fewer, well-​spaced thematic statements in the opening point and more, quite densely packed statements in the second is one that we have already encountered in the contemporary motet, and therefore up to the cadence at the downbeat of m. 41 we still find ourselves in comfortably familiar territory as indicated by Apel’s diagram, excepting only the thematic freedom of mm. 13–​15. The ensuing measures, on the other hand, muddy the thematic waters. In the midst of seven statements of subject 3, Cavazzoni sneaks in one appearance of subject 2 (mm. 43–​44, alto). A deceptive cadence in m. 52 introduces an entire point with no thematic identity and almost unrelieved four-​part texture without rests. (Apel finds a fourth theme here, which escapes me.) A point of imitation need not always be fugal, as we have noted, but the mixing of themes from different points is new. The final point begins in m. 67 with a seemingly new theme, but if we recall Willaert’s thematic transformation, we can discern in this theme the outline of subject 1 minus its descending scalar notes. Subject 4 is even given an exposition from top to bottom like the opening, although the alto’s statement is incomplete, after which this subject disappears. The passagework of mm. 82–​ 86 then gives way to a final coda-​like section in which the first five notes of subject 1—​i.e., the notes from mm. 13–​15—​pile in on each other in two impressive strettos, after which statements of S2 and S3 bring the piece to an impressive close. How one could miss this final thematic tour de force is difficult to imagine. The influence of Willaert’s way of handling thematic material is obvious. Rhythm is a relatively unimportant component of Cavazzoni’s subjects, and even if the first thematic statements show a particular rhythmic profile, the composer constantly tinkers with it as the succession of thematic statements unfolds. Furthermore, the subjects themselves are melodically simple in the extreme and therefore well suited to such manipulation. The portion of S1 that Cavazzoni uses for his incorporation of both augmentation and stretto is a simple five-​ note descending scale from dominant to final, and S3 is really little more than an ornamented suspension formula, as its final statement at the piece’s conclusion illustrates. If we turn now to the collection of ricercars published toward the end of the decade by Guiliano Tiburtino, we find a clue to the origin of this way of handling thematic material, a way quite different from that found in the contemporary motet. Tiburtino stands somewhat outside the main tradition of the early imitative ricercar, as he was a gambist rather than an organist and worked in Rome rather

164  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century than Venice. Nevertheless, the twelve ricercars and one fantasia that he published in 1549 in his Fantasie et Recerchari share much in common with Willaert’s four ricercars of 1543.18 They are for three parts only, they were published in partbooks, they are of relatively modest length, and they incorporate few internal cadences. Tiburtino offered the user one helpful hint about his ricercars, however, that Willaert did not: he indicated for each one the solmization syllables of its theme, just as Narváez had done a decade earlier. Almost all of the pieces begin with the three voices entering one by one on these syllables, but merely two of the thirteen (no. 5 on Sol sol sol ut and no. 8 on Re ut re fa mi re) maintain enough rhythmic profile to suggest a proper fugal exposition. A hint pointing to the inspiration for this way of treating thematic material comes in the very last ricercar, no. 12 on La sol fa re mi. This theme, soon to become a favorite of ricercar composers, appears to have its origin in Josquin des Prez’s Missa La sol fa re mi, in which the theme, unlike that of the composer’s related Missa Hercules dux ferrariae (whose theme Tiburtino also borrows in shorter form in Ricercar no.  8), is subjected to myriad rhythmic transformations in the course of the mass.19 In Tiburtino’s setting we see an approach to the treatment of thematic material quite different from that of the motet, which, according to Dressler and as described by Zarlino, had its origins in canonic writing. The solmization syllables of Tiburtino’s ricercar titles, in other words, are the sum total of the theme’s identity, and the theme, like Josquin’s cantus firmi, never carries any rhythmic profile at all. Given the origin of this way of handling thematic material in cantus firmus technique rather than in canon, one might think that it would play a relatively minor role in the history of fugue, but in fact such an approach to fugal writing came to be preferred, as we will see, by an entire group of sixteenth-​century composers, active away from Venice. Perhaps the best-​known fugues of this type are Frescobaldi’s Fantasie of 1608, but such rhythmically free handling of subject also spawned yet another type, the so-​called variation canzona of Frescobaldi, Froberger, and many others.

18 For an edition of Tiburtino’s pieces, see Giuliano Tiburtino, Baldesar Donato, Cipriano de Rore, Adriano Willaert, and Nadal: Fantesie, et recerchari a tre voci, accommodate da cantare et sonare per ogni instromento (Venice, 1549), ed. Robert Judd, Italian Instrumental Music of the Early Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 1–​56. 19 In “The Fantasie et Recerchari of Giuliano Tiburtino,” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 59 (1973), pp. 223–​238, James Haar shows how most of Tiburtino’s solmization themes can be traced to works of Josquin. Haar also grapples with Tiburtino’s possible intended distinction between ricercar and fantasia, but since Tiburtino’s is an isolated attempt to draw such a distinction, it need not concern us here. The recent edition of Willaert’s four three-​voices ricercars from 1543 disproves Haar’s assertion (p. 226) that “[t]‌here seems to be no precedent for [Tiburtino’s] pieces in the Italian ricercar before 1550.”

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  165 The most prolific composer of imitative ricercars during the 1540s was Willaert’s fellow northerner Jacques Buus, who served as organist of St. Mark’s, Venice, during the decade 1541–​1551. While in this position, Buus published two collections of ricercars in partbooks, Book I  in 1547 with ten ricercars, Book II two years later with eight.20 He also published in the latter year a collection of four ricercars notated in keyboard score (the first of which is an elaborated version of Ricercar 1 from Book II) as well as a volume of motets.21 Buus’s whereabouts before he arrived in Venice are not known, but suspicion rests on France, where an early motet of his was published in 1539 by Jacques Moderne. Not only was Buus the most prolific of the early ricercar composers, but he is the only one to have engaged extensively with the fugal motet at the same time. Although no modern edition of the 1549 volume of motets has yet appeared, the early motet of 1539 is available, and a comparison of its fugal opening (Example 3.6) with that of one of his ricercars based on a similar subject (Example 3.7) proves instructive. The motet shows Buus to be a true colleague of Gombert. Its opening point of imitation lasts until the downbeat of m. 14, and the five voices present within that span nine thematic statements with the first two spaced only half a breve apart. The tonal type is g-​♭, the answer is real, and all entrances are placed on either G or D. The principal characteristic of the subject is its opening long note held across a strong beat, the downward leap of a fourth that follows on a half note, then the upward third to a whole note. The final three pitches are always present but rhythmically inconsistent, and the very last statement adjusts the upward third. Finally, the cadence at the end is set up for g minor but made deceptive. In short, there is nothing here that cannot be found in the motets of Buus’s northern contemporaries. By comparison, Buus’s Ricercar IX features only four voices and a subject of only five notes, but perhaps the most obvious difference between the two pieces is the impressive length of the ricercar’s opening section, an estimable forty breve measures. Although one Clemens motet, Respice in me, extends its opening point to thirty-​eight measures, the opening points of most motets conclude

20 The first is available in two modern editions: one notated in open score (2 vols.) by Donald Beecher and Bryan Gillingham (Italian Renaissance Consort Series, No. 5, 1984), one transcribed into two-​stave keyboard notation by Thomas Daniel Schlee (Universal Edition, 1982). A modern edition of the second, also notated in open score, is by James Ladewig (Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 3, 1993). 21 The four ricercars are available in facsimile in the series Biblioteca musica bononiensis, Sezione IV, no.  97 ([Bologna:] Arnaldo Forni, 2004), and in modern edition by Thomas Daniel Schlee (Universal Edition, 1980). Buus’s motets of 1549 have not been put into modern edition, but for more information on this corpus, see Walter Breitner, Jacob Buus als Motettenkomponist (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1977).

166  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century within twenty measures, and a forty-​measure point is unheard of. The density of thematic statement in Buus’s two fugues is comparable, twenty-​five for the forty measures as compared with nine in fourteen measures, so that despite its length the ricercar’s opening point is never without a statement of the subject for longer than two measures. Given the number of statements, and the penchant of Example 3.6  Jacques Buus, Dulcis ave virgo (Moderne, Quartus liber mottetorum ad quinque et sex vocds, 1539). From The Sixteenth-​Century Motet, vol. 11, pp. 193–194.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  167 Example 3.6 Continued

Willaert in particular toward thematic transformation in his ricercars, one might expect Buus to introduce this tool for the sake of variety, but if anything, he stays closer to the original subject in the ricercar fugue than he does in the motet. This is only one way in which Buus’s ricercar is more suggestive of the later fugue than is his motet, however. More important is the configuration of the first two voices to enter. Here we see the kind of exposition that we expect in fugue: the subject

168  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.7  Jacques Buus, Ricercar 9 (Ricercari a quattro voci, Book I, 1547). From Italian Renaissance Consort Series, No. 5, vol. 2, pp. 46–54.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  169 Example 3.7 Continued

170  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.7 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  171 Example 3.7 Continued

begins with a leap from dominant to final, the second voice waits until the first has completed its statement before entering, and it enters with a tonal answer from final to dominant. Buus’s motet, in other words, begins with what looks and acts like canon, whereas the ricercar begins by stating a theme and answering it with a careful eye toward modal clarity. This tonal answer plays an important role in the variants that Buus introduces into later thematic statements, as we see in mm. 11 (bass), 23 (alto), and 34 (tenor), where the answer form is changed from tonal to real (i.e., enters on A instead of G). Otherwise, the only variants introduced involve the filling in of thirds (mm. 30 and 34, tenor) or the introduction of dotted rhythm (mm. 24 and 38, alto). Of Buus’s twenty-​one ricercars, only one (Book I, no. 3) does not begin with a proper fugal exposition. Buus’s subjects are all clearly delineated with an obvious final note, and all but six of them end on the downbeat of the third measure

172  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century (two are shorter, three are half a measure longer, and one [Book II, no. 7] is four measures long). No answer enters more quickly than after one measure, and in all but two cases the answer enters after one and a half or two measures. In other words, Buus generally lets much if not all of the subject sound before bringing in the second voice, just as we have seen in Example 3.7. In one respect, however, the opening of Example 3.7 is atypical: only three of Buus’s ricercars begin with a tonal answer. The primary reason for this is to be found in the nature of the subjects. That of Example 3.7 is the only one to begin with a leap from dominant to final, whereas most begin with the interval of a second, third, or fourth. Thus, even if the entirety of the subject outlines the principal fifth, Buus clearly does not feel that a tonal answer is required for modal clarity. Buus’s ricercars are well distributed over the standard tonal types—​eight on ♮ d-​ or g-​♭, three on e-​♮ or a-​♮, four on F-​♭ or C-​♮, and five on G-​♮—​but there is no pattern or attempt to be systematic. Thematic statements enter on the notes we would expect from our study of the fugal motet in all but two cases, both of which are problematic. Ricercar 3 of Book II is in d-​♮ but the subject begins with the downward leap E-​B and ends on C. Ricercar 10 of Book I is in g-​♭ but its subject takes the notes A-​G-​B flat-​A, which gives the impression of a transposed Phrygian mode on A. In both cases, these starting notes can be readily found in fugal motets of the period, but Buus’s use of them to start a piece is awkward. Of Buus’s twenty fugal ricercars, a full fourteen are structured in the same way as Example 3.7, that is, with the opening subject treated in an opening point of imitation ranging from 32 to 81 measures, after which it disappears and never returns. The number of statements can vary considerably, from only nine in Ricercar 3 and Ricercar 6 of Book II to an impressive 32 in Ricercar 4, Book II, but thematic density remains high, with few non-​thematic measures to be found. The impressive lengths of these opening points are naturally reflected also in overall length of the pieces, which range from just over 150 breve measures to an eye-​opening 356 (Ricercar 6 of Book I), with most coming in at over 200. Three of the six remaining pieces in Buus’s ricercar collections (Ricercar 5, Book I, and Ricercar 1 and Ricercar 8, Book II) include later statements of the opening subject after the opening point. Sometimes these later statements come in groups (Ricercar 5, Book I, mm. 47–​53), sometimes isolated (two such instances comprise the totality of later statements in Ricercar 8, Book II). Of these three pieces, the most interesting is Ricercar 1 of Book II. Its opening point introduces two themes (the second in m. 11) before cadencing in m. 38, after which three further themes are introduced in separate points. In m. 184 the meter changes to triple, and theme 1, this time together with theme 3, is stated numerous times before the meter reverts to duple and theme 3 dominates this final section. One lone statement of theme 1, four measures from the end, however, closes out the piece. Needless to say, in all three pieces the opening subject undergoes much thematic

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  173 transformation, primarily of a rhythmic nature. Finally, it deserves mention that all of these later statements enter on the same principal notes of the mode as the statements with which the pieces open; in other words, the later statements do not serve as an opportunity to explore other tonal space. The most innovative way in which Buus sought to work with his thematic material was not primarily through thematic transformation, as we have of course already seen, but through the introduction of the so-​called learned or contrapuntal devices of augmention, diminution, and melodic inversion. These devices were well known in Flemish music from such contexts as cantus firmus use or canonic writing, but only melodic inversion played any sort of role in the early fugal motet. Augmentation is a key component of Buus’s remaining three ricercars, however (Ricercars 4, 7, and 8 of Book I). In each case, the composer introduces at least two augmented statements one after the other in different voices, and these groups of augmented statements occupy their own point, delineated on either side by clear cadences. In Ricercar 7, this produces an opening point of 89 measures with 27 statements, followed by a second point of 41 measures with 7 augmented statements. Ricercar 8 begins with no fewer than three points dedicated to theme 1, the first with the original form of the theme, the second devoted to melodic inversion, the third to augmentation.22 These augmented statements make little attempt to retain the relative note values of the original version; often each note is at least a breve or more in length and resembles more than anything a typical long-​note cantus firmus. It should also be noted that in both of these cases the theme never returns after these augmented statements. The last of Buus’s ricercars to be considered is perhaps his most daring: Ricercar 4 from Book I  is 219 breves long and monothematic. After over 40 thematic statements in the first 120 measures, we hear the theme in augmentation five times, sometimes combined with itself at normal speed, before we return to a final section without further augmented statements. Needless to say, Buus makes use of considerable thematic transformation in this ricercar in an attempt to maintain interest. It is difficult to argue that the ambitiousness of Buus’s ricercars, in both length and contrapuntal ingenuity, is matched by their effectiveness as pieces of music. With neither text to provide structural logic nor tonal harmony to provide a means for variety and coherence, a series of often loosely (if at all) related points of imitation exhibiting consistent rhythmic flow in predominately whole, half, and quarter notes can add up to a recipe for sustained tedium, notwithstanding 22 It must be to this ricercar, and not Ricercar 8 of Book II, that Colin Slim refers in his article on Buus for New Grove II, when he notes Buus’s 56 statements of the theme in the opening point of imitation. This number of course makes it sound as if the composer has no idea when to quit, a charge that is often leveled at Buus, but we have here not one but three points differentiated from each other through the use of contrapuntal devices. In other words, Buus’s opening is anything but monotonous.

174  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century all of the clever thematic manipulation. Buus’s contemporaries Willaert and Tiburtino, neither of whom is known to have been an organist, would presumably have thought first and foremost of three or four individuals getting together to play or sing from their partbooks, perhaps also discussing the compositional methods involved and the many subtle changes in the thematic material as the piece unfolded. Buus would probably have envisioned the same use, but as an organist he no doubt performed them in public as well. We can gain insight into his own expectations for the usefulness of these pieces by considering the four ricercars he published in keyboard score in 1549. As noted above, the first of these is the same piece as Ricercar 1 from Book II, and comparison of the two, whose openings are given in Examples 3.8 and 3.9, suggests the way in which Buus “fancied up” the skeletal counterpoint for public performance. Closer study reveals two important points. The first is that the playing of such sophisticated counterpoint on a keyboard instrument, which of course cannot distinguish the various voices from each other, makes it difficult if not impossible for a listener to sort out the voicing. This conundrum would have been quite familiar to the intabulators of contemporary vocal works, and the notation makes no attempt to do so; it is instead all about indicating to the player where to put his fingers and with which hand. Thus, for instance, the C in the left hand at the downbeat of measure 3 is in the original shared by both alto and tenor voices, but Buus’s notation offers no downward stem on this note to make the voicing clear. Furthermore, because the ranges of Buus’s parts can be extremely wide, there is considerable voice crossing, as the modern edition of Book I notated on two staves makes apparent, and the notation in the Intabolatura gives no indication of this. Without an original version notated in partbooks, in other words, it can be virtually impossible to puzzle out such a version from a keyboard score. All the more is it the case, then, that a listener cannot be expected without considerable effort to apprehend the underlying structure of the piece in the way that could relatively easily be done were the performance done on four gambas. The second point follows from the first: Buus, who was clearly aware of the listener’s difficulty, made the piece more interesting by adding a great many ornamental notes, most of which are given to the right hand. Indeed, the first few measures of Example 3.9 sound more like accompanied melody (see esp. mm. 5–​8) than like four-​voice counterpoint. In other words, Buus’s original piece serves primarily as a vehicle for a performance that captures the imagination through a steady stream of virtuoso passagework, and he probably had no expectation that his listeners would even try to follow the intricate contrapuntal framework. Indeed, ricercars that are originally conceived for keyboard performance often do not maintain strict voicing and cannot be written into partbooks. In Cavazzoni’s Ricercar 1, for instance, the voicing keeps “moving

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  175 Example 3.8  Jacques Buus, Ricercar 1 (Ricercari a quattro voci, Book II, 1549). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 3, p. 1.

176  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.9  Jacques Buus, Ricercar 1 (Intabolatura d’organo di recercari, 1549).

downward” as from time to time a new voice enters on top of the texture and one of the previous four voices disappears forever. (See Example 3.5, m. 30, where the bass disappears, and mm. 45–​47, where alto disappears.) For today’s organists and audience, this state of affairs poses serious challenges. We are interested in these pieces primarily for their handling of fugue, but the evidence presented by the original notation suggests that this interest was likely shared only among composers, and that what organists thought the untrained listener would want to hear was a colorful flow of melodic invention mixing slower notes with quicker ornamental figures. This was, after all, a mainstay of motet and chanson intabulation, as well as of the instrumental performance of vocal works with artful diminutions played primarily by the top-​most instrument. To perform such long ricercars straight and without

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  177 the insertion of rapid passagework may be to do something that the original composers never envisioned, unless the audience should happen to be made up of the most discerning musicians. No doubt, organists of the time improvised such ornamentation. Evidence for the study of Buus’s ricercars by another musician far from Italy, on the other hand, can be found in two manuscripts in Portugal.23 Manuscript MM 48 in the Coimbra University Library, copied for the most part during the years 1550–​1570, includes ten ricercars from Buus’s Libro primo notated in open score.24 An apparent follow-​up manuscript from slightly later, MM 242, presents seven of these ricercars in revised and shortened form, again in open score. The latter manuscript also includes several untitled works in similar style by the Portuguese keyboard composer António Carreira, who died sometime in the 1590s.25 Most of Carreira’s pieces are noticeably short than Buus’s, but they share the same approach to theme and structure, including both monothematic and multi-​themed examples, and offer only very modest if any keyboard figuration. The modern edition of these pieces gives them the titles Tento (the Portuguese cognate of tiento) and Fantasia, but these genre names are not present in the manuscript, and it is unclear whether Carreira would have named his pieces anything other than Ricercar.26

The Ricercar in the Late 1550s In the second half of the 1550s three important collections of ricercars appeared, comprising thirteen new works by Annibale Padovano published in 1556,27 23 On both manuscripts, see Filipe Mesquita de Oliveira, “Some Aspects of P-​ Cug, MM 242:  António Carreira’s Keyboard tentos and fantasias and their Close Relationship with Jacques Buus’s ricercari from his Libro primo (1547),” in Interpreting Historical Keyboard Music:  Sources Contexts and Performance, ed. Andrew Woolley and John Kitchen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 7–​18. 24 For a complete inventory and description, see Owen Rees, Polyphony in Portugal, c. 1530–​c. 1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra (New York and London: Garland, 1995), pp. 271–​282. 25 The most up-​to-​date inventory of this portion of MM 242 appears in Mesquita de Oliveira, “Some Aspects,” pp.  10–​11. For a modern edition of most of Carreira’s pieces in this style, see Antologia de organistas do século XVI, transcr. Cremilde Rosado Fernandes with introduction by Macario Santiago Kastner, Portugaliae Musica, Series A, No. 19 (Lisbon:  Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1966), pp. 1–​99. The volume also includes several facsimile pages from MM 242 on pp. LXV–​LXVIII. 26 According to Mesquita de Oliveira, Kastner initially drew a distinction between tento and fantasia in Portuguese keyboard music of the period, with the latter understood to be largely monothematic and the former polythematic, but he later abandoned this distinction. See “Some Aspects,” pp. 8–​9, 11, and 18. 27 For a complete modern edition, see Annibale Padovano: Il primo libro de ricercari a quattro voci (Venice, 1556), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 4.

178  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century fifteen by Giovanni Battista Conforti published in 1558,28 and fourteen by one Giaches (now thought to be Giaches Brunel rather than Giaches de Wert) that survive in manuscript and were likely compiled ca. 1560.29 The three collections share several common features:  four-​voice texture (at a time when motet composers had come to favor five, six, or eight voices), shorter pieces than those of Buus, and, for the first time, modal designations. Nevertheless, the differences in their handling of fugue outnumber the commonalities. Annibale Padovano achieved an organist post at Saint Mark’s, Venice, in 1552, the year after Buus left the basilica, and served there until 1565. Although he also published masses, motets, and madrigals, he is best known for his ricercars, and over the years these instrumental pieces have enjoyed a relatively high reputation, much of it at the expense of Buus’s less-​admired works. In particular, scholars have praised Padovano’s “dignified and homogeneous level of rhythmic activity; diatonic, largely conjunct thematic material; the linking of thematic material by means of subtle motivic interconnection and variation; and the variation of thematic material by constant rhythmic permutation and by learned devices (augmentation, diminution, inversion, and stretto).”30 Certainly the composer put his own personal stamp on the genre, and his pieces differ from those of his predecessor Buus in significant ways, as closer investigation makes clear. For Buus the ricercar had been almost exclusively a fugal genre, but two of Padovano’s are cantus-​firmus pieces: no. 4, in which the Kyrie cunctipotens is stated in the tenor, predominantly in long notes, and no. 9, in which Psalm tone 1 with ending on D appears in long notes first in the bass, then (beginning in m. 102) as a migrant cantus firmus moving among the four parts. A third ricercar, no. 10, lacks sufficient thematic identity at the beginning, leaving ten fugues. All but one of these (no. 5, at 191 breve measures) fall between 100 and 145 breve measures in length, shorter, in other words, than every one of Buus’s ricercars. The opening points of imitation are also correspondingly shorter, one only 17 measures long. Padovano chose not to experiment with the monothematic ricercar, and only one, no. 7, brings back its opening theme later in the piece, although several incorporate contrapuntal devices, and two introduce two themes in the opening point. The total number of themes varies considerably, from as few as two (nos. 3 and 6) to as many as twelve (nos. 5 and 12). Clearly Padovano 28 Complete modern edition in Giovanni Battista Conforti, Ricercare (1558) und Madrigale (1567), ed. Dietrich Kämper (Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1978). 29 Modern edition in The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex: Giaches Brumel [?]‌, Fabrizio Dentice, Anonymous, ed. Anthony Newcomb (Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1991). The name of the likely principal composer is spelled Brunel in Barton Hudson’s biographical article in New Grove II but Brumel in Anthony Newcomb’s edition. Neither author discusses his chosen spelling. 30 Anthony Newcomb, Preface to The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex:  Giaches Brumel [?]‌, Fabrizio Dentice, Anonymous, p. ix. This passage appears verbatim in the article on Padovano in New Grove II, written by Tiziana Morsanuto.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  179 preferred a more modest and disciplined approach in contrast to the exuberance of his St. Mark’s predecessor. This approach is apparent in both the nature of the thematic material and the spacing of its statements. Some scholars, no doubt inspired by Padovano’s prominent use of Gregorian melodies in the two cantus firmus ricercars, have claimed to find Gregorian borrowings in much of the composer’s thematic material, but these borrowings have more recently drawn skepticism.31 It is true that many of Padovano’s opening subjects favor stepwise motion and smaller leaps and that they move predominantly in white notes, but the attempts to link them with Gregorian melodies seem too strained to be convincing. Nor do these features distinguish Padovano’s subjects from Buus’s as much as one might expect. Where Padovano differs from his predecessor more significantly is in the pacing of the opening point and the spacing of the thematic statements. We have seen in Examples 3.6 and 3.7 how comparable in thematic density Buus’s ricercars are to his motets, with entrances often piling in on each other in stretto and with few spans of more than a measure or two lacking some sort of thematic material. Padovano’s opening points are by contrast much more orderly and almost leisurely. For one thing, he delays the entrance of the second voice in all but two cases until either two or two and a half breves’ time, and he is also not afraid to wait several measures between statements. Example 3.10 shows us an opening exposition that looks very much like what scholars of later fugue expect to see. The initial four entries follow the familiar pattern subject-​answer-​subject-​ answer with a two-​measure interlude between the first two and the second two entries, in other words following the model of paired imitation familiar from motets of the early sixteenth century. There is, furthermore, no thematic overlap. The answer form concludes with a rising fourth in place of the subject’s falling second, but otherwise the answer is real. In the remaining ten measures we find only three additional statements and no stretto at all. Two peculiarities deserve comment, however. Padovano identifies the mode as mode 6, which in this case is transposed to C-​♮, but he brings in his fugal answer on F rather than the dominant G.  Then, surprisingly, statement 5 in the soprano enters on G, followed by two more on C. Nevertheless, despite the prominence of F at the beginning, the mode is fairly clearly laid out, since the first four notes of the subject, together with those of the answer, entirely spell out the mode’s scale, and the cadence in m. 20 is on C. The second peculiarity involves the remaining three statements, not one of which quotes faithfully either form of the subject. Statement 5, the one on G, 31 For a summary of these arguments and a convincing refutation, see James Ladewig’s Introduction to Annibale Padovano:  Il primo libro de ricercari a quattro voci (Venice, 1556), pp. xiv–​xv.

180  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.10  Annibale Padovano, Ricercar [13] del sesto tono (Il primo libro de ricercari a quattro voci, 1556). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 4, pp. 171–​172.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  181 Example 3.10 Continued

182  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century incorporates a bit of thematic transformation, in that several of the rhythmic values have been altered, and the second of the two repeated notes toward the end of the subject has been eliminated. Statement 6, by contrast, incorporates a more complex change. In this case all of the original rhythms remain, as do all but one of the melodic intervals. The single change involves the upward leap of the fourth between notes 4 and 5, which is replaced by a downward step. The effect is to break up the subject into two parts (notes 1–​4 and 5–​9), each of which retains its integrity but between which the relationship is altered. To a student of fugue this appears to be a major distortion of the subject, but to a sixteenth-​ century musician working within the hexachordal system of solmization it is simply a “transposition” of the subject’s second half from the “hard” hexachord on G to the “natural” hexachord on C, while the solmization syllables, ut mi re re ut, remain the same. The Italians gave the word inganno (deception) to this device, and it proved to be a particularly clever, and amazingly popular, method of thematic transformation, as we shall see.32 Statement 7 of Padovano’s Ricercar 13 incorporates the exact same use of inganno, but with an additional bit of rhythmic alteration. Although only Ricercar 7 brings in its opening subject later in the piece (introducing both inganno and augmentation), four of Padovano’s ricercars introduce either augmentation (nos. 3 and 6) or two themes (nos. 2 and 11) into the first point of imitation. The opening points of these four pieces are also longer—​ between 48 and 93 measures—​compared to under 40 measures each for the opening points that are based only on a single theme without augmentation. The opening of one of those with two themes, Ricercar 11 (Example 3.11), deserves a closer look. The second theme of Example 3.11 functions very much like the countersubject of a later fugue. That is, it follows directly the opening statement of the subject in each of the four voices, but its independence is clear: not only is it separated from the subject by a rest, but in the course of the point, the distance at which it follows the subject varies considerably, and both subject and countersubject occasionally appear independent of each other. Padovano’s characteristic leisureliness in the unfolding of thematic material is very much in evidence in this exposition, with only two instances of stretto, both involving countersubject only, and noticeably long rests in cantus, altus, and bassus. There are, on the other hand, few moments, all very brief, in which neither theme is sounding, a result in large part of the presence of two themes. One glaring detail requires special

32 For a brief history of the inganno technique, see Massimiliano Guido, “Giovanni Maria Trabaci and the New Manner of Inganni: A Musical Mockery in the Early Seicento Ricercare,” in Interpreting Historical Keyboard Music:  Sources, Contexts and Performance, ed. Andrew Woolley and John Kitchen (Surry, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 44–​45.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  183 Example 3.11  Annibale Padovano, Ricercar [11] del terzo tono (Il primo libro de ricercari a quattro voci, 1556). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 4, pp. 146–​150.

184  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.11 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  185 Example 3.11 Continued

186  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.11 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  187 comment. The opening statement of the subject begins with a rising fourth that never reappears, since all subsequent statements begin with a falling whole step. Here we have a rare instance of the use of inganno at the very beginning of the piece. Perhaps the composer chose to open his piece in this way in order to avoid beginning on the troublesome note B. Certainly the opening fourth from E to A sets out mode 3 in very clear fashion. Padovano’s decision to give each of his ricercars a modal designation provides us with our first opportunity to investigate how one composer of the time distinguished between authentic and plagal pairs. Padovano made no attempt to organize his volume systematically according to mode, but the eight modes are relatively evenly distributed: of the ten fugues, we find one each in modes 1 and 2 (the Dorian), three in mode 3 (authentic Phrygian), 2 in mode 6 (plagal Lydian), and 3 in modes 7 and 8 (the Mixolydian). Although this is a small sampling, we can conclude from it that either cleffing or modal transposition served as Padovano’s determining factor. Of the pieces in modes 1 or 2, for instance, Ricercar 7 (in the authentic mode 1) is notated in high clefs, Ricercar 5 (in the plagal mode 2) in low clefs. The same factor distinguishes Ricercar 2 (mode 7, high clefs) from Ricercar 6 and Ricercar 8 (mode 8, low clefs). All of these Mixolydian pieces share the same final, G. In the case of the two ricercars in mode 6, nos. 3 and 13, on the other hand, we find two different cleffings but also two different finals: F (with a flat) for no. 3 in low clefs, C (with no flat) for no. 13 in high clefs. Here the cleffing presumably serves to bring the range of Ricercar 13, with its lower final, up to the level of Ricercar 3. One important feature of Padovano’s fugues must not be ignored. The regularity of Example 3.10 might lead us to expect that it would be the norm for Padovano’s fugal expositions to demonstrate regular alternation between subject and answer forms, but this is not the case. Just half of his ten fugues begin with subject followed by answer, whereas many begin instead with two statements beginning on the same note (including the unusual case of Example 3.11). In one extreme case, Ricercar 6, seven statements of the subject form precede the first statement of the answer. In this regard, Padovano followed the precedents of Buus and the northern motet composers. A tonal answer is primarily effective, of course, when it immediately follows the first statement of the subject in another voice, so it is not surprising to note that there is not a single tonal answer in the entire collection. In 1604, more than a quarter century after Padovano had died, the Venetian publisher Angelo Gardano issued a volume entitled Toccate et ricercari d’organo del excellentissimo Annibale Padoano that includes two ricercars by the

188  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century composer, a Ricercar del sesto tono alla terza and a Ricercar del duodecimo tono.33 The volume is notated in two-​stave keyboard notation and, like Buus’s similar volume of 1549, incorporates idiomatic keyboard ornaments into the melodic lines. There is no reason to doubt the attribution, since the two ricercars are similar in length and style to those of Padovano’s publication, although neither one is taken from the earlier set, but there is of course no way to be sure that Padovano himself added the ornamental notes or notated the pieces in this way. Certainly their appearance at such a late date speaks to a long-​lasting interest in and respect for the composer’s contributions to this genre. Another indication of such ongoing interest is the existence of two ricercars by a lesser-​known Paduan organist named Sperindio Bertoldo based on pieces from Annibale’s 1556 collection.34 Both appeared in a posthumous publication of 1591 (Bertoldo died in 1575) and are abbreviated keyboard intabulations, with the customary added ornamentation, of Padovano’s Ricercar 1 and Ricercar 4. A third ricercar in this publication has no known model, and has as its subject the famous “St. Anne” melodic pattern.35 This ricercar of Bertoldo is monothematic but a mere 40 breve measures in length. * * * Little is known about the life of the next important composer of ricercars, Giovanni Battista Conforti. His Primo libro de ricercari (1558) appeared in Rome, and its dedication to a cardinal whom Conforti presumably served also puts him most likely in that city. There are in addition hints of certain ties with Venice, since Claudio Merulo later printed and published a collection of Conforti’s madrigals, which included a piece in memory of Adrian Willaert. Conforti’s ricercars appeared in four partbooks (although one of the pieces, no.  13, is for three voices), but we have no information regarding his abilities or preferences as a performer, and the title page offers no suggestion for instrumentation. It would be natural to expect to see some influence from Conforti’s Roman predecessor Tiburtino, and indeed we find Conforti also using Josquin’s La sol fa re mi as one of his subjects (without identifying it), but except for their shorter length (all ca. 100 breve measures) these pieces fall squarely in the tradition

33 An edition of the two pieces can be found in Annibale Padovano and Sperindio Bertoldo, Compositions for Keyboard, ed. Klaus Speer, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 34 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1969), pp. 19–​28. 34 For a modern edition of these two, see ibid., pp. 57–​62. 35 Modern edition: ibid., pp. 55–​57.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  189 established by Buus and Padovano. Conforti does not identify his themes with solmization syllables, he follows Padovano in identifying the mode of each ricercar, and all but two of the pieces (nos. 1 and 12) easily qualify as fugues. There is one way, however, in which Tiburtino’s preferred approach to thematic material is mirrored: thematic transformation is pervasive. In only five of Conforti’s thirteen fugues do even the opening four entrances share the exact same rhythms, even if the subject has no particularly pronounced rhythmic profile. Furthermore, the composer occasionally transforms his thematic material in a new, more systematic way. Example 3.12 shows Conforti at work. Here we see a subject whose profile is both melodically and rhythmically memorable. It begins with a dotted whole note followed by the upward leap of a fifth, and it ends with a quarter-​notes figure that encircles this upper note. The first four entrances retain this profile, including the real answer, with the only variant being the offbeat entrance of the bass. Entrance 5 in the alto copies this bass rhythm, but with entrance 6 in the tenor the thematic transformation begins, however modestly, when the subject’s second note is doubled in length. Further modifications of this sort mark the next two entrances in soprano and alto—​one notes especially the alto’s recasting of the quarter-​note flourish—​but in m. 19 the bass offers a much more radical change. Now the flourish disappears altogether, taking the theme down to only six notes, and the relationship of rhythmic values for the first two notes is reversed. The next two entries, in tenor and alto, adhere closely to this new version of the subject (labeled S' in the example), until the final two entrances, in bass and soprano, begin to stray further from it. What we have, in other words, is the clear establishment of one theme, followed by its gradual transformation into another related theme that then replaces the first. I can find no example of such systematic handling of thematic transformation in the works of Conforti’s predecessors. There is yet another peculiarity in this passage. The last note of m. 28 in the tenor introduces the next, unrelated, theme, but the cadence and change of texture occur three measures earlier, in m. 25. Conforti’s thematic work, in other words, is not neatly compartmentalized into the distinct points of imitation, but “spills over” from one point into the next. Here is a composer pushing some of the boundaries established by his predecessors. In contrast to Padovano’s relative consistency and reserve in the crafting of thematic material and handling of opening exposition, Conforti’s set shows much more variety. Subjects vary considerably in length, from less than two measures to over three. Some are quite austere and vocal in their motion, others surprisingly florid and instrumental. Melodic range of the subject also varies, from a mere fourth to a full octave, but Conforti tends to prefer the wider ranges. The entrance of Conforti’s second voice can likewise take place at all sorts of different

190  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.12  Giovanni Battista Conforti, Ricercar [2]‌del ottavo tono (Il primo libro de ricercari, 1558). From Concentus musicus, vol. 4, pp. 8–​9.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  191 Example 3.12 Continued

192  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.12 Continued

time intervals, from merely half a measure to two and a half measures. As this last statistic suggests and Example 3.12 illustrates, Conforti most certainly does not shy away from stretto at the beginning of a piece. In addition to the ever-​present phenomenon of thematic transformation, Conforti also shows a fondness for augmentation as introduced by Buus and Padovano. Six of his thirteen ricercars include it, and in each case its use has a fundamental influence on the piece’s overall structure. Four of these six (nos. 3, 5, 13, and 14) are monothematic, one (no. 8) is almost monothematic (75 measures for theme 1 followed by only 30 measures for the only other theme), and one (no. 7) brings its initial theme back later in the piece. Each of the remaining seven ricercars without augmentation treats its opening theme in a point of imitation of between eighteen and twenty-​eight measures with anywhere from eight to thirteen statements.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  193 Conforti’s collection is the first not only to designate the mode of each ricercar, but also to order the pieces according to mode. Ricercars 1–​3 are in the Mixolydian mode 8; Ricercars 4–​6 in the Lydian mode 5; Ricercars 6–​8 in the Phrygian modes 3 and 4; Ricercars 9–​14 in the Dorian modes 1 and 2; and the last one back to Mixolydian in mode 7. Trying to determine Conforti’s criteria for distinguishing authentic from plagal modes, about which he offers no information, turns out to be tricky and inconclusive, however. The range of the individual parts is generally too wide for the tenor ambitus to be a determining factor. Cleffing seems to separate mode 1 from mode 2, since the only ricercar in mode 1 (no. 9) is notated in high clefs and all of those in mode 2 (nos. 10, 11, 13, and 14) in low, despite the variety of tonal types for the latter (including d-​♮, d-​♭, and g-​♭). Cleffing does not distinguish the three pieces in modes 7 and 8, however. In this case, all are in high clefs, and it is the finals and signatures (G-​♮ for mode 7, C-​♭ for mode 8) that differ. A combination of the two criteria work for the Lydian pieces. Ricercars 4 and 6 both have the final F and the signature of one flat; no. 4 is in high clefs (authentic mode 5), no. 6 in low clefs (plagal mode 6). Ricercar 5, then, also in mode 6, has the final C with no flat and high cleffing. And yet all of these criteria break down for Ricercar 7 (mode 3) and Ricercar 8 (mode 4), since their cleffings (high) and tonal type (a-​♭) are identical. One possible way to distinguish these last two is to draw on the distinction later made by Girolamo Diruta whereby the subjects of authentic fugues ascend, while those of plagal fugues descend. This does in fact hold true for Ricercars 7 and 8 but not for others in the volume, and we are left in the end with no apparent single factor distinguishing between the two modes of each pair. The starting notes on which Conforti brings in his thematic statements are comparable to those found in contemporary fugal motets of the period, including one based on the Gregorian melody Ave Maria (Ricercar 14) that is in tonal type g-​♭ but opens with entrances on F and B flat, just like Gombert’s motet cited in Example 2.11. * * * In 1954 the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris received from a family by the name of Bourdeney a late sixteenth-​century manuscript (Rés. Vma ms. 851) containing over 400 pieces of polyphony notated in open score, including sixteen untexted pieces for four voices and one for five voices. Those untexted pieces that bear titles are called ricercars, and fourteen of them appear for stylistic reasons to be by a single composer, who is not named in the manuscript. Fortunately, four of these pieces also survive in a manuscript in the Chigi collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where they are designated “fantasie” and are attributed to “Giaches,” almost certainly the French musician Jacques Brunel who was

194  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century organist in Ferrara from 1532 until his death in 1564.36 There are various reasons to associate the Bourdeney manuscript with the Po Valley, possibly Ravenna; Anthony Newcomb, who has done the most recent work on the collection and has published a complete edition, dates the ricercars around 1560.37 These ricercars, approximately contemporaneous with those of Padovano and Conforti, take the genre in a rather different direction. All but three qualify as fugues (nos. 10 and 11 lack a proper opening exposition and no. 14, the five-​ voice piece, is a reworking of a madrigal by Rore), and yet scarcely a single one is as straightforward in its handling of thematic material as those of Padovano and Conforti. The reason is pervasive thematic transformation, principally using the technique of inganno, which plays a fundamental role in every single fugal ricercar. Indeed, Brunel’s constant tinkering with his themes takes us back almost, but not quite, to Willaert’s Ricercar in Re (Example 3.4), in which one could scarcely speak of a theme at all. For instance, if we focus on just the first four thematic statements of each fugal ricercar, we find that in four cases (nos. 1, 2, 5, and 13), these opening statements do not share a consistent rhythm; in two other cases (nos. 7 and 9), the rhythm remains consistent but inganno is already applied before the four are completed; and in one other, the four statements share a common rhythm but with the answer in inversion. This leaves only four pieces (nos. 4, 6, 8, and 12) in which even the first four statements of the subject are the same in rhythm and melodic line, and one of these (no. 12) is based on an extremely simple three-​note subject. In short, Brunel’s ricercars stretch almost to the limit the idea of what fugue is, since it frequently proves extremely difficult to identify the theme precisely and to know when it has transformed itself into a new identifiable theme according to the kind of process we saw in the opening of Conforti’s Ricercar 2 (Example 3.12). This almost frenetic use of inganno makes clear that the composer had to have understood his thematic material in terms of its solmization, just as Tiburtino had done, although nowhere does Brunel identify his themes in this way. Such a highly intellectual approach to thematic material is supplemented in a major way by the incorporation of the learned devices of augmentation and melodic inversion. Four of the ricercars include augmentation and an additional five inversion (one of these eight, no. 4, incorporates both), leaving only three (no.  7–​9) without either device. The idea of these pieces as serious, sophisticated works suitable for study is also reinforced by their survival in that rarest

36 For the reasons behind this identification, see Anthony Newcomb, “The Anonymous Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex,” in Frescobaldi Studies, ed. Alexander Silbiger (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 114–​116. 37 Concerning dating and provenance, see Newcomb’s Preface to The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex, pp. vii–​viii.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  195 of sixteenth-​century formats, open score, rather than in the usual partbooks or keyboard score.38 No evidence survives that these works were ever published, and it seems likely that they were conceived primarily for the purpose of circulating in manuscript to other professional musicians who could appreciate their subtleties and learn from them. Brunel’s ricercars take us back (almost) to the length of Buus’s ricercars, with six of the eleven between 200 and 220 measures long and only one shorter than 131 measures. Structurally we find four different approaches. Three of the pieces (nos. 1, 2, and 12) continue to treat the opening subject throughout the piece, including one (no. 2) based on the by-​now familiar subject la sol fa re mi. One additional ricercar (no. 12) opens with two themes, which likewise continue throughout the piece. In two (nos. 5 and 9) the theme undergoes ongoing transformation into new themes.39 Finally, in only five (nos. 3, 4, and 6–​8) is the opening subject supplanted by later thematic material that replaces it for good. From the standpoint of the history of fugue, then, the irregularity of opening exposition is somewhat compensated for by the composer’s ongoing interest in his opening material from beginning to end in more than half of the pieces, as well as by the great interest in learned devices. Example 3.13, the first 58 measures of Ricercar 7 “del primo tono,” illustrates some of the ways in which Brunel manipulates his thematic material. I  have chosen it because it is the single instance in the collection of a tonal answer following immediately on the opening statement of the subject. Its theme, identified by Newcomb in the Preface to his edition, is a long one, and once its opening fifth D-​A announces the mode’s final and dominant, its subsequent motion pays little heed to the mode as it rambles through two long quarter-​note scales that emphasize the unimportant notes C and E. These scales are followed by four final notes, also emphasizing the note C, that show more rhythmic and melodic character than the preceding scales. Indeed, Brunel soon detaches this four-​note motive from the remainder of the subject, but the subject does not seem to consist of two halves, since without the final motive it feels incomplete, as it simply trails off. Given the subject’s length, it is not surprising that the answer enters well before the initial statement is complete, as does the third statement (again in subject form) before the answer is quite finished. But already with this third statement, the composer begins to play with his material. In m. 8, the interval between the descending scale and the final four-​note motive is altered from an ascending 38 Not only are they notated in open score in the Bourdeney Codex, but they are also so notated in the Chigi ms. VIII, 206, of the Vatican Library. For a facsimile from Bourdeney, see Newcomb’s edition, Plate 1; for one from Chigi, see Edward Lowinsky, “Early Scores in Manuscript,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 13 (1960), Plate 8 (the article is on pp. 126–​173). 39 Newcomb gives a detailed guide to how this works for Ricercar 5 on p. xv of his preface to the edition.

196  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century sixth to a rising half step, a classic instance of inganno. Two further statements of the answer form appear intact in mm. 14–​18 in the bass and mm. 18–​22 in alto, but there is not a single restatement of the subject form with its exact opening rhythms and intervals. What Brunel does instead (to both subject and answer forms) is to remove the final four-​note motive from the end of the subject and to conclude the downward quarter-​note scale at whatever point he wishes, as can be seen in mm. 9–​11 (alto), mm. 17–​19 (soprano), mm. 24–​27 (alto), mm. 30–​32 (bass), mm. 36–​38 (soprano), mm. 40–​42 (bass, with inganno), etc. Particularly telling is the tenor statement in mm. 37–​40. Here the downward scale ends with a downward leap, following which the rhythm and general melodic shape Example 3.13  Jacques Brunel, Ricercar [7]‌del p[rim]o T[o]no (Paris, Bibliothèque national, Rés. Vma ms. 851). From The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex, pp. 49–​52.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  197 Example 3.13 Continued

198  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.13 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  199 Example 3.13 Continued

200  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.13 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  201 Example 3.13 Continued

of the four-​note motive round out the statement. These alterations cannot be explained through a change of hexachord, and yet the subject is clearly discernible. Meanwhile, the four-​note motive, having lost its role as closing gesture for the subject, appears a number of times entirely on its own, e.g., in mm. 22–​23 (tenor), 26–​27 (bass), 32–​33 (alto), and others. In all of this, we see surprisingly little manipulation of the subject’s rhythmic values. One final observation concludes our examination. As we saw in Conforti’s Ricercar 2, Brunel’s first subject spills over into the second point of imitation. The first point of Ricercar 7 cadences on the downbeat of m. 55, but a final statement of the opening subject appears in the bass immediately thereafter before the next subject begins in soprano with the last three notes of m. 58.

202  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Such free handling of thematic material poses significant terminological problems. In his edition, Newcomb chooses the word subject as his basis, but it functions differently in different contexts.40 The ricercars that proceed in traditional fashion as a series of relatively unrelated and compartmentalized themes are said to have x number of subjects. Newcomb also designates as separate subjects those that are derived one from another through some sort of manipulation. Once a subject is stated and established, other thematic material that enters “against” it is labeled as one or more countersubjects. Finally, when a theme consists of two independent halves that appear sometimes together, sometimes separately, the expression “double subject” is applied. Although this application of fugal vocabulary makes sense in the context of Brunel’s collection, for a larger study focused on the history of fugue the words subject and countersubject in particular, as well as the expression double subject, are perhaps best used in ways more consistent with that overall history. We will return to this question in the following section. Only six of Brunel’s eleven fugal ricercars bear modal designations in the sources, an insufficient sampling from which to judge the composer’s (or perhaps the compiler’s) distinctions between authentic and plagal modes. What is important to point out, however, is that whoever assigned modes to these pieces worked from the newer twelve-​mode system, since one ricercar is designated mode 9 and one mode 12. There is no systematic modal order to the pieces as they appear in the manuscript, and not all modes are represented. In the midst of Brunel’s fourteen ricercars, the Bourdeney Codex includes three additional untexted and untitled pieces—​ one attributed to Fabrizio Dentice, the other two anonymous—​that Newcomb finds much different in style from the main set.41 All are imitative ricercars, but they are considerably shorter than Brunel’s (between 71 and 91 measures) and make significantly less use of learned devices. Their date and provenance are uncertain, since the manuscript was not compiled until sometime in the 1580s, although they may date from about the same time as Brunel’s, given that Dentice was active as a lutenist and composer in the 1560s and died in 1581. By about 1560, then, the general characteristics of the ricercar had been firmly established along the lines first systematically explored by Buus: four-​voice texture, variable in length and ambition, in all but a few instances straightforwardly fugal, with emphasis in many of the pieces on learnedness expressed through subtle, clever thematic transformation and the contrapuntal devices of augmentation and melodic inversion. Individual composers had also experimented

40 41

See Newcomb’s edition, pp. xi–​xiv. All three are edited on pp. 127–​139 of Newcomb’s edition.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  203 with various structural models that moved well beyond that of the motet, including monothematic ricercars, ricercars with one principal theme maintained throughout but accompanied by one or more subordinate themes, ricercars that begin with two themes, and ricercars whose opening theme reappears later in the piece after a long absence. Before we turn once again to Venice and consider the contributions of the two organists of St. Mark’s in the 1560s and 1570s, however, we must first grapple with a set of ricercars that survive only in manuscript and have only recently been confirmed as the work of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

The Eight Ricercars Attributed to Palestrina The manuscript Musica M 14 of the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome, understood to date from the end of the sixteenth century, begins with a set of eight modally ordered ricercars in open score notation attributed to Palestrina.42 The manuscript’s over 100 folios comprise 123 works, all, with the exception of the eight ricercars, scored-​out copies of vocal works by many of Europe’s leading composers.43 Palestrina is the best-​represented composer in the collection, and enough pieces by other Romans are also included to point to a Roman origin for the manuscript. When Franz Xaver Haberl produced the first complete works set for Palestrina in the second half of the nineteenth century he included these ricercars, but because the Corsiniana manuscript was as yet unknown to the wider scholarly community and the pieces were available only in nineteenth-​ century copies, he considered the works of doubtful authenticity.44 Now that we have no reason to doubt Palestrina’s authorship, we are left with the question of how to evaluate these, the only known textless works in the composer’s output, and where chronologically they might belong in the ricercar’s development. Palestrina was born in 1525 or early 1526, within a year or two of Padovano and a few years before Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli. Although a volume of Masses appeared in print in 1554 and one of madrigals in 1555, Palestrina’s 42 For a modern edition (in two-​stave keyboard notation) based on this source, see Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Ricercate sugli otto toni and Thesaurum absconditum, ed. Liuwe Tamminga (Colledara, Italy:  Andromeda Editrice, 2003), pp. 2–​ 19. The eleven pieces of the Tesaurum absconditum, from another manuscript in the Corsiniana collection, are also titled “Ricercar” but are all based on the hexachord and therefore of no interest for the history of fugue. 43 For a study and complete inventory, see Oscar Mischiati, “Il Manoscritto Corsiniano dei ‘Ricercari’ di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina” in Atti del II Convegno Internazionale di Studi Palestriniani: Palestrina e la sua presenza nella musica e nella cultura europea dal suo tempo ad oggi, pp. 177–​201. Edited by Lino Bianchi and Giancarlo Rostirolla. Palestrina:  Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 1991. 44 The eight ricercars still do not earn mention in the article on Palestrina in New Grove II.

204  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century first published motets were not issued until 1563, and all of his remaining published music dates from after that time. The set of eight ricercars shares several features with those just considered: all are for four voices, the eight are given modal designations (the collection is in fact modally ordered), they arose (like those of Conforti) in Rome and thus outside the Venetian orbit, and the notation is open score, as in Bourdeney. In other ways, however, Palestrina’s set stands apart. We noted in our study of Buus the difference in his handling of fugue in a motet vis-​à-​vis a ricercar, more specifically the vastly greater length of the ricercars and their correspondingly large number of thematic statements per point of imitation. Palestrina’s ricercars, by contrast, are quite like his fugal motets. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the consistencies in Palestrina’s fugal writing across genres is through comparison of two examples based on similar thematic material: the opening point of Ricercar 1 (Example 3.14) and that of the motet Coenantibus illis, first published in 1572 (Example 3.15). Beyond the similarity of theme, the two examples share a great many characteristics. In terms of material, we see similarity of rhythmic values (predominantly whole and half notes with some quarter notes) and predominance of stepwise motion, with occasional leaps of third, fourth, or fifth. Structurally, the two share similar overlap of thematic material at the very beginning (paired imitation, in fact, in the ricercar), a tonal answer, precisely two thematic statements per voice, and a similar level of thematic density, leading to a longer opening point for the five-​voice motet (26 measures) than for the ricercar (20). One particular feature, on the other hand, surprises: Cœnantibus’s fugue shows great sophistication in its handling of thematic material, with a three-​note descending motive assigned to the word “accepit,” which returns again and again and thus behaves something like a countersubject. In the ricercar, on the other hand, we find only one thematic unit, which is rather longer and kept intact. In fact, not one of the eight ricercars presents two themes in its opening point, quite in contrast to the prevalence of this strategy in the motets. The handling of mode in the ricercars also mirrors that in the composer’s motet fugues. We see, for instance, subject entrances on G and D in Ricercar 7 and on G and C in Ricercar 8; comparable examples appear in the motets (for the former type, see, e.g., Veni sponsa, for the latter, Quam pulchri). Likewise, Palestrina brings his subject in on E and A in Ricercar 3 and E and B in Ricercar 4 (the motet Lapidabant takes the former two notes for its subject entrances, Dominus Jesus the latter). As for the distinction between authentic and plagal modes, Palestrina’s methods are not consistent. Modes 1 and 2 are distinguished by finals, but in the opposite way to that of most composers: the tonal type for Ricercar 1 is g-​♭, that for Ricercar 2 d-​♮, in both cases with high cleffing.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  205 Example 3.14  Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Ricercata del Primo Tono (Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana, ms. Mus. M 14, fol. 1). From Palestrina, Ricercate sugli otto toni, p. 2.

206  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.14 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  207 Ricercars 3 and 4 share tonal type e-​♮ but differ in cleffing, again in a backward way: low clefs for the authentic mode, high for the plagal. Ricercars 5–​8 are more what we would expect, with the same final for each pair of modes, high clefs for the authentic, low for the plagal. Example 3.15  Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Coenantibus illis (Il libro secondo dei Mottetti, 1572). From Palestrina, Opere complete, vol. 7, pp. 31–​33.

208  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.15 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  209 Example 3.15 Continued

210  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.15 Continued

Where, then, do these eight works belong in the history of fugue, and when and why might Palestrina have written them? In the absence of hard evidence to guide us, perhaps the first thing to note is their modesty: modesty in total length (between 50 and 71 measures), modesty in length of opening point (between 14 and 21 measures), modesty in number of thematic statements in the opening point (between five and eight), consistent avoidance of more than one thematic unit per point, and complete absence of the sorts of thematic transformation found in the ricercars of Conforti and Brunel. To me, they seem like nothing so much as compositional studies in the handling of fugue without text in preparation for the greater challenge of writing fugal motets. In that sense, they could be seen as modest counterparts to the ambitious ricercars of Brunel, likewise intended for study and teaching and also notated in open score. A glance at Palestrina’s first three publications provides a possible time frame for their composition. His first, a set of Masses that appeared in 1554, reveals itself as rather traditional in style; included among its seven Masses are one based on a cantus firmus (Missa Ecce sacerdos magnus), one featuring canonic writing (Missa Ad coenam Agni providi), and one based on a motet by Andreas de Silva from 1532, O regem coeli.45 Fugue plays no significant role in this volume, as it of course also does not in the book of madrigals published the following year.46 45 This publication is edited in its entirety in Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Le opere complete, vol. 1: Il libro primo delle Messe a 4, 5 e 6 voci, ed. Raffaele Casimiri (Rome: Fratelli Scalera, 1939). 46 Edited in its entirety in Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Le opere complete, vol. 2: Il libro primo di Madrigali a 4 voci, ed. Raffaele Casimiri (Rome: Fratelli Scalera, 1939).

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  211 Fugues abound, on the other hand, in Palestrina’s first published book of motets of 1563, and a great many of them exhibit a level of thematic sophistication beyond that found in the ricercars. If the conjecture is correct, then the years 1555–​1563 would be the obvious time for Palestrina to have begun his engagement with fugue through the genre of ricercar, and the motets of 1563 and beyond would represent the fruits of this engagement. One could speculate further that it might have been the appearance in Rome of Conforti’s ricercar collection in 1558 that provided the inspiration, although admittedly Conforti’s handling of thematic material seems to have exerted no influence. It is ever so tempting to speculate that it might have been a relatively early engagement with the genre of ricercar that inspired Palestrina to feature fugue in such a large percentage of his motets at a time when his contemporaries were beginning to back away from this approach.

The Ricercars of Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli Although a great many ricercars were published in lute collections of the 1560s and early 1570s, only two volumes of ricercars for keyboard or ensemble appeared in print during the more than decade and a half following Conforti’s publication of 1558. Both were by Claudio Merulo, organist at St. Mark’s, Venice, the first (Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo, 1567)47 in keyboard score, the second (Il primo libro de ricercari da cantare, a quattro voci, 1574)48 in partbooks. Merulo had joined Annibale Padovano as second organist at St. Mark’s when in 1557 he won the slot vacated by Girolamo Parabosco, contributor to the original Musica nova of 1540. When Padovano subsequently left St. Mark’s in 1565 and failed to return, his slot was filled by Andrea Gabrieli, who had competed unsuccessfully with Merulo in 1557, and together these two served the basilica for almost two decades, until Merulo moved to Padua in 1584 and Gabrieli died the following year. Between them they left behind a legacy of almost 100 imitative ricercars, and through both this compositional engagement and their influence as teachers the two men set the ricercar on a path leading clearly and directly to the later fugue. Despite the two composers’ importance for the history of fugue, their contributions have proven difficult to evaluate properly due in part to certain 47 For a complete modern edition, see Claudio Merulo, Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo (1567), ed. John Morehen, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 133 (Madison, WI: A-​ R Editions, 2000). For a complete facsimile of the second edition, see Claudio Merulo, Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo, 2nd ed. (Venice: Gardano, 1605; reprint ed., Forni, n.d.). 48 Complete edition in Claudio Merulo, Il primo libro de ricercari da cantare, a quattro voci (Venice, 1574), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 5 (New York: Garland, 1987).

212  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century problems that took some time to resolve. Most problematic perhaps was an incorrect birthdate for Andrea Gabrieli, long thought to have been ca. 1515 but now known to have been ca. 1532/​1533, i.e., contemporary with Merulo’s birth year of 1533. Since all of Gabrieli’s ricercars appeared in posthumous prints,49 their dating has been based largely on speculation, which the incorrect birth year caused to be placed rather earlier than appropriate.50 After his first bid for the organist post at St. Mark’s failed (when he and Merulo were about twenty-​four years old), Gabrieli is known to have traveled to Munich to study with Lassus, and it seems very likely, given the appearance of Merulo’s first publication of ricercars in the year following Gabrieli’s finally successful assumption of the other organist post, that Merulo had already been experimenting with the ricercar while Gabrieli was elsewhere and focused on other genres. Proper evaluation of Merulo’s contribution, on the other hand, was hindered in part by the incomplete survival of his two posthumous collections of ricercars dated 1607 and 1608, which have only in more recent years been discovered in complete form among the organ tablatures of the Torino collection.51 Merulo’s nearly seventy ricercars can now be studied in their entirety. Whatever the compositional chronology of the two composers’ ricercars, Merulo’s volume of 1567 brought the first of these pieces to the wider public, and it offered a decisive new direction for the genre. Merulo’s focus on mode is apparent from the very outset, since not only is each of the eight ricercars assigned a mode, but the collection is ordered by mode, with one in each of the traditional eight modes (excepting modes 5 and 6, which are both given the tonal type F-​♭ and numbered 11 and 12, i.e., transposed Ionian). One suspects his inspiration in this regard to have been his colleague Gioseffo Zarlino, student of Willaert and the latter’s successor as maestro di capella of St. Mark’s, who only two years after Padovano’s publication of 1556 had published his landmark treatise Istitutioni harmoniche. In it the theorist had insisted that composers be very careful to take mode into account when starting a piece with fugal imitation, and he went so far as to offer specific guidelines: Volsero prima gli Antichi Musici, il che è osservato etiandio da i migliori Moderni, che nel dar principio alli Contrapunti, overo ad altre Compositioni musicali, si dovesse porre una delle nominate Consonanze perfette; cioè 49 These include the Madrigali et ricercari . . . a quattro voci of 1589, the Ricercari . . . Libro secondo of 1595 (including two ricercars by Giovanni Gabrieli), and Il terzo libro de ricercari of 1596. 50 See, e.g., Apel, History of Keyboard Music to 1700, pp. 177–​184. 51 Complete editions of the two are available as Claudio Merulo, Ricercari da cantare a quattro voci . . . libro secondo (Venice, 1607), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 6 (New York: Garland, 1987), and Claudio Merulo, Ricercari da cantare a quattro voci . . . libro terzo (Venice, 1608), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 6 (New York: Garland, 1988).

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  213 l’Unisono, o la Quinta, o la Ottava, overo una delle replicate. . . . Ma quando, per maggior bellezza, & leggiadria del Contrapunto, & per maggior commodità ancora, li Musici facessero, che le parti non incominciassero a cantare inseime; ma l’una dopo l’altra, con lo istesso progresso di figure, o note, che è detto Fuga  .  .  .  allora potranno incominciare da qual consonanza vorranno, sia perfetta, overo imperfetta: percioche intravengono le Pause in una delle parti. Si debbe però osservare, che li principii dell’una et dell’altra parte habbiano tra loro relatione di una delle nominate consonanze perfette, overo di una Quarta; & ciò non sara fatto fuori di proposito: conciosia che si viene à incominciare sopra le chorde estreme, overo sopra le mezane de i Modi, sopa il quali è fondata la cantilena, che sonno le lor chorde naturali, overo essentiali; come altrove vederemo. Musicians in the past, as well as the best of the moderns, believed that a counterpoint or other musical composition should begin on a perfect consonance, that is, a unison, fifth, octave, or compound of one of these. . . . But for reasons of greater beauty and grace in the counterpoint or for greater convenience, musicians sometimes begin the parts one after another rather than together, with the same succession of notes, as in fugue. . . . In such cases [the voices] may enter with any consonance they choose, perfect or imperfect, for rests would have intervened in one of the parts. However, the interval between the initial notes of the two voices should be one of the perfect consonances named above, or a fourth. This is not unreasonable, for one begins on the extreme or middle notes of the modes on which the melody is founded. These are the natural and most essential notes, as we shall see elsewhere.52

The chorde estreme of the authentic modes, the notes at either extreme of the mode’s ambitus, would of course be the final of the mode, the chorde mezane the dominant. In plagal modes, these roles would be reversed. In his first publication of ricercars, Merulo not only took these guidelines seriously, he did Zarlino one better. Whereas in ricercar collections of the past, and motet fugues in general, one finds as many pieces beginning with two thematic entrances on the same note as there are pieces beginning with entrances on different notes, only one of Merulo’s eight ricercars (no. 8) begins with two statements on the same note. Furthermore, five of the other seven begin with a tonal answer, and a sixth (no. 2) features fugal answer by inversion, leaving only one true real answer among the seven. The prevalence of tonal answers is a direct reflection of Merulo’s carefully crafted subjects: each of the five tonal 52 Gioseffo Zarlino, The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of Le isitutioni harmoniche, 1558, trans. Guy A Marco and Claude V. Palisca (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 55. I have made one change to Marco’s and Palisca’s translation: Zarlino’s word “chorde” is rendered as “notes.”

214  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century answers responds to a theme that begins (either directly or after a repeated note) with the leap of a fifth between final and dominant or with an arpeggiation of the fundamental triad. Largely gone, in other words, are the subjects derived from Gregorian chant and its formulas or conceived within the ancient system of hexachords and its solmization syllables. Instead, nearly all of Merulo’s subjects announce immediately and unequivocally to the listener the basis of the mode, and that basis is immediately reinforced by their answers. It is especially interesting in this context that Merulo continues to employ the traditional approach to the modes—​according to which the dominants of modes 3 and 4 were A or C rather than B, and that of mode 8 likewise C rather than B—​despite Zarlino’s insistence that a mode’s dominant should always be a fifth above the final.53 To distinguish authentic from plagal modes, Merulo followed the model of his predecessor Padovano and used either cleffing or transposition. It might seem unusual to try to use cleffing as a modal indicator for a collection notated in Italian keyboard score, with a five-​line staff for the right hand and a seven-​line staff for the left, but Merulo makes use of two different cleffing combinations analogous to those found in partbook notation. The higher cleffing employs treble clef for the right-​hand staff, the lower one soprano clef. For the left hand, where both C and F clefs consistently appear, the two clefs are placed a third lower to accompany the soprano clef of the right hand compared to their placement when accompanying a treble clef above. In the two transposed Dorian ricercars on g-​♭ and two transposed Ionian modes on F-​♭, the authentic mode is notated in high clefs and the plagal in low. Modes 7 and 8 likewise show this characteristic, although here we find different finals (G-​♮ for mode 7, F-​♭♭, that is, twice transposed, for mode 8). The finals of the ricercars in modes 3 and 4 are a fourth apart (e-​♮ for mode 3, a-​♭ for mode 4), so here the cleffing pattern is reversed and does not signify the higher ambitus of the authentic mode. Merulo’s modal clarity is matched by a similar thematic clarity. He shows no interest in thematic transformation of his opening themes:  once the subject’s rhythm is announced it is all but fixed, and I find not a single instance of inganno. Only in the two ricercars (nos. 2 and 6) whose opening subjects continue to play a role from beginning to end do we find any sort of rhythmic tinkering with these subjects, and Merulo reserves this tinkering for well into the piece. In short, almost all of Merulo’s opening expositions look reassuringly familiar to a student of the later fugue, including as they do subjects that perfectly fit and project the mode, proper tonal answers, soprano and tenor entrances on one note with alto and bass entrances on the other, and sufficient time for the subject 53 See Zarlino, Le istitutioni, part iv, c­ hapter 13, translated as On the Modes: Part Four of Le istitutioni harmoniche, 1558, trans. Vered Cohen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 37–​39.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  215 to unfold before the answer enters (between one and a half and two and a half breves distance). The preference for subjects with leaps between final and dominant also ensures considerable melodic profile which, coupled with the subject’s rhythmic consistency, helps a listener to pick out the subject from hearing alone. This would clearly have been a major goal for Merulo, since as he notes even for his later ricercar publications issued in partbooks, all were “offered to God on the organ.”54 This approach stands in stark contrast to the subtleties of thematic transformation that are central to the ricercars of Brunel. Without question, these latter could only be fully appreciated through close study of the score, as is clearly suggested by the open score format in which the pieces circulated. Example 3.16 shows the opening point of imitation of one of Merulo’s ricercars and illustrates all of these points, including, keeping in mind the transposition to cantus mollis, emphasis on the note D in place of Zarlino’s preferred dominant E. In contrast to his forward-​looking opening expositions, Merulo’s approach to structure in these pieces is rather traditional. The pieces are comparable in length to those of Padovano, between 79 and 139 breve measures, and in all but two the opening subject is restricted to its point of imitation. These points can be as brief as fourteen measures (no. 8) with only five statements, or as expansive as fifty-​three measures (no. 3) with fifteen statements, and the number of themes to follow can likewise be as few as two or as many as seven or eight. In one case, Ricercar 7, the opening point introduces two themes, which enter just as the subject and countersubject of a later fugue, with a rest in between. Even in this case, however, neither theme returns after the first important cadence. Merulo’s disinterest in thematic transformation is matched by a de-​emphasis of contrapuntal devices. Augmentation in particular is nowhere to be found. The composer uses melodic inversion, however, in the two pieces whose opening subjects continue to play a role from beginning to end. The subject of Ricercar 2 comes closest to resembling the sort of solmization-​based theme found in Tiburtino and Brunel, a simple five-​note rising scale from D to A, all in half notes following an opening whole note. It is answered in inversion, and in one or the other of these forms it is seldom absent for long, including some quick five-​note scales in black notes toward the end to generate a drive to the final cadence. Its only significant absence occurs in mm. 42–​49, where a second theme that began as counterpoint to the first in mm. 40–​41 takes over the texture with eight rapid-​fire statements before later reappearing twice more in counterpoint to the principal subject (in mm. 59–​63) and then disappearing for good. By contrast, statements of the opening subject of Ricercar 6 after the opening point of imitation are rather fewer and farther between, despite a number of returns after 54 “Has meas lucubrationes, quas Deo in Organis obtuli . . .” This quote, given by James Ladewig on p. xii of his Introduction to Merulo’s Primo libro of 1574, is taken from Merulo’s preface.

216  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.16  Claudio Merulo, Ricercar [4]‌del quarto tuono (Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo, 1567). From Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 122, pp. 36–​38.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  217 Example 3.16 Continued

absences, and the piece ends with around thirty measures based on a completely different theme, unrelated to the first. Merulo’s choice of keyboard score for his first publication of ricercars is telling. As already mentioned, he clearly envisioned these pieces for playing on the organ, and the collection includes much eighth-​and sixteenth-​note figuration of the sort commonly found in lute and keyboard transcriptions of the period and as we have already seen in Buus’s intabulated ricercar given in Example 3.9.55 It is interesting that, despite references to such organ-​based

55 On the topic of such transcriptions and their ornamentation, see further Victor Coelho and Keith Polk, Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–​1600: Players of Function and Fantasy (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.  212–​220, and Howard Mayer Brown, “Embellishment in Early Sixteenth-​Century Italian Intabulations,” Proceedings of the Royal Music

218  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century performance for his later ricercars, Merulo never returned to keyboard score notation or to any sorts of idiomatic keyboard figuration and instead presented the remainder of his over 60 ricercars in clean versions issued in partbooks. The first of these later volumes to appear, and the only one after the Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo to be published during the composer’s lifetime, was Il primo libro de ricercari da cantare, a quattro voci of 1574. The collection appears at first to comprise twenty ricercars, but closer inspection reveals that there is no ricercar numbered 4, so that the final sixteen are misnumbered 5–​20 instead of 4–​19. (I will refer to them by their original numbering.) This collection shows much more variety in the crafting of its subjects than the earlier collection, with less emphasis on subjects announcing the mode’s fundamental fifth, but Merulo continues to avoid in all but one instance (Ricercar 18) beginning the piece with two statements of the subject on the same note. He shows, on the other hand, greater interest in opening with two different themes, either introduced in two different voices (Ricercars 5, 7, and 10) or successively in one voice in subject/​ countersubject fashion (Ricercar 20). Of the sixteen pieces in which the second entrance introduces the answer form (i.e., all but nos. 5, 7, 10, and 18), only six are tonal, whereas ten are real, including one unexpected instance (Ricercar 9) of an opening leap of a fifth which is given a real answer. Merulo also omits any indication of mode in this collection, nor are the pieces ordered by mode. The composer’s second collection, then, shows him experimenting with different formal types and especially with the contrapuntal combination of different themes, and correspondingly less concerned with the interaction of imitative counterpoint and mode. The experiments with thematic combination take many forms. Ricercar 1 ends with all four of its themes stated simultaneously in the four voices. These four themes had been introduced one at a time in the course of the piece, beginning with theme 1 by itself in the first point, then each successive theme entering to serve as a counterpoint to one of the themes already introduced (theme 2 in m. 20, theme 3 in m. 26, theme 4 in m. 62). For Ricercar 5, Merulo turned this plan on its head and began with all four themes introduced right away at the beginning, one in each of the four voices. Only theme 4 is still around for the final cadence, but all four play prominent ongoing roles in the course of the piece. Association, vol. 100 (1973–​1974), pp.  49–​83. Brown’s less-​than-​enthusiastic view of this ornamentation as provided by most composers of the period can be seen throughout the article in such expressions as “stereotyped ornamental patterns” (p.  55), “endless and aimless scale fragments” (p. 77), and “mechanical figuration patterns” (p. 82). On the importance of Merulo’s (and others’) writing out of trill-​like figures for the understanding of ornament signs as used by the English virginalists, see David Schulenberg, “Ornaments, Fingers, and Authorship:  Persistent Questions About English Keyboard Music circa 1600,” Early Keyboard Journal, vol. 30 (2013), pp. 27–​52, but esp. 34–​36.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  219 This plan came to be a type of ricercar all its own, later known as the “ricercar con quattro soggetti,” and was cultivated by such later composers as de Macque and Frescobaldi.56 With so much emphasis on contrapuntal combinations, one might expect Merulo to handle his themes more freely and to introduce more rhythmic alterations, but he does not. Sometimes the endings will be truncated or slightly rewritten, but for the most part his themes retain their melodic contour and rhythmic profile from beginning to end. Not surprising, on the other hand, is that these two ricercars, based on four interacting themes, are two of the longest in the collection (166 and 183 measures, respectively). Two ricercars (nos. 7 and 10) begin with two themes in the first two voices, but in neither case do the two themes reappear after the first important cadence. In both cases, the second voice with theme 2 enters almost immediately, after only half a breve rest, so that the two themes work in counterpoint from the very beginning. The two themes of Ricercar 20, which enter successively in the same voice as mentioned above, also disappear after the opening point is finished. Indeed, aside from the two pieces described in the previous paragraph, only two ricercars (nos. 3 and 18) bring their opening themes back later the piece, after new themes have been introduced. At the other end of the thematic spectrum is Ricercar 17, Merulo’s first monothematic ricercar. The piece is relatively brief at 88 measures and, surprisingly perhaps, introduces no thematic transformation, inversion, or augmentation. Instead the composer maintains interest through several combinations of the theme in stretto, once (mm. 21–​23) with three different statements overlapped. It is worth pointing out, finally, that in all three of the pieces that begin with two themes and both of the pieces that combine four themes, the themes themselves exhibit no strong contrasts of character among themselves, either in their predominant note values and rhythms or in the relative conjunctness or disjunctness of their melodic motion. The remaining eleven pieces follow the traditional structural plan in which the opening theme disappears after the end of the first point. These ricercars vary from as few as 67 measures all the way to 193 measures in length, and most bring in the opening theme somewhere between eight and twelve times in the span of around 30–​40 measures. The one exception is Ricercar 16, with an impressive 31 entries in 49 measures, but this is accomplished through the use of melodic inversion to maintain interest and variety. Manipulation of the opening theme is rarely encountered in the entire collection. 56 For examples, see Giovanni de Macque, Opere per tastiera, ed. Armando Carideo (Rome: Il Levante Libreria Editrice, 2007), vol. 2, pp. 46–​49 (a “Ricercare dell’Ottavo Tono con quattro fughe”) and Girolamo Frescobaldi, Opere complete, vol. 9: Recercari et canzoni franzese, Libro primo (1615), ed. Gustav Leonhardt (Milan: Edezioni Suvini Zerboni, 2004), where the piece, entitled “Recercar Nono con quattro soggetti,” appears in open score in vol. 9, part 1, pp. 43–​47 and in two-​stave keyboard notation in vol. 9, part 2, pp. 32–​34.

220  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century In 1584, after his first wife had died, Merulo remarried and shortly thereafter left his position at St. Mark’s to serve at the court of Parma, where he remained until his death in 1604. Two further volumes of ricercars, totaling thirty-​six pieces, appeared posthumously in 1607 and 1608, published by Gardano with prefaces by Merulo’s nephew. Although we have no information concerning dates of composition for these pieces, or whether they perhaps represent compositions from various stages of Merulo’s career, the two collections show enough features not present in the earlier volumes to suggest that at least some of the pieces were most likely written after the second publication of 1574, perhaps even after Merulo had left Venice. It seems appropriate, then, to turn next to the ricercars of Merulo’s Venetian colleague Andrea Gabrieli and to return later to Merulo’s last two ricercar publications. * * * All of Gabrieli’s surviving ricercars were published, but all appeared only after his relatively early death in 1585 at the age of about fifty-​two. The relevant collections comprise a volume entitled Madrigali et ricercari . . . a quattro voci of 1589 (seven ricercars, notated in partbooks),57 a Ricercari  .  .  .  Libro secondo of 1595 (thirteen ricercars, including two by Giovanni Gabrieli, in keyboard score), Il terzo libro de ricercari of 1596 (six ricercars, also in keyboard score),58 the predominantly vocal Concerti di Andrea et di Gio: Gabrieli of 1587 (including one ricercar by Andrea), and the Canzoni alla francese et ricercari ariosi of 1605 (including seven pieces with “ricercar” in their titles). It is not clear in all of these cases who is responsible for the use of the word “ricercar,” but some of the pieces clearly belong to the category that contemporaries almost universally designated “canzona.” This is most obvious in the last-​named volume, where chansons by Lassus, Clemens, Janequin, and Crecquillon are each given two different settings, the first a straightforward intabulation designated “Canzon francese deta . . . ,” the second a parody-​type reworking of the principal thematic material designated “Ricercar sopra. . . .” The volume concludes with four “Ricercari Ariosi” in a style similar to the so-​ called ricercars but without vocal models. The single ricercar in the volume of Concerti also behaves like a canzona, as do two of the ricercars in the collection of Madrigali et ricercari (those “del sesto tuono” and “del duodecimo 57 For a complete modern edition of the ricercars in this collection, see Giovanni Bassano, Fantasie . . . 1585, Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercars from Madrigali et ricercari . . . 1589, and Valerio Bona, Il secondo libro . . . 1592, ed. Robert Judd, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 8 (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 75–​149. 58 Books II and III are available in modern edition as Andrea Gabrieli, Sämtliche Werke für Tasteninstrumente, Vol. II (Libro secondo) and III (Libro terzo), ed. Giuseppe Clericetti. Diletto musicale nos. 1142 and 1143 (Munich: Doblinger, 1997–​1998).

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  221 tuono”). The characteristics that mark all of these pieces as canzonas rather than ricercars will be discussed later in this book. This leaves a total of twenty-​ two pieces by Andrea that belong in the category of true ricercars: five from 1589, eleven from 1595, and six from 1596. Compared to the legacy of his colleague Merulo it is a small showing, but the innovative importance and legacy of these works loom large. All of Gabrieli’s ricercars carry modal designations, but there is no evidence that the composer himself ever conceived a modally ordered collection like Merulo’s of 1567. His Book II is so ordered according to the expanded system of twelve modes, but two of the ricercars were contributed by his nephew Giovanni, presumably to complete the set. The (admittedly small) sampling of ricercars in the 1589 volume all show a distinction between authentic and plagal modes based on cleffing, and I presume that the remainder are also designated either in this customary manner or according to disparate finals.59 Despite the consistent identification of mode, Gabrieli’s ricercars do not show the same careful regard for mode in their opening imitation as do Merulo’s. It is true that, as was the case in Merulo’s ricercars, most of Gabrieli’s (all but four) bring in the answer form with the second entrance, but the incidence of tonal answer is much lower, only five in all, and many subjects whose first prominent melodic motion is a fourth or fifth are given real answers. Where Gabrieli distinguishes himself, by contrast, is in the considerable attention he pays to three features that figure prominently in the history of fugue: the introduction of two themes in the opening point, the incorporation of contrapuntal devices, including inganno as well as the more familiar augmentation and melodic inversion, and the treatment of the opening subject as a “principal theme” that plays an important role from beginning to end. All three can be found in the earlier published ricercars of Merulo, but for Gabrieli they take on much greater significance. A few statistics reveal Gabrieli’s fascination with these procedures. Thirteen of the ricercars—​well over half, including four of the five in Book I—​have opening subjects that play a role throughout the piece and appear toward the end, and fourteen—​including all of those in Book I—​begin with an opening exposition in which a second subject follows the first in the manner of a countersubject. Indeed, this latter feature is so common that scholars have often used the expression “double subject” to describe it. The presence of contrapuntal devices is much more limited—​there are just two ricercars in Book I (the first two of the set) that incorporate both inganno and augmentation, three examples of augmentation in

59 Neither the Doblinger edition nor the older Bärenreiter edition (Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercari für Orgel, 2 vols., ed. Pierre Pidoux (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959) of Books II and III, offers any information about the original cleffing. The originals are notated in keyboard score.

222  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Book II (those in modes 1 and 2), and two others in Book II with inversion (in modes 5 and 9)—​but the almost complete absence of these devices from Merulo’s first two published collections draws a sharp contrast between the two men. Gabrieli’s pieces are also on average shorter than we have generally seen, with three coming in at under 50 measures and only one longer than 128. Gabrieli makes occasional use of inganno, but at least in his treatment of the opening subject thematic transformation is otherwise virtually nonexistent. Example 3.17 reproduces a complete ricercar from the first publication of 1589. The piece begins with two themes presented in subject/​countersubject (or double-​subject) format, and these two provide the entirety of thematic material for the piece; indeed, there is not a single measure when one or the other is not sounding in some form. The opening is laid out as a textbook exposition. The answer form enters just as the last note of the subject sounds in the alto, with the alto’s inserted rest leaving no doubt concerning the subject’s identity, and the countersubject then accompanies the subject stated in the soprano. After a two-​ and-​a-​half measure delay, bass and tenor then enter in the same way as alto and soprano, so that this modern-​looking fugal exposition is complete at the downbeat of m. 14. There is one respect, however, in which Gabrieli’s opening is not according to expectation, namely, its handling of mode. Although the opening statement begins on A, the final of mode 9, the fifth that it outlines emphasizes the note D rather than the dominant E. The answer given in the soprano is real, and its melodic outline is modally clear, but judging from the evidence of his 1567 collection, Merulo would almost certainly have given this theme a tonal answer so that both versions emphasized the notes A and E. The primary focus of Gabrieli’s ricercar proves to be on the various contrapuntal combinations of subject and countersubject. The two are similar in both their rhythmic motion and their melodic emphasis on the interval of a fifth, and they appear in myriad combinations, including in combination with each other at differing time intervals and each (but especially the countersubject) in stretto with itself. Gabrieli never varies the rhythm or melodic intervals of the subject, but the countersubject is treated more freely, with the application of inganno (see m. 32), other interval changes not produceable through inganno (especially the replacement of its opening second with a third in numerous places), and rhythmic alteration (mm. 19–​20, 37–​39, and 54–​56). The approach to overall structure is not particularly systematic, and no augmentation or inversion is introduced, but the composer makes sure to bring in both subject and countersubject one final time in the top voice to coincide with the final cadence so that no listener could miss it. Only two statements of the subject enter on notes other than final and dominant, one on D in m. 39 in the bass, the other on G in m. 56 in the alto. In each case the predominant harmonies move

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  223 Example 3.17  Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercar del nono tuono (Madrigali et Ricercari, 1589). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 8, pp. 132–​140.

224  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.17 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  225 Example 3.17 Continued

226  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.17 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  227 Example 3.17 Continued

228  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.17 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  229 Example 3.17 Continued

230  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century away from chords on A, D, and E to emphasize in the first instance D and G, in the second G and C, but cadences in the piece tend toward the subtle and do not mark out significant changes in Gabrieli’s approach to his material. In his History of Keyboard Music to 1700, Willi Apel identified Andrea Gabrieli’s most important contribution to the development of the ricercar as his particular focus on the learned artifices of inversion, augmentation, etc. These devices clearly play an important role, but I submit that Gabrieli’s most important contribution might instead be his ability to make a compelling piece of music out of what can often seem a dry, extended exercise in contrapuntal showing-​off. A  closer look at Example 3.18, the very first ricercar in the 1595 publication, can give us the sense of a composer intent on creating a ricercar that commands the listener’s attention without simply trying to impress with yet one more learned device.60 It is first important to understand that the original is notated in two-​stave keyboard score. An attempt to discern strictly maintained voicing turns out, nonetheless, to be relatively successful, as the edition demonstrates through its use of stemming to indicate voices (which of course the original does not do). Occasional uncertainty of voicing stems from the preponderance of three-​ voice texture in a four-​voice piece. On the flip side, these lengthy stretches of reduced texture actually contribute to the work’s success as a piece of music by helping the listener avoid feeling overwhelmed by thick texture and making it easier to hear the various thematic statements. Furthermore, Gabrieli highlights thematic statements by placing all but two of them in outer voices (the exceptions are mm. 12–​14 and 83–​91), which the stretches of three-​voice texture facilitate. Gabrieli the organist, in other words, is inviting the listener to follow the subject and its treatment. Structurally the piece shows nothing unusual. It is monothematic, all of the statements enter on either E or A,61 and Gabrieli has kept things short and concise: 97 breve measures of duple, followed by a quick triple-​meter section to close.62 Based on the important cadence moments, I  identify four points 60 The edition of Example 3.18 is derived directly from the original print, which is available as an online scan on the website www.e-​rara.ch. Stemming is revised to reflect, to the extent possible, the intended voicing. Not only are rests not added, but occasionally they are supressed, as in m. 20, where in the original a rest after the third note in the tenor voice and a half rest preceding the fourth note suggest a change of voice placement from tenor to alto despite the connection necessary for mm. 26 and 29 to work properly. Note also that mm. 25 and 47 are rendered with the number of beats given them in the original print. 61 This analysis is focused on the piece’s structure and musical effectiveness, but clearly Gabrieli’s choice of E rather than D for the opening, and subsequent entrances in a piece identified as mode 1, i.e., of the tonal type d-​♮, could merit discussion. It appears that he has given the modally proper version of his theme to the answer form (soprano, m. 5) and has chosen to relate subject and answer in a real rather than a tonal way. Modal niceties were obviously not Gabrieli’s focus in this piece. 62 The reader will want to be mindful of the nature of triple-​meter notation in the sixteenth century. Although to a modern musician the white notes suggest slow movement, the proper tempo

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  231 (mm. 1–​20, 20–​44, 44–​92, and 92–​128) labeled with Roman numerals in the score. After an opening point with six statements spaced close together and even overlapped, he begins the second with textural variety provided by an extended tenor-​bass duet. The duet  also offers several moments with sixteenth-​note Example 3.18  Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercar del Primo Tuono (Ricercari, Book II, 1595).

232  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.18 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  233 Example 3.18 Continued

234  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.18 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  235 Example 3.18 Continued

236  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.18 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  237 Example 3.18 Continued

238  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.18 Continued

motion, something scarcely present in point 1. In this second point the statements are spaced further apart from each other and are quite easy to pick out, with only one segment (mm. 34–​38) of full four-​voice texture. The principal artifice of this ricercar is augmentation, which is the raison d’être of section III. After the section opens with a regular statement in the bass (mm. 46–​48) to remind the listener one last time of the subject, each voice is given its augmented version: soprano in m. 49, tenor in m. 62, bass in m. 74, and alto in m. 83. Not until the last of the four does the composer tuck the subject inside the texture. A cadence in m. 92 ushers in a final augmented statement, in the bass, after which Gabrieli gives us a “drive to the cadence” that considerably increases the energy level. He accomplishes this through a clever move to lively triple meter and an adaptation of the subject that includes a jazzy syncopation for notes 5 and 6, which he exploits within the texture for great rhythmic effect. In addition, he relaxes the strictness of the voicing, so that even the measures with four-​voice texture sound more like accompanied melody than serious counterpoint. In other words, after the hard work of following the subject in its two duple-​meter rhythmic guises, the listener is rewarded with some fun at the end. This playfulness extends even to the final five measures, where one last statement is “hidden,” that is to say, passed back and forth between alto and tenor. Gabrieli’s Ricercar del Primo Tuono shows us two important signs of the future. One, which has already been mentioned, is the attempt to write a monothematic relationship is that one measure of triple meter equals half a measure of duple, with the result that the whole notes of the triple section move at a speed somewhere between the half and the quarter notes of the duple.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  239 ricercar that invites the listener to engage with it on a contrapuntal level. Unlike Buus’s ricercar of Examples 3.8 and 3.9, whose voices prove nearly impossible to follow on the organ and whose keyboard version offers extensive ornamentation as compensation, Gabrieli’s ricercar by and large eschews such ornamentation and instead appears crafted for maximum thematic comprehensibility. Brevity also helps hold the listener’s attention. But Gabrieli’s real coup is the idea to heighten the energy level as the piece draws to a close, not with the introduction of diminution, as we find, for instance, in the well-​known Chromatic Fantasy of J. P. Sweelinck a generation later, but through the use of quick, dance-​like triple meter. This is a ricercar that beautifully combines artifice with effective music-​ making; we might think of it as the sixteenth-​century counterpart to the classic eighteenth-​century  fugue. The second, related, sign of the future is Gabrieli’s idea to present the subject in more than one meter. Here we see the very first step in what was to become by century’s end the so-​called variation canzona, in which the subject might appear in three different meters, most commonly in the order duple, triple, and compound. As in Gabrieli’s Ricercar del Primo Tuono, the iterations get progressively livelier after a sober opening. This principle proved remarkably durable and forms a central part of the fugal writing of Frescobaldi and his student J. J. Froberger. We will encounter it in sixteenth-​century fugue toward the end of the next chapter. * * * The evidence of the 41 ricercars that were published in 1607 and 1608 under Merulo’s name strongly suggest that Gabrieli’s interest in ricercar composition based on one or two principal themes that played a dominating role from beginning to end was shared by his Venetian colleague. Because all these later pieces, like those of Gabrieli, were published posthumously, it is impossible in the absence of further evidence to determine chronology or direction of influence, but an amazing 30 of Merulo’s 41 ricercars are either monothematic (9 altogether) or bring in the opening subject toward the end (21 total), leaving only 11 to follow the old pattern of a series of points based each on its own theme with no overlap. It seems likely that, in the same way that Zarlino’s pronouncements about how to handle mode at the beginning of a fugal piece motivated Merulo to craft the kinds of subjects and answers that he did, so Zarlino’s chapters on invertible counterpoint (especially ­chapters 56 and 62 of Le istitutioni part III) inspired both Gabrieli and Merulo to experiment with the contrapuntal combinations of two or three themes. Several of Merulo’s later ricercars also explore the learned devices of augmentation (Ricercar 11 from the 1607 collection and Ricercar 19 from 1608) and inversion (several), something all but absent from

240  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century his earlier published efforts. At the same time that Merulo turned his attention to these techniques, however, he continued to show concern for modal clarity: his final two published collections comprise as many ricercars beginning with tonal answers (20) as with real answers (19, plus two that begin with imitation in inversion). We also find considerable use of inganno, scarcely to be found in Merulo’s earlier publications. Deserving of particular mention is Ricercar 11 from the 1607 collection. This piece is an unbelievable 476 breve measures long, easily the longest ricercar known and so long that the person who copied all the rest of these late Merulo ricercars into the Torino organ tablatures omitted it. (The remainder of the pieces in these two collections are comparable in length to those of Merulo’s earlier publications.) Ricercar 11 thus survives incomplete, without its soprano part, but the surviving three parts suffice to describe it. Its opening subject continues to reappear throughout, despite the staggering length, and Merulo makes use of the sorts of thematic transformation we found in Brunel’s ricercars. All of this suggests that Merulo was a more important figure in the history of the ricercar and the fugue than he has been given credit for. Not only do we have from his pen more ricercars than from any other single composer, and not only did he play a seminal role in establishing how fugal imitation and mode should behave at the beginning of a piece, but he appears to have continued to explore the genre throughout his career and to have assimilated ideas on the handling of thematic material from both his Venetian colleague Andrea Gabrieli and the organists outside Venice who worked primarily in the tradition established by Jacques Brunel. Merulo’s last two ricercar publications, in their bringing together of these two strands—​emphasis on mode and emphasis on thematic working-​out—​laid much of the necessary groundwork for the fugal composition to come in the seventeenth century. The seminal roles played by the ricercars of both men in the history of fugue were reinforced by the legacies of their teaching. Merulo’s most important pupil in this respect was undoubtedly Girolamo Diruta, whose treatise Il Transilvano systematized the relationship between fugue and mode and set the stage for much seventeenth-​century theory. Gabrieli’s most important student was Hans Leo Hassler, the south-​German organist who composed over twenty ricercars, including three in the Torino manuscripts that are designated fugue rather than ricercar. Indeed, Hassler, who knew Michael Praetorius well, is likely responsible for the latter’s equating of the two words in the passage with which this chapter began. Gabrieli has long been recognized for his significant contributions to this history, but it is now time to place Merulo alongside him and see the two together as key figures in the move from the earliest motet fugues to the seventeenth-​century instrumental fugue. If only it were possible to know more about how they worked together at St. Mark’s and the extent to

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  241 which their respective contributions to the history of the ricercar were the result of interactive collaboration as opposed to individual effort and perhaps even competition.

Other Ricercar Composers of the 1570s During the second half of the 1570s, while Merulo and Gabrieli held forth on the organs of St. Mark’s, three ricercar collections by composers outside of Venice appeared in print: the Libro di ricercate a quattro voci (Naples, 1575) of Rocco Rodio,63 Cristofano Malvezzi’s Primo libro de recercari (Perugia, 1577),64 and the Secondo libro de ricercari a quattro voci of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, which survives only in a manuscript score but can be identified from the date of 1578 given there.65 In the 1570s and early 1580s a fourth composer, the Sicilian Pietro Vinci, most likely composed the seven ricercars published posthumously by his student Antonio Il Verso in 1591, since Vinci died in 1584, one year before Andrea Gabrieli.66 Rocco Rodio, approximately the same age as Merulo and Gabrieli, was a native of Bari who apparently spent most of his career in Naples. Although Rodio wrote much vocal and instrumental music, he is remembered today primarily as a theorist, thanks to his Regule di musica first published in Naples in 1600 and devoted largely to the study of canon, invertible counterpoint, and the modes.67 This theoretical bent is plainly apparent in the five ricercars of his 1575 collection, which, like those of Brunel, are notated in open score to facilitate study and with no accompanying suggestions concerning performance. Furthermore, although the pieces are relatively brief, totaling between 47 and 63 All five of the ricercars are available in modern edition, transcribed onto two staves for playing at the keyboard, in Rocco Rodio, Cinque ricercate, una fantasia, ed. Macario Santiago Kastner (Padua: Zanibon, 1958). 64 For a complete edition, see Cristofano Malvezzi, Jacopo Peri, Annibale Padovano, Ensemble Ricercars, ed. Milton A.  Swenson, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 27 (Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1978). Note that the ricercars by Padovano included in Swenson’s publication do not belong to Malvezzi’s original publication and are all taken from Padovano’s 1556 print. 65 Concerning the dating and identification of Luzzaschi’s ricercars, see Anthony Newcomb, “When the ‘Stile Antico’ Was Young,” in the International Musicological Society, Congress Report XIV:  Bologna 1987, p.  179, fn. 4.  A  complete edition can be found in Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Il secondo libro de ricercari a quattro voci, ed. Michelangelo Pascale (Rome: Pro Music Studium, 1981). According to New Grove II, the original manuscript survives in the library of the Convento di S. Francesco in Bologna. 66 A complete edition can be found in Pietro Vinci e Antonio Il Verso, Mottetti e ricercari a tre voci, ed. Paolo Emilio Carapezza, Musiche Rinascimentali Siciliane no. 3 (Rome: Edizioni de Santis, 1972), pp. 32–​77. The edition also includes a long introduction, translated into English, about the composers. 67 The date comes from the New Grove article on Rodio. A reprint of the later 1609 printing was published by Forni in 1981.

242  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century 93 breve measures in length, all but one of them feature augmentation, with one of these also incorporating diminution, and another begins with two themes. The composer’s debt to Conforti and Brunel is further revealed through his choice of la sol fa re mi for the subject of Ricercar 5, which is monothematic and incorporates much rhythmic variety, if not to the extent that we have seen in Brunel’s pieces. In his handling of mode, Rodio is conservative: we find no tonal answers despite the presence of prominent fifths or fourths in all subjects except la sol fa re mi, and in this latter case the opening statements enter on A and D despite the chosen tonal type g-​♭. Structurally, however, the ricercars are more progressive, since in only two of the five does the opening subject not play a role toward the end of the piece. Also worthy of note is the inclusion in Rodio’s collection of “alcune Fantasie sopra varii Canti Fermi,” an indication that for this musician at least the words ricercar and fantasia had come to mean two very different things. A ricercar on la sol fa re mi also turns up in the collection published by Cristofano Malvezzi. By this time this subject serves almost as the marker for a ricercar collection standing outside the Venetian tradition; in place of the latter’s emphasis on tonal answers and “regular” fugal exposition, here we can expect to find hexachordally conceived thematic material subjected to extensive thematic variation and transformation. The ricercars of Malvezzi’s 1577 collection fulfill those expectations. Malvezzi, who spent his entire career in Florence, is best known today as a member of the so-​called Florentine Camerata of Count Giovanni de Bardi, to whom the collection of ricercars is dedicated, and as a principal contributor to the intermedii performed in 1589 for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I and Christine of Lorraine that served as such an important precursor to the first operas. Of the ten ricercars in the set, one (no. 9) is by Malvezzi’s young pupil Jacopo Peri, the famous pioneer of early opera, and another (no. 3) lacks sufficient thematic identity at the beginning to qualify as a fugue, leaving eight pieces total. Learned contrapuntal devices abound in these eight, including inversion (in all but one), inganno (used prominently in half of them), and augmentation (in nos. 2 and 8). Furthermore, not a single piece begins with a “regular” subject-​answer pair of the sort favored by Merulo and A. Gabrieli. Instead, we find four ricercars with the initial answer in inversion, two (nos. 5 and 10) that begin with three straight statements of the subject version before the answer version enters, one in which the second voice enters with a second theme, and one in which inganno alters the subject’s shape. Not surprisingly, thematic identity is often not maintained, either as a result of rhythmic manipulation (e.g., as we might expect, in Ricercar 4 on la sol fa re mi) or through the indeterminate nature of the subject’s ending (e.g., no. 6). In this light it is not surprising that scholars can disagree about the number of themes in a given piece. For instance, in his dissertation on the ensemble ricercar, Milton Swenson finds

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  243 seven themes in Malvezzi’s Ricercar 1, whereas I would enumerate only three, subjected to various instances of manipulation.68 In total length Malvezzi’s ricercars are comparable to those of his Venetian contemporaries and longer than Rodio’s: they range from 84 to 128 breve measures, with half under 100 measures and half at 100 or more. It is particularly notable that, unlike Rodio, Malvezzi prefers to carry his opening subject through to the end, a feature of five of his eight fugal ricercars, including one (no. 4) that is monothematic. Malvezzi identifies the mode for each piece according to the new twelve-​mode system (with Ionian numbered 11 and 12), and although the collection is not ordered by mode, Malvezzi’s fugal ricercars show a certain systematic thinking, with two pieces in each of the four traditional modal groups (with two in mode 3 and one each in modes 1 and 2, 11 and 12 [both F-​♭], and 7 and 8). Authentic and Plagal versions are distinguished as we have come to expect, that is, either through cleffing (the Lydian and Mixolydian modes) or transposition (modes 1 and 2). The single ricercar by Malvezzi’s student Jacopo Peri follows in the tradition of the efforts by young composers Parabosco and Girolamo Cavazzoni as encouraged by their teachers and mentors. Although the piece is only 81 breves long, Peri introduces eight themes, but he also keeps the original subject in play while manipulating it with inganno (mm. 23–​25), inversion (mm. 48–​51), and augmentation (also mm.48–​51, as well as 61–​63). Given the complete absence of the phenomenon from his teacher’s ricercars, one is surprised to see Peri open the piece with a regular exposition incorporating proper tonal answer. Peri’s career of course took him far away from fugal counterpoint, which he never again essayed so far as is known. Perhaps if his teacher Malvezzi had not suffered from illness in his later years and died in his early fifties in 1599, the two would have collaborated further on the earliest operas. Luzzasco Luzzaschi was a native of Ferrara who spent his entire life in the city, where he wrote avant-​garde music for the duke’s famous concerto di donne and five-​part madrigals that inspired Gesualdo. His importance in these areas has tended to obscure his contemporary reputation as a keyboard player, and his contributions to the latter have been further complicated by the loss of much of the music he composed. For instance, he appears to have published at least three collections of ricercars, but no such publications survive. One collection of twelve does survive in manuscript, however, with a date of 1578, and it has now been published complete in modern edition, so that we can finally begin to assess Luzzaschi’s contribution to our topic.69 68 Milton A. Swenson, The Four-​Part Italian Ensemble Ricercar from 1540 to 1619 (Dissertation: Indiana University, 1971), Part II, p. 222. 69 Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Il secondo libro de ricercari a quattro voci, ed. Michelangelo Pascale (Rome: Pro Musica Studium, 1981).

244  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Luzzaschi’s predecessor as court organist in Ferrara was Jacques Brunel, and it is widely assumed that Brunel was also his organ teacher, since Luzzaschi was around twenty years of age when Brunel died in 1564. One would reasonably expect, then, that the younger composer’s approach to the ricercar would mirror his teacher’s, an initial impression reinforced by the use of open score for the manuscript of Luzzaschi’s pieces. Indeed, Anthony Newcomb characterizes Luzzaschi’s approach to ricercar as “even more insistent than Brumel [sic] in his use of thematic evolution by motivic variation, and of inganno and extensive rhythmic variation to this end.”70 Closer examination, however, suggests that this characterization requires qualification. The manuscript comprises twelve ricercars, one in each of the twelve modes. Of these, nine (nos. 1–​6, 8, 10, and 12) incorporate minimal thematic variation of the opening subject, in some cases none at all. Later themes are handled more freely, as we might expect, but there is nothing like the frenetic introduction of rhythmic variety that we saw in the openings of Brunel’s ricercars. Two ricercars (nos. 7 and 11) show sufficient thematic manipulation to make identification of a theme problematic, which leaves only one (no. 9) in which the opening subject takes on several different rhythmic guises. Luzzaschi’s handling of opening subject, in other words, is rather conservative and traditional, an impression that is reinforced by his inclusion of not a single ricercar whose opening subject plays a role later in the piece after it has given way to new thematic material. We do find use of the devices of inversion (nos. 1 and 12) and inganno (no. 3), but this is modest compared to Brunel’s partiality toward them. Example 3.19 shows how regular and uncomplicated an opening exposition by Luzzaschi can be. Luzzaschi works here in very orderly fashion. The subject, offering an interesting mix of white and black notes, begins on the dominant of the tonal type g-​♭ and immediately moves to the final, on which note it also ends. This model of modal clarity is then given a proper tonal answer, just as we would expect to see in Merulo’s ricercars. Although these first two entries overlap by half a measure, the opening point largely unfolds as a series of statements following directly one upon the other, with only two non-​thematic stretches in mm. 17–​18 and approaching the cadence in mm. 25–​26. The only rhythmic alteration to be found is the replacement of the theme’s final two quarter notes with half notes in m. 12; the only pitch change the C with which the subject begins in m. 21, a change effected not through inganno but merely by giving to the subject the same melodic profile as that of the tonal answer on G. Following the cadence on the downbeat of m. 27, two new themes are introduced and subject 1 disappears forever. One can see in the opening point bits of melodic material derived from

70

Newcomb, “When the ‘Stile Antico’ Was Young,” p. 177.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  245 Example 3.19  Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Ricercar quarto (Torino, Ms. Foà 2, fol. 102v–​105). From Luzzaschi, Il secondo libro de ricercari, pp. 42–​43.

246  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.19 Continued

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  247 Example 3.19 Continued

subject 1, especially the entrances in mm. 15–​17 in soprano and alto that derive from its final notes, but the subject itself is never significantly altered, nor do these entrances represent important new thematic material. In short, one sees in this piece, and most others of the set, more of the orderliness of Padovano than of the intellectualizing of Brunel. Not all of Luzzaschi’s openings are so regular, but one searches in vain for such an uncomplicated exposition in the ricercars of his presumed teacher. Luzzaschi obviously conceived this group of twelve ricercars as a set. Not only are all twelve of approximately the same length, between 100 and 113 breve measures, but the set is ordered by mode, although these are not designated by the composer. The sequence is Zarlino’s revised ordering of 1573 beginning on C, and authentic versions are distinguished from plagal ones by the traditional indicators of either transposed final or cleffing, although for modes 1 and

248  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century 2 Luzzaschi reverses the order of high and low clefs by assigning low clefs to the authentic and high to the plagal mode. All in all, the composer favors such Venetian preferences as classic expositions and careful attention to mode and shows less interest in the devices of inversion or inganno than one might expect for a musician whose career never took him to Venice for any significant length of time. The surviving ricercars of Pietro Vinci lie somewhat outside the mainstream of the genre’s development, which is perhaps not surprising for the works of the first important composer to be a native of Sicily. Vinci is thought to have been born ca. 1525, and although he spent many years in Naples, Bergamo, and Milan, he always seems to have maintained contacts with his homeland, and he returned there in the last years of his life. Vinci was primarily known as a madrigalist, and his seven known ricercars were published in Venice only in 1591, several years after the composer’s death, by his Sicilian student Antonio Il Verso, who contributed to the volume seven ricercars of his own in similar style. Vinci’s ricercars fit for the most part within the tradition established by the ricercar composers active outside of Venice. One of their most notable features is the use of only three voices, the first since Tiburtino’s ricercars not to be written for four. Subjects tend toward the brief, based on white notes with little or no rhythmic profile and almost certainly conceived according to solmization, as can further be surmised from the presence of one ricercar (no. 10) based on the ubiquitous la sol fa re mi. As we would then expect, there are no tonal answers and we see little attempt to craft thematic material for modal clarity. Rhythmic variety abounds, as does the use of the learned devices of inversion, augmentation, and diminution. The pieces are all quite brief, no more than sixty-​one breve measures total, so it is perhaps not surprising that for four of the seven the opening subject is still around at the end. The seven ricercars added by Vinci’s student Il Verso also fit these parameters. Although these works exerted little influence on the subsequent history of the ricercar and of fugue, they are certainly attractive and well-​crafted examples of the genre and deserve to be better known.

The Ricercar at Century’s End The true heir to Brunel’s legacy is undoubtedly his fellow northerner Giovanni de Macque. Macque was also an organist, and after several years in Vienna as a choirboy he worked first in Rome between 1574 and 1585, then in Naples, where he served in the Gesualdo household and where he died in 1614. In addition to many volumes of vocal music, two publications can be documented that included ricercars: a volume entitled Ricercate e canzone francesi, published in partbooks in Rome in 1586, and a Secondo libro de ricercari, listed without date

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  249 in a seventeenth-​century inventory but no longer extant. One partbook of the former survives but in private hands, where it is, according to the latest information, inaccessible to scholars.71 Fortunately, a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (Magl. XIX. 106 bis) includes among other items a set of twelve ricercars by Macque copied by a single hand and notated in open score.72 Two other pieces survive in Berlin manuscript 12837, also in open score, where they are identified as part of Macque’s Book II.73 At present it is of course impossible to know whether the Florence set comes from the 1586 publication or represents yet another, undocumented collection of ricercars by Macque. Macque’s ricercars take the genre’s growing penchant for learnedness to new levels by combining the traditional interest in augmentation and inversion with Andrea Gabrieli’s focus on the interaction of two themes and Brunel’s penchant for inganno. Every single piece in the Florence manuscript begins with at least two themes, either in the subject/​countersubject configuration favored by Gabrieli (found in seven of the twelve) or distributed among the first voices to enter. Easily Macque’s favorite number of themes is three, found in nine of the pieces, followed by two themes (two pieces, the Ricercar del Quinto Tono and Ricercar del Nono Tono), and four (Ricercar del Ottavo Tono). In all cases, all themes are introduced right away at the beginning of the piece, and the piece proceeds as a continuous unfolding of contrapuntal combinations of this material, with a density of thematic statement that is astonishing and that can lead to significant stretches with almost no free counterpoint at all. Macque’s ultimate goal is then to conclude each piece with all themes stated simultaneously as lead-​in to the final cadence, a goal he achieves even with the four themes of the Ricercar del Ottavo Tono. One can also see in Macque’s collection some of the first instances of pairs of themes that are of contrasting character. Example 3.20 offers an example of this, the opening of the Ricercar del Quarto Tono. Here the second entering voice brings in subject 2, whose running quarter-​note scales contrast noticeably with the slow, repeated notes of subject 1. Subject 3 enters shortly thereafter in m. 5 in the alto, and it features the prominent leap of a fourth within mostly white-​ note motion. Even at the beginning of the piece, the texture is made up largely of thematic material, and we see all three subjects combined already in mm. 8–​10

71 See Newcomb, “When the ‘Stile Antico’ Was Young,” pp. 178–​179 and footnote 7. 72 For a complete edition of Macque’s surviving ricercars, see Giovanni de Macque, Opere per tastiera, vol. 2: 14 Ricercari, rev. ed., ed. Armando Carideo (Colledara, Italy: Andromeda Editrice, 2007). Detailed information about the Florence manuscript and a complete list of its contents can be found on pp. VI–​VIII. It is thought to date from the 1640s. 73 A complete description of the manuscript is in ibid., pp. VIII–​IX. The date 1702 appears at the top of its first page.

250  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 3.20  Giovanni de Macque, Ricercar del Quarto Tono (Florence, Ms. Magl. XIX. 106 bis). From Macque, Opere per tastiera, vol. 2, p. 10.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  251 Example 3.20 Continued

and 12–​13. We can also see in these first few measures the introduction of inversion (of S2 in the alto, mm. 9–​10) and of inganno (second note of S3 in the soprano, mm. 12–​13); both of these devices are used extensively in the course of the piece’s 70 breve measures. There is no obvious place where the opening point ends or the approach to thematic treatment changes; rather, the ricercar unfolds as a continuous exploration of contrapuntal combinations, culminating in the combination of S1 and S3 with two forms of S2, one rectus, one in inversion in the final four measures. I have chosen to end Example 3.20 at the first moment—​a relatively arbitrary one—​when none of the three subjects carries over from one measure to the next. As the systematic and consistent nature of Macque’s handling of thematic material suggests, the twelve ricercars of the Florence manuscript were clearly conceived as a set. We find, for instance, that, like those of Luzzaschi, Macque’s

252  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century ricercars are of relatively uniform length (all but two between 70 and 74 breves long), and the collection is ordered and its pieces identified by mode, with one piece per mode beginning with the traditional mode 1 (tonal type d-​♮). The opening subjects of these pieces reveal a variety of types. Some, such as those in modes 1 and 2, carefully emphasize final and dominant and are given tonal answers, whereas others, e.g., those of modes 3 and 4, tend to revolve around a single pitch and are given real answers. Instances of the former are numerous enough to suggest likely influence from the early published ricercars of Merulo, and suggest a shared concern for modal clarity at the beginning of a piece. Because the pieces survive solely in German organ tablature, we have no information about the original cleffing, but differences in range between an authentic mode and its plagal pair leave little doubt that Macque used the customary means of transposed final or cleffing to keep the two separate. The two additional ricercars found in the Berlin manuscript fit perfectly into the pattern established by the twelve from Florence. In these two cases the number of subjects (labeled “fughe”) is made explicit in the title, three in the Ricercar del Sesto Tono, four in the Ricercar del Ottavo Tono. The latter is, then, another “ricercar con quattro soggetti,” and both pieces end, as we would expect, with all subjects stated at once. Without the opportunity to consult the single surviving partbook from Macque’s 1586 collection, we can only speculate about the date. Newcomb proposes sometime in the 1580s or 1590s, which seems very likely based in part on the date of 1586 that we do have.74 Presuming the correctness of this assumption, there is no doubt that Macque’s surviving ricercars are the finest to have come down to us from the last two decades of the century. Although their expositions lack the classic orderliness of so many of Andrea Gabrieli’s, the pieces mark in other respects an important milestone in the history of fugue. That is, each ricercar introduces its thematic material at the outset and then proceeds to make the entire piece “about” those themes, with much application of learned devices and of course the inevitable ongoing exploration of invertible counterpoint. Although the result looks in many ways more like Brunel’s than Padovano’s model, there is no question that Zarlino’s focus on both imitation vis-​à-​vis the modes and invertible counterpoint factor into Macque’s thinking, whatever the direct source of his inspiration. The remaining composers to publish ricercars in the last two decades of the century were relatively minor figures. These include Ottavio Bariolla, who served as an organist in Milan during these years and who published a volume of twelve Ricercate per suonar l’organo there in 1585 that is lost but that survives in organ



74

Newcomb, “When the ‘Stile Antico’ Was Young,” p. 179.

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  253 tablature in Torino;75 a Spanish former soldier named Sebastian Raval who worked as a musician in Urbino and Rome and published, along with much vocal music, three ricercars in a collection of 1593 and a further eighteen in 1596;76 the Istrian Francesco (Sponga) Usper, a student of Andrea Gabrieli, whose Ricercari et arie francesi, with fourteen ricercars, appeared in print in 1595;77 the south German organist Gregor Aichinger, a student of Giovanni Gabrieli, whose Liber secundus sacrarum cantionum of 1595 includes three ricercars;78 and the Italian organist Luigi Mazzi, who worked in Ferrara and Modena and published eight ricercars in his Ricercari a 4 et Canzoni of 1596.79 Aichinger’s contribution is perhaps best considered in the context of fugue in the seventeenth century; the remaining four can be briefly summarized here. Ottavio Bariolla’s ricercars range between 78 and 120 breve measures in length, and their several points of imitation are particularly clearly delineated through idiomatic keyboard ornaments which mark nearly all of the important cadences. The composer works with somewhere between two and five themes in each piece, with each point focused on either one particular theme or a particular combination of two or more that is distinct from the points on either side. In seven of the twelve, the opening subject plays a role near the end, but perhaps surprisingly only one (no. 8) begins with two subjects (in the form subject/​countersubject). Despite the total number of twelve, there is no systematic approach to mode, and no modes are designated. Nevertheless, Bariolla is careful to give any opening subject with prominent use of a fifth (nos. 3, 5, 7, and 11) a tonal answer, with real answers for those subjects that outline a fourth (nos.8, 9, and 12). The composer’s favorite type of subject is around two and a half measures long, begins with white notes, and ends with a flourish of quarter notes. Either inganno or inversion (or both) is present in almost all of the ricercars, but augmentation is absent. These pieces are well crafted, attractive contributions to the genre. The three ricercars of Sebastian Raval included in his First Book of Canzonette of 1593 include, in contrast to Bariolla’s, few clearly delineated internal cadence 75 Complete edition in Ottavio Bariolla, Keyboard Compositions, ed. Clyde William Young, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 46 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler Verlag, 1986). 76 The three ricercars of 1593 are available in Sebastiano Raval, Three Ensemble Ricercars in Four Parts from “Il Primo Libro de Canzonette, 1593,” ed. Milton Swenson, Italian Renaissance Consert Series, no. 1 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1981). The eighteen ricercars from the 1596 publication are not available in modern edition. The edition of this volume listed in New Grove II by Máximo Pajares Barón (Madrid, 1985) is of the six large-​scale canons only and does not include any of the ricercars. 77 Complete edition in Francesco Usper, Ricercari et arie francesi à quattro voci (Venice, 1595), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 11 (New York: Garland, 1990). 78 Complete edition in Gregor Aichinger, Three Ricercars in Four Parts from “Liber secundus sacrarum cantionum,” 1595, ed. William E. Hettrick, Italian Renaissance Consort Series, no. 11 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1983). 79 Complete edition in Milton A. Swenson, The Four-​part Italian Ensemble Ricercar from 1540–​ 1619 (Dissertation: Indiana University, 1970), Part II, pp. 447–​592.

254  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century and no interest in the interplay of different themes. Raval’s focus is instead on contrapuntal devices. Both of the first two ricercars are monothematic and feature extensive stretches of augmentation, while the last, with three themes treated in succession, makes use of inganno. Despite their relatively short length, between 43 and 56 breve measures, the pieces also include surprisingly long stretches without perceivable thematic material; Ricercar 3, most notably, ends with fourteen measures of free counterpoint. The themes themselves incorporate many black notes, including even sixteenths as well as eighths, which places them close to the border between ricercar and canzona. Each ricercar bears a modal designation. It is a shame that the eighteen ricercars Raval published in 1596 remain available only in their original partbooks. Based on the evidence of these three, Raval’s contribution to the ricercar is most interesting and very much his own take on the genre. Francesco Usper (born Sponga) was relatively young, probably in his late twenties, when he published his Ricercari et arie francesi in partbooks in 1595. Usper claimed to be a student of Andrea Gabrieli, who had of course died ten years earlier, and the teacher’s influence is readily apparent in these fourteen ricercars. Their length is modest—​only three exceed 100 breves in length and the shortest is a mere 45—​as is the number of themes, mostly two, plus two pieces that are monothematic and four comprising three themes. Most worthy of notice is that every single piece treats the opening subject from beginning to end of the piece. Also notable is Usper’s insistence on beginning every piece with subject followed directly by answer, the prominence of final and dominant of the mode in virtually every subject, and the use of tonal answers for all but three of these. Usper’s subjects tend toward the extended, with one (no.  5)  nearly five breve measures long, but they include few black notes and are quite traditional in their motion. It is a bit surprising that a student of Andrea Gabrieli would offer only one instance of a double subject (Ricercar 2), although there is one additional instance of what one could call a triple subject (Ricercar 7), and Usper loves to combine themes later in the piece. Also surprising is the relatively modest use of contrapuntal devices: augmentation appears in only one ricercar (no. 3), and inganno appears frequently but generally in isolated fashion. We find neither modal designations nor systematic organization by mode. No doubt Usper’s most original contribution to the genre is his Ricercar 14, the first ever to begin with a subject in triple meter. The most ambitions ricercars from this group are those of Luigi Mazzi. All but two are over 150 breve measures in length, and one clocks in at 266. The composer’s ambitiousness is likewise apparent in the use of contrapuntal devices, most notably augmentation (nos. 1, 5, and 8)  and inganno (omnipresent). Although his ricercars include much more free counterpoint than Macque’s—​a reflection, no doubt, of their greater expansiveness—​Mazzi is also focused on

Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century  255 bringing all of the piece’s themes together in the lead-​up to the final cadence, which can be observed in Ricercars 2, 4, 5 (all with four themes), and 6 (with three themes). Mazzi’s subjects and their opening presentations are more variable in approach. We find long subjects (Ricercar 1’s is four breves in length, among the longest of the genre so far) and short subjects (Ricercar 4’s is only four notes), great time distance before the entry of the answering voice (three breves for Ricercar 1) and the kind of quick second entrance seen principally in the earlier motet (half a breve for Ricercar 2). Half of the pieces open with a proper tonal answer, and another two begin with a real answer, but one begins with two statements of the subject form (no. 6) and one begins with a second theme stated in the second voice to enter. Unlike Macque, Mazzi mostly does not prefer to introduce all of his thematic material up front. Only Ricercar 3 begins with two themes and fails to introduce further ones, so none of the ricercars with four themes fits the classic “con quattro soggetti” model of assigning a different theme to each of the four voices as they enter. In the end, then, Mazzi’s ricercars are finely wrought but extremely traditional works, which no doubt accounts at least in part for the absence of a published modern edition.

4

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance As we saw at the beginning of Chapter 2, it was in the chanson that some of the most important early experiments in fugal imitation took place. Cultivation of fugue in chanson writing continued past the first quarter of the sixteenth century, especially at the hands of some of the same composers who cultivated the motet fugue. Indeed, as the authors of the article “chanson” in New Grove II state, “[w]‌ithout their words, many of these Netherlands chansons could well be mistaken for motets, so pervasive is their imitation and so dense their texture once all the voices have entered . . .”1 But as early as the late 1520s such Franco-​Flemish chansons, as they are commonly known, began to be supplanted by a new, much more homophonic type, associated mostly with French composers and the Parisian publisher Pierre Attaingnant and widely known as Parisian chansons. This type largely eschewed imitative writing in favor of full-​textured homophony, so that such fugal openings as are found, for instance in Passereau’s Il est bel et bon, quickly dissolve into chordal writing with almost complete abandonment of contrapuntal texture. As the Parisian chanson grew to dominate the scene, then, one might think it safe to presume that chansons would gradually cease to play any kind of significant role in fugue’s history. In a literal sense this is true; certainly contemporary writers on fugue directed all of their attention to the motet. Nevertheless, the chanson’s instrumental offspring, the canzona alla francese, brought many of the characteristics of the fugal Franco-​Flemish chanson back into prominence and developed them in ways that prove central to our story. In this chapter we will explore the roots and early history of the fugal canzona, a genre that enjoyed continuous cultivation from its beginnings ca. 1570 until the early eighteenth century, when J. S. Bach was still contributing to it.

Fugue in the Chanson The two principal strategies for fugal imitation at the beginning of a chanson in the middle third of the century were the same as those of the contemporary motet: either in the context of paired imitation or as evenly-​spaced entries. Two examples by Clemens non Papa (Examples 4.1 and 4.2), both first published in 1549, can serve to illustrate the two strategies.2 1 Howard Mayer Brown and Richard Freedman, “Chanson,” (section 3) in New Grove II. 2 The two chansons appear in Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Chanson, ed. K. Ph. Bernet Kempers, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 4, no. 10 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1962), pp. 62 and 77–​79, respectively. Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

258  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.1  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, La la la la la maistre Pierre (Susato, L’unziesme livre . . . a 4, 1549). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/10, p. 62.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  259 Example 4.1 Continued

260  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.2  Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Mais languiray je (Susato, L’unziesme livre . . . a 4, 1549). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 4/10, pp. 77–​79.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  261 Example 4.2 Continued

262  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.2 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  263 Example 4.2 Continued

264  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.2 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  265 Example 4.2 Continued

266  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century The two examples reveal a number of characteristics of the chanson that are of relevance for fugue: (1) Although motets and chansons share similar note values—​predominantly whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes—​the much greater prevalence of quarter notes in the chanson is apparent. Furthermore, black notes in sacred music almost never carry individual syllables; in the chansons, they frequently do. As a result, the chanson features a certain rapid-​fire diction that causes the words to fly by much more quickly. This would seem to have more to do with the often low-​brow subject matter and poetic verse than any change from Latin to French. (2) Also contributing to this sense of quickness and lightness is the prevalence of repeated quarter notes. We see this in that stock chanson opening—​ three repeated notes sung long, short, short—​with which “La la la maister Pierre” begins, but “Mais languiray je” also includes prominent repeated-​ note passages in mm. 23–​28 and 41–​44. (3) Whereas adjacent points of imitation in motets are most often smoothly dovetailed to produce a seamless texture and continuous flow, the points in a chanson often do not overlap. Instances of this occur in Example 4.1 at mm. 14–​15 and in Example 4.2 at m. 38. In both cases, all voices come to a cadence together and hold the final note before the next segment of text enters. (4) A further divergence involves the chanson’s penchant for exact repetition of entire blocks of the musical texture. This repetition stems in part from the structure and rhyme schemes of the poetry, but it also harks back to the old formes fixes of the previous centuries. Example 4.1 gives only the opening point of “La maistre Pierre,” but this section returns note for note at the very end to give the piece a ternary-​like structure. Example 4.2 is complete. Here we see an AABCC scheme, with the opening point of mm. 1–​11 repeated in mm. 12–​24 with the second strophe of text (note, however, the rewriting and expansion of m. 9 into mm. 20–​21) and with the closing refrain beginning in m. 38 repeated verbatim. (5) “Mais languiray je” in particular shows the kind of uncomplicated tonality that can be frequently found in chansons and that contrasts markedly with the chant-​derived tonalities of the motet. Here we find only one notated accidental, a B flat in m. 17, and almost no need for added ficta, in a piece that strongly projects a modern-​sounding C major. The tonality of “La la la la la maistre Pierre” is g-​♭, a favorite of chanson composers. (6) Four-​voice texture, although far from ubiquitous, was by a wide margin the most frequently found, and it remained a favorite when the motet expanded to five, six, and more voices later in the century. These characteristics—​four voices, lively rhythm in half and quarter notes, a penchant for repeated notes, more clearly demarcated sections, frequent

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  267 repetition of sections, and more straightforward tonalities—​carried over directly into the canzona. Praetorius summed them up well when early in the following century he described the instrumental canzona as follows: 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 repetitrt und darmit beschlossen wird.3 There are also some without text composed with short fugues and agreeable fantasien [musical ideas] for four, five, six, eight, etc. voices. At the end the opening fugue is usually repeated, and with that [the piece] concludes.

Certainly the fugal passages found in chansons are short and their themes are agreeable, even if a ternary structure is only one, and even not the most common, of a number of possible repetition schemes.

The Classic Instrumental Canzona of the Late Sixteenth Century Until almost three-​quarters of the way through the sixteenth century the expression canzona alla francese nearly always indicated an instrumental intabulation of a preexisting chanson performed on lute or keyboard. The keyboard performance of a vocal work, with idiomatic keyboard figuration added by the performer, is of course a time-​honored tradition, going all the way back to the very first surviving manuscript of organ music, the Robertsbridge Codex of the later fourteenth century, which includes two intabulations of motets from the Roman de Fauvel.4 Earlier in the sixteenth century, Italian lutenists and organists produced such pieces in considerable numbers, but already in 1543 the organist Girolamo Cavazzoni began to chart a different course when he published two keyboard works, titled canzon, that took their thematic material from two of the most popular chansons of the day, Josquin’s Faulte d’argent and Passereau’s Il est bel et bon.5 The first two sections of Passereau’s original and of Cavazzoni’s reworking are given in Example 4.3 to illustrate Cavazzoni’s approach to his material.

3 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, vol. 3 (Wolfenbüttel:  Elias Holwein, 1619; reprint, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958–​59), p. 17. 4 For an edition, see Keyboard Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Willi Apel, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 1 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1963), pp. 3–​8. 5 Passereau’s Il est bel et bon first appeared in 1534 in the Attaingnant print Vingt et huyt chansons musicalles a quatre parties. It was published in Venice the following year as part of Ottaviano Scotto’s [Il] secondo libro delle canzoni franzese, which would have been the most likely place for Cavazzoni to have first encountered it. Cavazzoni’s two canzonas are edited by Oscar Mischiati in Girolamo Cavazzoni, Orgelwerke, vol. 1: Libro primo (Mainz: Schott, 1959), pp. 17–​20.

268  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.3a  Pierre Passereau, Il est bel et bon (Attaingnant, Vingt et huyt chansons, 1534). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 45, pp. 23–​24.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  269 Example 4.3a Continued

270  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.3a Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  271 Example 4.3b  Girolamo Cavazzoni, Il est bel et bon (Intavolatura, cioe Recercari, 1543). From G. Cavazzoni, Organ Works, pp. 17–​18.

272  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.3b Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  273 There is surprisingly little of Passereau’s original in Cavazzoni’s reworking. The first eight notes of each are identical, allowing for the new dotted rhythm for notes 5 and 6, and they are presented in each case in the soprano voice, but that represents the sum total of Cavazzoni’s borrowing. Not only has he changed the rest of Passereau’s opening phrase for his own subject, but he has also changed the tonal type from d-​♮ to g-​♭ through the addition of a flat to the signature and placed the answer on G rather than the original A. The opening subject receives its proper, orderly exposition with entries proceeding systematically from top to bottom voice, there is almost no overlapping of thematic material, and after only a measure of free counterpoint following the end of the final entry a new theme enters in m. 15 just as the music is coming to a cadence on G. This second theme is quite brief—​only four notes—​and bears no relationship to the thematic material that Passereau introduces between the A  sections of his chanson. (The first of these sections comprises mm. 8–​13 of Example 4.3a.) It reminds us instead of the short phrase “se je le dis” from the other chanson of the pair, Josquin’s Faulte d’argent. Perhaps because this subject has only four notes, Cavazzoni gives it five statements, but he still works systematically from top to bottom of the texture, with one additional statement given to soprano in mm. 19–​20. At this point a measure and a half of free counterpoint takes us to a cadence on the relative major, B flat, and yet another new theme, but this time the join between sections is not elided and subject 3 enters only after the cadential chord is struck. Here we see another brief, four-​note theme, now given six statements, the first three in stretto. Despite the neatly dovetailed connection of the first two points as one expects to find in a ricercar, Cavazzoni reminds us of the piece’s roots with a complete restatement of the opening 15 measures in mm. 31–​45 (i.e., where Example 4.3b leaves off). The piece then concludes with a coda of six measures that is free of thematic material. We see, therefore, characteristics of both motet and chanson: an elided section change in m. 15, and another in mm. 30–​31, suggesting motet, but the very chanson-​like repetition scheme ABCA coda. Although the voicing at first glance appears to be rigorously maintained, it is in fact not: close examination of m. 12, for instance, shows that although four voices are present at both beginning and end of the measure, the added half note at the end of the measure fits into none of the four existing voices. A further instance of loose voicing can be seen at the beginning of m. 25, where a five-​voice texture prevails for half a measure. Nonetheless, the piece offers the listener an attractive package: a substantial but lively (and undoubtedly very familiar) main theme given a rigorous exposition followed by two contrasting sections based on much simpler and shorter thematic material before a complete restatement of the opening and a brief coda bring the piece to a close. The whole takes up only fifty-​one breve measures.

274  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Andrea Gabrieli followed Cavazzoni’s lead when he composed for each of four chansons two different keyboard “versions,” the first a traditional ornamented intabulation, titled Canzona francese deta  .  .  . , and the second a Cavazzoni-​type fugal reworking using the chanson’s thematic material, titled Ricercar sopra. . . .6 Gabrieli works much more thoroughly with his source, however, as is made clear in his ricercar based on Thomas Crecquillon’s Pour ung plaisir (Susato, 1543). The chanson’s structure is AABCC, and Gabrieli builds his substantially longer ricercar from four borrowed thematic units: the first is the theme of Crecquillon’s A section, the second and third (each given its separate point) are taken from the original B section, and the fourth comes from C. The whole proceeds much like Gabrieli’s other, non-​derivative ricercars, with strictly maintained voicing, relatively substantial later themes, and all sections smoothly joined without a full stop. Only the repetition of the final C section betrays the piece’s roots in a chanson. It was but a short step from an independent canzona taking its thematic material from a chanson to a piece composed in chanson-​style without a vocal model. The earliest such piece to appear in print is, as far as we know, a single “Canzone da sonor ‘La bella’ ” for five voices by Nicolo Vicentino, included in his Madrigali a 5 voci, Book V of 1572.7 This piece, which begins fugally, remained an isolated experiment for its composer, but beginning in the 1580s several Italian organists issued prints devoted exclusively to such canzonas independent of vocal models (see the list in Table 4.1).8 In his dissertation The Instrumental Canzone prior to 1600, Floyd Sumner labeled the three types of canzona “transcription” (i.e., intabulation), “paraphrase” (e.g., those of Cavazzoni and Gabrieli taking their subjects from vocal works), and the “stylized canzona” (“reliant on vocal models only for their points of departure”).9 It is of course the last of these that will be the focus of this chapter. For the present book, I will use the expression “fugal canzona” to refer to the canzonas that begin with fugue and are not based on vocal

6 Three of these pairs of canzonas first appeared in print in Gabrieli’s Canzoni alla francese et Ricercari ariosi . . . Libro quinto, published posthumously in 1605. Howard Brown, in his book Instrumental Music before 1600 (p. 254), cites mention of a 1571 edition in the modern secondary literature, but no evidence of such an edition has ever surfaced and most scholars have dismissed or ignored the earlier date. The fourth pair was included in the composer’s Libro sesto published in the same year. For modern editions, see Andrea Gabrieli, Complete Keyboard Works, ed. Giuseppe Glericetti, vols. 5 and 6 (Vienna: Doblinger, 1999). 7 Nicolo Vicentino, Opera Omnia, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 26 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1963), pp. 119–​122. 8 Lutenists seem not to have made this switch, and lute music, which played an important role in the early imitative ricercar, plays no significant role in the history of the fugal canzona. 9 This summary, including the quoted phrase, is taken from Robert Judd’s introduction to Florentio Maschera, Libro primo de canzoni . . . a quattro voci (Brescia, 1584), Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 9 (New York: Garland, 1995), p. xii.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  275 Table 4.1  Important Extant Published Collections of Canzonas without Vocal Models, 1580–​1600 Florentio Maschera, Libro primo de Canzoni da sonare a quattro voci (Brescia, 1584).a Claudio Merulo, Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo a quattro voci, fatte alla francese . . . libro primo (Venice, 1592).b Ottavio Bariolla, Capricci overo canzoni a quattro (Milan, 1594).c Adriano Banchieri, Canzoni alla Francese a quattro voci (Bologna, 1596).d Giovanni Cavaccio, Musica . . . a quattro voci (Venice, 1597).e Vincenzo Pellegrini, Canzoni de intavolatura d’organo (Venice, 1599).f Antonio Mortaro, Primo libro de canzoni da sonare a quattro voci (Venice, 1600).g Floriano Canale, Canzoni da sonare a quattro, et otto voci . . . libro primo (Venice, 1600).h a

Complete modern edition: Florentio Maschera, Libro primo de canzoni . . . a quattro voci (Brescia, 1584), ed. Robert Judd, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 9 (New York: Garland, 1995). b Complete modern edition:  Claudio Merulo, Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo, ed. Walker Cunningham and Charles McDermott, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 90–​ 91 (Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1992). c Complete modern edition:  Ottavio Bariolla, Keyboard Compositions, ed. Clyde William Young, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 46 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1986). d Complete modern edition:  Adriano Banchieri, Canzoni alla francese (of 1596), ed. Leland Bartholomew, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 20 (Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1975). e Complete modern edition:  Giovanni Cavaccio, Musica (Venice, 1597), ed. Floyd Sumner, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 10 (New York: Garland, 1994). f Complete modern edition:  Vincenzo Pellegrini, Canzoni de intavolatura d’organo fatte alla francese, ed. Robert B. Lynn, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 35 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1972). g Complete modern edition:  Antonio Mortaro, Primo libro de canzoni da sonare a quattro voci (Venice, 1600), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 13 (New York: Garland, 1988). h Complete modern edition: Floriano Canale, Canzoni da sonare a quattro, et otto voci . . . libro primo (Venice, 1600), ed. James Ladewig, Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 14 (New York: Garland, 1989).

models. Before we examine this genre more closely, a few general remarks will serve to set the stage. First, the central role taken by Venice for the early history of the ricercar was taken for the fugal canzona by the north Italian city of Brescia. Brescia was home to the Antegnati family of organ builders, suppliers of instruments to Brescia, Milan, and most of northern Italy from the end of the fifteenth century until the second half of the seventeenth. The family’s most famous member was Costanzo (1549–​1624), who, in addition to his activities as a builder, wrote a considerable amount of vocal and instrumental music, including fifteen canzonas that

276  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century survive transcribed into German organ tablature in Johann Woltz’s Nova musices organicae tabulatura, published in 1617.10 (Nothing is known of an original publication of these works by Antegnati himself or how Woltz might have acquired them.) The two most popular collections of canzonas in the late sixteenth century, to judge by the number of reprints and manuscript copies, were also authored by Brescian organists: Florentio Maschera’s Libro primo de Canzoni da sonare a quattro voci, published in Brescia in 1584, and Antonio Mortaro’s Primo libro de canzoni da sonare a quattro voci, which appeared in Venice in 1600.11 All three of these men were organists, as was Ottavio Bariolla, another important early contributor to the genre, who served various churches in nearby Milan. Although Maschera was a pupil of Claudio Merulo, the latter, along with his Venetian colleague Andrea Gabrieli, seems not to have made the kinds of game-​changing contributions to this genre that the two did for the ricercar, as we will see. Second, the canzona, like the contemporary ricercar, might appear in one of several notational formats:  two-​staff Italian keyboard notation, partbooks, open score, and after 1600, German organ tablature. Canzonas published in partbooks, such as those of Maschera and Mortaro, appear in straight, “skeletal” versions, but those surviving in some sort of keyboard notation generally incorporate a certain amount of idiomatic keyboard figuration and ornamentation. This suggests that many of the composers preferred to present their canzonas in partbooks, where the lines were clean and the counterpoint and voicing readily apparent, but for performance at the organ they renotated them and added the kind of ornamentation that had always been applied to chanson intabulations.12 In short, as was the case for the ricercar, it makes little sense to talk of chansons for instrumental ensemble distinct from those for keyboard during this period, and we will consider all canzonas together, regardless of notational format. Third, when German organists discovered these pieces and began reissuing them in the years after 1600, they began to apply the word fugue to them as a genre designation. Bernard Schmid made this connection explicit in his tablature of 1607 when he described such pieces as “Fugues, or as the Italians call them, canzoni alla francese,” and he designated them “Fuga prima,” etc.13 We saw 10 For a modern edition of all fifteen canzonas, see Costanzo Antegnati, Canzoni alla Francese, ed. Gabriella Dini (Bologna: Antiquæ Musicæ Italicæ Studiosi, 1992). 11 The two collections’ popularity is detailed in Maschera, ed. Judd, p. xi, and Mortaro, ed. Ladewig, pp. xi–​xii. 12 See in this regard Peter Allsop, The Italian “Trio” Sonata: From its Origins until Corelli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 29, where Allsop goes so far as to speculate that organists may have continued this practice of scoring out and playing pieces published in partbooks in the context of the later seventeenth-​century ensemble sonata. 13 “Fugen (oder wie es die Italianer nennen) Canzoni alla Francesce.” Bernard Schmid the Younger, Tabulatur Buch: A Facsimile of the 1607 Strasbourg Edition (New York: Broude Brothers, 1967), table of contents, fol. A5v.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  277 in the previous chapter how Praetorius tried to associate fugue as a genre designation with the ricercar, but most pieces labeled fugue in the seventeenth century are canzona-​like, not ricercar-​like. The early Brescian canzonas of Maschera, Mortaro, and Antegnati proved to be central to the establishment of the genre and can serve as classic archetypes. As a model of the classic late-​Renaissance fugal canzona we can take Maschera’s Canzon sesta, a piece that Schmid also included in his tablature of 1607 as his Fuga tertia (see Example 4.4). Several features of this piece stand out immediately. One is the modern look of the note values: a basic flow in half and quarter notes, with eighths used to ornament suspensions and whole notes relatively rare. Were it to be barred in Example 4.4  Florentio Maschera, Canzona sesta (Libro primo de canzoni, 1584). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 9, pp. 36–42.

278  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.4 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  279 Example 4.4 Continued

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4/​4 time, the piece would look quite familiar to a modern musician. A second notable feature is the piece’s unrelieved contrapuntal texture, without a single homophonic passage. Third, we find a structure built with short points of imitation and repetition of entire points according to the scheme AABCDD, much like that of Clemens’s Mais languiray je. The piece never comes to a complete stop, but the join points incorporate little dovetailing; most often, the material of the next point simply begins at the point when the previous one cadences, as can be seen in mm. 6 and 12. Fourth, all of the points involve imitative counterpoint, and each has its own theme, but the brevity of the sections makes any sort of extended thematic working, to say nothing of contrapuntal devices, impossible. Indeed, the opening point is nothing more than a simple fugal

284  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century exposition that comes to a cadence a measure and a half after all voices have stated the subject, and which then is repeated note for note. All of this unfolds in the tonal type g-​♭, a favorite for chansons. The fugal exposition that is section A merits a closer look. Here we find a subject that begins with that cliché of chanson/​canzona composition, the repeated note opening in long-​short-​short rhythm. It projects its mode well, with a prominent leap from final (G) to dominant (D). On the other hand, the subject seems to fit Zarlino’s and Dressler’s idea of fugue as imitation that is simply broken off at some point, rather than as a theme with a clear ending note, since its apparent ending note, C in the Canto, does not particularly help to make the mode clear and thus seems a bit arbitrary. Maschera’s use of a real answer also does not fit ideally with the mode and would have earned him censure from many musicians of the time, including probably his teacher Merulo. Structurally we find a relatively regular succession of entries, in the order subject-​answer-​subject-​answer, but the first two entries overlap, as do entries 3 and 4. Compared to the contrapuntal and structural sophistication of the contemporary ricercar, Maschera’s fugue is rudimentary indeed. When Bernard Schmid the Younger transcribed this canzona into German organ tablature for his Tabulatur-​Buch of 1607, he took advantage of the piece’s literal repeat of its opening point of imitation to offer the first A section plain, followed by an ornamented version of the repeat, as can be seen in Example 4.5.14 If we look at Maschera’s collection as a whole, we find that only one of the twenty-​one canzonas (no. 5) begins homophonically, and two others (nos. 4 and 21) begin with fugal expositions that are in some way irregular. All of the remaining eighteen begin with proper fugal expositions, some with paired imitation, some with regularly spaced entries. The pieces are not long, between 40 to 87 breve measures in length, and all maintain a contrapuntal texture from beginning to end. A remarkable seventeen of these eighteen begin with the half note-​quarter-​quarter rhythm of Canzon sesta, although Maschera’s favorite melodic contour is not three repeated notes but the scale-​step pattern 1-​1-​2-​3 or its inversion. He shows a marked preference for the two tonal types on G, with seven of the fugal canzonas set in g-​♭ and three in G-​♮. As for repetition schemes, we find a wide variety, from as simple as ABB to such longer patterns as AABCDC'DC'.15 Despite Maschera’s use of a real answer in Canzon sesta, five of his fugal canzonas do employ a tonal answer, and all

14 Ibid., fol. N iv–​N iiiv. For a modern edition of all twelve of the canzonas labeled “Fugue,” see Canzoni alla francese:  extraits du Tabulatur Buch Strasbourg 1607, 2 vols., ed. Jean-​Luc Gester (Strasbourg: Les Cahiers du Tourdion, [2006]). For Maschera’s piece (Example 4.5), see vol. 1, pp. 8–​11. 15 Judd’s edition includes a table of all repetition patterns on pp. xiv–​xv.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  285 Example 4.5  Florentio Maschera, opening of Canzon sesta (1584) as intabulated by B. Schmid (Tabulatur Buch, 1607).

but three of the opening expositions bring in subject and answer on final and dominant of the mode, about half beginning on final, the other half on dominant. The vast majority (fifteen) begin with subject followed by answer; most continue with the order subject-​answer-​subject-​answer.

286  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century For the history of fugue the most interesting of Maschera’s canzonas, thanks to its structure, is no. 10, La Rosa, in d-​♮, given in its entirety in Example 4.6. This is the longest of the set, and Judd outlines its structure as A A' A'' B A''' C C coda with section divisions at mm. 16, 25, 37, 57, 64, 75, and 85. We might verbalize this by saying that four of the piece’s seven principal sections, or points of imitation, treat the opening subject, but in ways that differ markedly one from the other. The first (mm. 1–​16) offers a proper fugal exposition (allowing for the problematic third entry, to which we will return) with voices entering in the order TABS; the second (mm. 16–​25) introduces entries in only three of the voices in the order ATB; A'' Example 4.6  Florentio Maschera, Canzona decima: La Rosa (Libro primo de canzoni, 1584). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 9, pp. 64–73.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  287 Example 4.6 Continued

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The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  289 Example 4.6 Continued

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The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  293 Example 4.6 Continued

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The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  297 Example 4.6 Continued

(mm. 25–​37) has only two reasonably complete entries, T & S; and the fourth (mm. 57–​64) once again includes a complete set in the order of the opening. In each case the thematic statements come at the beginning of the point, after which free counterpoint takes us to a cadence and the start of the next point. From the very beginning, on the other hand, Maschera handles his subject flexibly. The tenor’s opening statement presents the most common form, a ten-​ note version in which the three opening repeated notes on the final are followed by a downward leap to the dominant and an immediate return to the final, after which the remaining notes outline a dominant-​minor triad ending on scale step 2. The answer itself already shortens this to eight notes by eliminating notes 6 and 7. These two versions are not, however, maintained as subject form and answer

298  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century form, as the soprano’s entrance—​in which the answer form begins on the note D, where we would expect to see the subject form—​shows. Meanwhile, the bass’s entrance, on G instead of A, is jarring and takes the piece to, as we would describe it, the subdominant only five measures into the piece. A' maintains the same two version of the theme, but neither of the two statements in A'' follows one of these forms, nor are the two identical despite their common length of ten notes. We see yet further versions in A''' in bass and soprano. It is in section C where things get really interesting. Here Maschera begins with thematic material clearly derived from the opening subject but with its own contour: three repeated notes, downward leap of a fourth, scalar rise. A  further theme (beginning in m.  68)  also begins with three repeated notes followed by a three-​note figure traceable to notes 6–​8 of the subject in its original form. What we are seeing in C, then, looks very much like the sort of thematic transformation we saw in the ricercars of Willaert and Conforti. Meanwhile, the various incarnations of A fit surprisingly well Antonio Bertali’s description of fugue, from about three-​quarters of a century later, as a series of points of imitation based on a single theme, organized so that no two points are alike. Although Maschera is not working in nearly as organized a way as Bertali describes, he does group together his thematic statements at the beginning of their sections and then follows them with non-​thematic counterpoint leading to a cadence. In the end, only section B incorporates nothing of the piece’s opening subject. Two further collections of canzonas, Antonio Mortaro’s published in 1600 and Costanzo Antegnati’s found in Woltz, bear enough similarity to Maschera’s to suggest direct influence. Perhaps because Antegnati was the dedicatee of Mortaro’s collection, Dietrich Kämper concluded that Mortaro modeled his canzonas after Antegnati’s, but in the absence of any firm date for the latter’s works this remains speculative.16 Similarities among the three volumes include obsession with long-​short-​short openings, use of subject followed directly by answer for most canzonas, entries on final and dominant, a mix of both tonal and real answers, and total length of pieces. The single important distinguishing feature of Antegnati’s canzonas is a systematic exploration of mode. His order follows no theorist’s system, but for the fifteen canzonas we find, in sequence, two each in g-​♭, G-​♮, d-​♮, and e-​♮, one in a-​♮, and three each in F-​♭ and C-​♮. The three canzonas in e-​♮ and a-​♮ show none of Maschera’s confusion: Those in e-​♮ begin with statements of the subject on E and B, the one in a-​♮ with statements on A and E, just as Zarlino had prescribed. To say that Maschera’s, Mortaro’s, and Antegnati’s subjects are conventional would be an understatement, as their fixation with the long-​short-​short rhythm suggests. Earlier scholars attempted to identify among these works thematic

16

These arguments are summarized in Ladewig’s introduction to Mortaro, p. xii.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  299 Example 4.7  A.  Opening theme of Thomas Crecquillon’s Pour ung plaisir (1543). B. Opening theme of Maschera’s Canzon nona, La Duranda. C. Opening theme of Maschera’s Canzon ottava.

borrowings from other composers, but Judd has rightly expressed doubt about such an endeavor.17 The subject of Maschera’s Canzon sesta, for instance, is the same as that of Clemens’s La la la la la maistre Pierre of over thirty years earlier, and Mortaro’s Canzona no.  5:  La Morona likewise begins with three repeated notes followed by the upward leap of a fifth. One of Maschera’s favorite subjects (Example 4.7B), which begins Canzon nona: La Duranda, as well as, in its inverted form, Canzon seconda:  La Martinenga and Canzon ottava, is a minor-​mode version of the opening theme of Crecquillon’s Pour ung plaisir, first published in 1543 and the basis for both an intabulation and a “ricercar” by Andrea Gabrieli. Obviously, if nearly all of one’s subjects are to begin with the same rhythm, the crafting of distinctive subjects with memorable turns of phrase is not a primary goal. One final note: Like Vicentino’s canzona “La Bella,” over half of Maschera’s fugal canzonas and all those of Mortaro and Antegnati bear allusive titles. The Brescians did not simply choose fanciful or pictoral titles like Vicentino’s, however; instead they named their pieces for prominent Brescian citizens and thus “dedicated” the works to them.18 The practice of giving named titles to fugal

17 Intro to Maschera, p. xii. 18 For instance, Mortaro’s last canzona, is entitled “L’Antegnata,” that is, dedicated to Antegnati. For further discussion of this topic, see Judd, intro to Maschera’s volume, p.  xii. Judd refers the

300  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century canzonas, whether in a dedicatory or in a fanciful way, continued to be a favorite practice of many canzona composers well into the next century.

The Contributions of A. Gabrieli and Merulo Since these two organists made such centrally important contributions to the ricercar, and since Merulo was Maschera’s teacher, it is perhaps a little surprising that the two did not play the same kind of central role in the establishment of the fugal canzona that they did in the ricercar. The surviving evidence suggests, in fact, that for both men the genre designation “canzona” was always more about the intabulation of chansons than about fugue. We can see this clearly in the works of Gabrieli, who with only one exception reserved the word “canzona” for intabulations of chansons, of which he wrote a considerable number. We have already noted that he followed each of four such intabulations with a newly composed piece based on the thematic material of the chanson, and that he gave these latter the designation “ricercar.” There also survive from his pen seven fugal canzonas without vocal model, which appeared in various posthumous publications and with various designations. A group of four, given the title ricercari amorosi, would fit comfortably into the collections of Maschera and Mortaro: rhythmic basis in half and quarter notes, three of the four subjects beginning with the ubiquitous long-​short-​short pattern (the other with four quarter notes), emphasis on repeated notes, familiar-​looking repetition patterns (AABCC, da capo, AAB, and AABCCC), and straightforward tonalities (two in C-​♮, one each in F-​♭ and g-​♭).19 Only their notation in Italian keyboard score and incorporation of keyboard figuration, including block chords with passagework at major cadence points, sets them apart from the canzonas of Maschera and Mortaro. Two further pieces sharing these same style characteristics pop up among a group of standard ricercari in the composer’s Madrigali et ricercari . . . a quattro voci, published in partbooks in 1589.20 Neither the titles of the two canzonas (Ricercar del sesto tuono and Ricercar del duodecimo tuono) nor their placement in the print (separated from each other) give any hint of the different stylistic world that they reader to an article by Claudio Sartori, “Une pratique des Musiciens Lombards (1582–​1639),” in La Musique instrumentale de la renaissance, ed. J. Jacquot (Paris, 1955), pp. 305–​312, for a more detailed discussion. 19 These appear in his Libro quinto of 1605. 20 For modern editions of these, see Andrea Gabrieli, Ricercars from Madrigali et ricercari . . . a quattro voci (Venice, 1589), Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 13, ed. Robert Judd (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 122–​131 and 141–​149.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  301 inhabit. The seventh fugal canzona is found in Gabrieli’s Ricercari Libro III of 1596 and bears (finally!) the designation Canzon arioso.21 Taken in the aggregate, Gabrieli’s choice of terminology, presuming that the titles are his, is revealing. He clearly thought of the word “ricercar” rather than “canzona” when writing a fugal piece, but he sometimes added the qualifier “arioso,” presumably to point up the vocal origins of the more lively style. One additional piece deserving of mention is a Ricercar settimo tono in Gabrieli’s Ricercari Libri II of 1596. In this case we see something of a stylistic hybrid, that is, a fugal piece that begins with the long-​short-​short pattern in half and quarter notes and moves predominantly in those note values but has no sectional repetition. We will explore this nascent phenomenon of ricercar-​canzona hybrids further below in the works of Andrea’s nephew Giovanni. While Gabrieli’s fugal canzonas are on average a bit longer than those of Maschera and Mortaro, they are not contrapuntally more ambitious. We still find the same sorts of expositions built from a series of simple thematic statements without the contrapuntal devices and countersubjects that elevate the composer’s ricercars. We might best sum up Gabrieli’s contribution to the genre of fugal canzona as that of a pioneer and explorer, someone who innovated and experimented but never produced the kind of larger collection that could help secure the genre’s place among composers of the late sixteenth century. The source situation for Merulo’s canzonas is more complicated.22 Only one collection appeared in print during the composer’s lifetime, a set of nine copiously ornamented works published in Italian keyboard score in 1592 with the title Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo . . . libro primo. Skeletal versions exist for six of them, all but one in the set of manuscript partbooks Cod. MCXXVIII of the Biblioteca Capitolare, Verona. Two further publications of intabulated canzonas in keyboard score were published after Merulo’s death by a nephew and numbered Libro secondo (1606), and Libro terzo (1611). The same Verona partbooks contain skeletal versions for three of the eleven canzonas in Book 2, but Book 3 comprises only four canzonas, and all are intabulations of chansons by Crecquillon (three) and Lassus (the famous Susanne un jour). Curiously, each of the first two books also includes a canzona with a chanson title—​Petit Jacquet in Book 1 and Petite Camusette in Book 2—​but neither has so far been 21 Schmid included this piece in his tablature book, where he designated it Fuga quarta. 22 All of the canzonas, including the three publications, the partbook-​based models, and the manuscript pieces, can be found in modern edition in Claudio Merulo, Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo, ed. Walker Cunningham and Charles McDermott, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 90–​91 (Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1992). Book 1 occupies pp. 5–​40, Book 2 pp. 45–​86, Book 3 pp. 91–​113, the skeletal models pp. 117–​146, and the manuscript works pp. 149–​184.

302  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century traced to a preexisting chanson. In addition to the published canzonas, eight canzonas attributed to “Ms. Claudio” and without concordances are included in the Torino manuscripts. These are of course in German organ tablature and are also ornamented with keyboard figuration, although less elaborately than the published intabulations. Two additional canzonas with Merulo’s name attached appear in Woltz, although one of them is attributed in two contemporary manuscripts to Hans Leo Hassler. Three fairly inconsequential works in manuscripts from Basel and Vienna complete the picture. As this source situation makes clear, neither Merulo nor his nephew ever presented to the wider world the unornamented partbook versions of his canzonas, which suggests that the composer’s primary interest was in the ornamented performance of canzonas. Indeed, the ornamentation in Book 1 is both continuous and very elaborate and includes note values down to a thirty-​ second. Conversely, only four of the nine pieces begin with a proper fugal exposition, and, as is made even clearer in the unadorned versions, the pieces incorporate much more homophonic and homorhythmic writing, as well as many fewer rests, than do the consistently contrapuntal and imitative canzonas of Maschera and Mortaro. A look at the opening of one of the canzonas from 1592 shows this clearly. Example 4.8 gives the opening A section of the canzona called “La Gratiosa” in Merulo’s print but “La Zerata” in Verona Cod. MCXXVIII first in its unadorned version, then in its intabulated version. In the unadorned version the fugal exposition is easy to perceive: the subject begins like that of Maschera’s Canzon sesta, subject and answer enter on final and dominant of the mode (g-​♭), the answer is properly tonal (unlike Maschera’s), and the thematic statements are relatively evenly spaced and do not overlap. After a second subject statement in the Canto, section A cadences at the downbeat of m. 12 and never returns. In the intabulation no measure goes completely unornamented. Particularly noteworthy are mm. 9 and 10, which in the original proceed as a continuous stream of eighth notes with only one tiny rest and in the intabulation look and sound like rapid keyboard figuration in the right hand accompanied by left-​hand chords.23 A closer look at m. 10 reveals that this effect is exactly what Merulo is aiming for: the alto and tenor parts of the second half of this measure have been completely rewritten in order to simplify the chords and to allow the passagework to proceed into their range. The listener’s attention is drawn, not to the counterpoint, but to the player’s virtuosity. It appears, then, that Merulo never fully embraced the fugal canzona. Not nearly as many of his canzonas begin with proper fugal expositions as do those of

23

This edition reproduces the original distribution of notes between staves.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  303 Example 4.8a  Claudio Merulo, La Zerata (Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, Cod. MCXXVIII). From Recent Researches in Music of the Renaissance, vol. 90–​91, p. 121.

304  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.8a Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  305 Example 4.8b  Claudio Merulo, La Gratiosa (Canzoni . . . Libro primo, 1592). From Recent Researches in Music of the Renaissance, vol. 90–​91, p. 13.

306  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.8b Continued

his canzona-​writing contemporaries; even his fugal canzonas tend to incorporate many more homophonic passages, and when he offered up the pieces in print, it was the flashy performer’s versions, not the transparent contrapuntal versions, that he favored. The most consistently fugal and contrapuntal of his canzonas are the eight found in Torino, with modest figuration likely not stemming from Merulo himself, but even here we see an emphasis on homophonic texture little in evidence among the published works of the Brescians. In the end, Merulo, like his colleague Gabrieli, made his contribution to fugue primarily within the genre

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  307 of the ricercar; his contribution to the canzona ultimately has more to do with the genre’s traditional emphasis on intabulation and figuration.

Increasing Contrapuntal Sophistication:  Macque, E. Pasquini, and Bariolla The fugal canzona did not long remain a contrapuntally simple piece constructed from short, repeating sections. Likely the first composer to break this mold and introduce sophisticated contrapuntal techniques into the genre was Giovanni de Macque. Eight canzonas survive with attribution to Macque, four in Woltz, three in the manuscript GB-​Lbl Ms. Add. 30491, and one in I-​Nc ms. mus. str. 73, and all are considered likely to have originated in the composer’s Ricercari e canzone francesi of 1586.24 All are fugal, and they exhibit many features associated with the chanson: subjects that open with the stock half-​quarter-​quarter rhythm (all but one), predominant motion in half and quarter notes, considerable use of repeated notes, sections that are not dovetailed, and straightforward tonalities (all in the “major” modes C, F with or without a flat, and G). Two characteristics not in evidence are descriptive titles and incorporation of sectional repetition patterns. What Macque adds instead is the same penchant for the contrapuntal interaction of multiple themes that we saw in his ricercars, handled in a somewhat different way. A full six of the eight incorporate multiple themes with clearly defined ending notes, and we also find instances of thematic transformation, inganno, stretto, and inversion. Macque’s Canzona 3 from Woltz’s tablature of 1617 (Example 4.9) is a particularly fine example of his preferred approach.25 The tonality of Canzona 3 is F-​♮, and subject and answer enter properly on final and dominant. Since the subject only covers the range of a third and ends on the note with which it begins, a real answer causes no contrapuntal or modal problems. The first four measures offer a textbook exposition based on subject and countersubject, with entries in the order alto-​soprano-​tenor-​bass and almost no free counterpoint (note how, in m. 4, alto parallels the bass statement in tenths and soprano drops out). Once the exposition is complete the soprano re-​enters with the subject, to which is added, in the alto, a second countersubject,

24 Editions of all eight can be found in Giovanni de Macque, Opere per tastiera, vol. I: Capricci, Stravaganze, Canzoni, etc., ed. Liuwe Tamminga (Colledara, Italy: Andromeda Editrice, 2002), pp. 14–​23 and  33–​44. 25 I have chosen open score notation for this example. All three of the canzonas in GB-​Lbl Ms. Add. 30491 are so notated, and if the pieces first appeared in the 1586 publication they would have been notated in partbooks. German organ tablature of course naturally preserves integrity of voicing as well, even though keyboard performance is presumed.

308  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century only half the length of the other two themes and thus more adaptable in its placement. With now three bits of thematic material, Macque is able to continue his apparent goal of minimizing free counterpoint, and he even introduces stretto between tenor and alto in mm. 8–​9. By the time section A cadences in m. 14, we have heard the subject ten times and each countersubject eight times. Section A never returns. After a complete break, section B introduces triple meter with a variant of the principal subject, derived using the technique of thematic transformation: opening repeated notes (now reduced to two), descending whole step, then

Example 4.9  Giovanni de Macque, Canzona 3, (Woltz, Tabulatur Buch, 1617). From Macque, Opere per tastiera, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  309 Example 4.9 Continued

310  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.9 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  311 Example 4.9 Continued

312  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.9 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  313 Example 4.9 Continued

a sequence built from the final three notes of the original subject, all ending one step higher than it began. This new theme, S', is given its own orderly exposition, S-​A-​T-​B, with an added fifth entry in soprano, after which each voice then states S' in inversion, again in orderly fashion T-​A-​B-​S. A return to duple meter brings section B to a close, after which section C begins homophonically but with yet another theme derived from the subject (S''), this time with three repeated notes and a two-​step scalar descent. The theme of S'' functions rather like an ostinato with a freely adaptable ending and takes the piece to its conclusion. In only thirty-​eight measures, then, we have seen an orderly opening exposition, use of two countersubjects, stretto, and inversion, all in the service of a primary subject that appears in three versions, one per section, that are related to each other through thematic transformation. This is a long way from “La la la la la maistre Pierre.”

314  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Musicians familiar with the works of Frescobaldi and Froberger will recognize in Macque’s Canzona 3 an early exemplar of what has come to be called the variation canzona, a subgenre characterized by, most often, three sections, generally including one in triple meter, each constructed from a particular version of the opening subject. In an article from 1987 entitled “The Origins of Frescobaldi’s Variation Canzonas Reappraised,” James Ladewig demonstrated convincingly the inaccuracy of older statements crediting Ascanio Mayone and Giovanni Maria Trabaci with the creation of this genre, but many of the examples cited in the article are not particularly fugal, and certainly none is as straightforward an example as Canzona 3.26 As we have already seen, the technique of thematic transformation reaches all the way back to the very first imitative ricercars of 1540 and enjoyed ongoing cultivation within that genre throughout the remainder of the century. Macque’s variation canzona represents a particular manifestation of that technique, however; in place of the ongoing, gradual approach to thematic change, we see here something akin to Andrea Gabrieli’s Example 3.18, in which the switch to triple meter introduces a new, jazzy variant of the subject that supplants the original version. Whatever the origin, the type of “variation principle” seen in Macque’s Canzona 3 proved to be a powerful and much-​favored tool in seventeenth-​century fugue. The canzonas of Ercole Pasquini, of which eleven (one titled “fugue”) survive, nearly all exhibit this same alternation of duple and triple meter, mostly in the sequence duple-​triple-​duple. Because Pasquini never published any of his music, dating of pieces is difficult; nor do we know his birth or death dates. But he was already described as elderly in 1593 before he took the post of organist of the Capella Giulia in Rome in 1597, and it seems safe to infer that most if not all of the canzonas were written before the turn of the seventeenth century.27 Five of the canzonas make use of the variation principle as found in Macque’s Canzona 3, and a closer look at one, the Canzona Franzese d’Ercole Pasquini, 1600, taken from the Naples manuscript 48, shows the musical ends to which the new approach could be put (see Example 4.10).28 26 James Ladewig, “The Origins of Frescobaldi’s Variation Canzonas Reappraised,” Frescobaldi Studies, ed. Alexander Silbiger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 235–​268. Ladewig did not cite Canzona 3 most likely because at that time no modern edition existed, although a facsimile of Woltz’s tablature was available for those who could read the notation. 27 Also noteworthy in this respect is the presence of his keyboard works exclusively in Italian manuscripts of the period, quite in contrast to the considerable presence of those of Giovanni Gabrieli in manuscripts of German provenance copied in the first third of the seventeenth century. 28 I have followed the lead of the editor of this canzona for the Collected Works, Paul Kenyon, in selecting this version, one of three extant, for the piece. The ornamented cadential formulas in mm. 28, 38, and 58 apparently do not have the correct number of beats in the manuscript (which I have not seen). For the present edition, I have given them the proper number of beats, since they do not affect my arguments. The edition by Richard Shindle for the Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (Ercole

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  315 Example 4.10  Ercole Pasquini, Canzona Franzese 1600 (Naples ms. 48). From Ercole Pasquini, Opere Complete, vol. 1, pp. 51–​53.

316  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.10 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  317 Example 4.10 Continued

In contrast to Macque’s focus on multiple themes and learned contrapuntal devices, Pasquini’s goal is the creation of a fugal piece that is musically compelling. Pasquini’s subject begins with three repeated quarter notes, but its most memorable characteristic is the interval of the diminished fourth from C down to G sharp, filled in with stepwise motion. When the subject is adapted for triple meter, this interval is negotiated directly by leap, while the meter ensures increased liveliness for an already active subject. The return to duple near the end further energizes the flow through a foreshortening of the subject, achieved by paring it down to its now characteristic descending leaps in a quick four-​ note motive first offered in m. 50 and stated several times in rapid succession. To achieve the desired drive to the final cadence, Pasquini intensifies the process by presenting the four-​note motive in sixteenth notes, again in rapid succession, before the expected toccata-​like flourish brings it all to a close. In this piece, then, variation principle serves the musical purpose of continually picking up the pace and driving the piece forward while never abandoning the original Pasquini, Collected Keyboard Works, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 12, pp. 41–​43) does not match Kenyon’s edition at these three places.

318  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century subject. Pasquini’s canzona recalls, in its musical effectiveness, nothing so much as Andrea Gabrieli’s ricercar of Example 3.18. Like Macque and Pasquini, the Milanese organist Ottavio Bariolla also had ambitious designs for the canzona, but in his case the results were more mixed, and scholarly opinion about the result has been sharply divided. Bariolla published a set of twenty canzonas in 1594 as a set of partbooks, but only two of the four parts survive. All twenty pieces are available, however, in lightly ornamented form in the Torino tablatures, from which they were edited for the Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, notated in two-​stave keyboard score, in 1986. The editor, Clyde William Young, cited Costanzo Antegnati’s praise of Bariolla as “among the best players and composers of the time,” while at the same time noting the plentiful parallel perfect consonances to be found.29 About a decade later, James Ladewig undertook the task of notating the original unornamented version by reconstructing the missing tenor and bass parts from the Torino scores and stripping away the added ornamentation.30 He published the result in open score and took earlier scholars to task for their negative assessment of Bariolla’s canzonas, principally by highlighting the piece’s ambitious structural designs and emphasis on invertible counterpoint with two or three themes.31 A closer look at these pieces from the standpoint of fugue helps to shed light on this divided verdict. The first seventeen of Bariolla’s canzonas lack descriptive titles and form something of a set. (The final three, with descriptive titles, set popular and other tunes and follow a different model.) All seventeen begin with proper fugal expositions, all but one of the opening subjects begin with the ubiquitous long-​short-​short rhythm, quarter note motion predominates throughout, and total lengths of the pieces are modest (shorter than Bariolla’s ricercars), but there the resemblance to the classic Brescian canzona ends. First and most noticeably, we find very little repetition of sections, and themes are in most cases confined to their original points of imitation. Second, the composer almost never works with only one theme at a time. Third, within a consistently contrapuntal texture, Bariolla keeps the thematic material coming, without the episodic passages of the classic model. Finally, the technique of thematic transformation, often involving inganno, is applied frequently as a way to increase the level of contrapuntal sophistication. All of this is very impressive, but a closer look at the opening of one of the canzonas, Canzone decima (Example 4.11), makes the shortcomings readily apparent. 29 Ottavio Bariolla, Keyboard Compositions, ed. Clyde William Young, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 46 (N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1986), p. XI. The quote is not Antegnati’s but Young’s summary of Antegnati’s judgment. 30 Cited above. 31 See esp. p. xv of Ladewig’s introduction. He points out that Bariolla’s canzonas are actually more ambitious than his ricercars.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  319 Example 4.11  Ottavio Bariolla, Canzone decima (Capricci, overo canzoni . . . libro terzo, 1594). From Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 12, pp. 90–93.

320  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.11 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  321 Example 4.11 Continued

322  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.11 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  323 Example 4.11 Continued

324  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Canzone decima is one of only two in the set to incorporate its opening subject into more than one point of imitation, and structurally there is much to admire in Example 4.11: the opening subject is given an orderly exposition with entrances on final and dominant of the tonal type (B flat in cantus mollis), a fifth thematic entry then leads to a cadence on B flat in m. 11, at which point a new subject enters as countersubject to S1. These two themes then interact until the next cadence in m. 31, two new themes take over, and S1 and S2 disappear. After this ensuing section, S1 returns with yet another countersubject and S3 later comes back as well. Although the earlier editors do not do so, one could represent this scheme as A A' B A', by analogy to the varied repetitions found in Maschera’s La Rosa. Furthermore, Bariolla is throughout clever with his material, which appears in various rhythmic guises and with occasional melodic adaptation through inganno and other means. So far, so impressive. The problems arise, however, as soon as we look more closely at Bariolla’s handling of mode. Immediately noteworthy is the contour of the first subject, with the sequence of prominent descending fifths—​A-​D and G-​C—​at its center and its close on D. Of these four notes, only D is the kind of important modal note called for by both Dressler and Zarlino for the beginning of a composition, and the subject’s contour suggests most readily a D-​minor sonority. The notes A and C are problematic, however, since they lie only one step either side of the final B flat and ensure that the listener is in no way prepared for the entrance of the answer on B flat in m. 2. One could say, then, that Bariolla’s exposition obeys the letter of the law through its use of final and dominant as starting notes, but breaks the spirit through the shape of his thematic material, which stubbornly refuses to conform to the mode. Nor are modal problems confined to thematic shaping: the tenor’s progression from B natural to C to B flat in m. 5 is also awkward, to say nothing of the thinly disguised parallel fifths between the latter of these two notes and the quarter notes G and F in the soprano. Such themes, with prominent fifths and fourths other than final and dominant, are common among Bariolla’s seventeen canzonas, as are the kinds of modal irregularities shown in m. 5. These features may have come across to some contemporaries as refreshing or intriguing, but both Dressler and Zarlino would have faulted them, and they were not going to stand up to the singular focus on modal clarity promulgated by Diruta and Scacchi in the half century to come.

Other Significant Collections Most composers of the time did not share Macque and Bariolla’s vision of the canzona as an ambitious contrapuntal equivalent to the ricercar and instead continued to write lighter, unpretentious canzonas. Of the several remaining

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  325 collections under consideration, the one with the most variety is undoubtedly Adriano Banchieri’s Canzoni alla francese, published in partbooks in 1596.32 The collection comprises ten canzonas by the composer, in addition to one by his teacher Gioseffo Guami; nine of the ten are fugal. The majority exhibit most of the characteristics of the classic canzona: descriptive titles, long-​short-​short openings (six of nine), much sectional repetition (with a particular penchant for da capo structure, found in all but two),33 plenty of repeated notes, modest length (generally under 50 breve measures total) and unproblematic modal clarity (pronounced preference for the tonal type g-​♭, with complete avoidance of the Phrygian modes). Helping to keep the pieces light are a great many passages that are not particularly contrapuntal, including chordal writing as well as chordally accompanied passagework reminiscent of Merulo. Most unusual are three canzonas apparently based on vocal models. Two of these bear sacred titles in addition to their descriptive ones: La Rustica, sopra Vitama eternam and La Camerina, sopra Veni dilecte mi. No vocal pieces have been definitively identified as models for these two, but the third is entitled L’Alcenagina, sopra Vestiva i colli and is indeed based on Palestrina’s five-​voice madrigal of 1566. It might seem surprising to see a canzona based on an Italian madrigal instead of a chanson, but Palestrina’s famous piece begins with long-​ short-​short canzona rhythm and features an opening A section that is immediately repeated with new text. Banchieri’s canzona is part setting and part arrangement: he reduces the number of voices to four but begins the piece with an exact copy of Palestrina’s first five measures up to the entrance of the original fifth voice (bass), and he also retains the immediate repeat of A (but varied) in place of his usual da capo. Eighteen canzonas, alongside several fantasies, dance movements, and vocal works, appeared in partbooks in 1597 from the pen of Giovanni Cavaccio, organist and maestro di capella at the Bergamo Cathedral, not far from Brescia. All but one of the eighteen are fugal, but almost half limit the opening subject to its first four statements, and for most of the others only one or two additional statements are to be found. The texture of these canzonas resembles that of Merulo’s skeletal versions, with fewer rests and more homorhythmic movement than in the classic canzona, but of course without the keyboard passagework. A number of the pieces include triple meter, invariably in homophony. These are simple, unpretentious works. A keyboard equivalent to Cavaccio’s partbook canzoni, by Vincenzo Pellegrini, organist and canon of the Cathedral in Pesaro, appeared in print in 32 Edition cited above. 33 Banchieri’s preference for da capo makes one wonder whether it was this volume that Praetorius had in front of him when he wrote his definition of chanson/​canzona.

326  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century 1599. All thirteen of Pellegrini’s canzone are fugal, all carry descriptive titles, and most are put together according to the scheme A A' B C, with B in triple meter and some sort of homophonic or accompanied-​melody texture. The keyboard figuration is modest and limited principally to eighth notes filling in leaps and sixteenth-​note trill-​like ornaments. This sort of unpretentious keyboard canzona proved very popular in the early seventeenth century. In the same year that Mortaro’s collection of canzonas appeared, his fellow Brescian Floriano Canale, also an organist, issued a partbook collection of nineteen canzonas. These are considerably more varied than Mortaro’s, including two for eight voices in the latest Venetian style, so that among the seventeen à 4 only seven begin with proper fugal expositions. Even in those that begin fugally, one finds a good deal of chordal or passagework-​with-​chords writing. Aside from some interest in the variation technique, discussed by Ladewig in the introduction to his edition on p. xii, there is little here of importance for our topic.

Giovanni Gabrieli and the Beginnings of Baroque Fugue There are several reasons to end the body of this book with the fugal writing of Giovanni Gabrieli. First of all, he was the last of the long line of St. Mark’s organists to contribute to the development of the ricercar, and thus he effectively brings to a close the Italian contributions to the Venetian branch of this genre. Second, unlike his St. Mark’s predecessors Merulo and Giovanni’s uncle Andrea, he contributed in a major way to the history of the fugal canzona. Third, and perhaps most importantly, he followed in Andrea’s footsteps as a teacher of German and other northern musicians—​most notably, of course, Heinrich Schütz—​and thereby played a central role in the geographic shift of fugue’s cultivation from Venice to north of the Alps. And finally, his fugues sit right at the moment of change from the relative straightforwardness of the two fugal genres of ricercar and canzona (adaptable, as we have seen, for either keyboard or ensemble performance) to the new world of additional and overlapping genre designations (fugue, fantasia, eventually capriccio) as well as the new ways of constructing fugue occasioned by the establishment of idiomatic instrumental writing and the resulting divergence (finally!) of ensemble music from keyboard music. Gabrieli’s contributions to fugue are neither numerous nor in any way comparable in scope to the grand vocal and instrumental works for multiple choirs for which he is justly famous. In the thematic catalog compiled by Richard Charteris, they are neatly categorized according to the three genres of ricercar, canzona, and fugue, although the situation “on the ground” is considerably

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  327 messier.34 The relevant works for our study are the following: four fugal canzonas for four voices, nos. 186–​189 in the thematic catalog, published in the collection Canzoni per sonare con ogni sorte di stromenti a quattro, cinque, & otto of 1608; five fugal canzonas (nos. 195–​197, 199, and 201) of between five and seven voices in Symphoniae sacrae, Book II of 1615; two ricercars (nos. 215 and 216) in the collection Ricercari . . . Libro secondo of 1595 along with ricercars of his uncle Andrea; and sixteen works, variously designated, that survive only in manuscript or in the tablature published in Basel in 1617 by Johann Woltz. In order to understand the totality of Gabrieli’s fugal output and to place these pieces in their proper context, we must first survey briefly the most important manuscripts in which Gabrieli’s fugal pieces appear.

Northern Sources with One or More Fugues of Gabrieli Aside from the aforementioned three Venetian publications of 1595, 1608, and 1615—​all of which can be directly linked to the composer himself—​all of the extant sources for Gabrieli’s fugal works appear to have been produced north of the Alps and after his lifetime. Of these, the earliest is almost certainly Woltz’s tablature.35 On the title page Woltz described his massive volume as a tablature “of some exceptional Latin and German motets and Spiritual Songs, also lovely fugues and Canzoni alla Francese by the most famous musicians and organists of German and Italian lands,”36 and indeed the contents are heavily oriented toward Italy. Abstract works make up Part III, including canzonas by Maschera, Macque, Merulo, C. Antegnati, and Banchieri, as well as twenty fugues by Simon Lohet and one fugue each attributed to Adam Steigleder, Carolus Luython, and anonymous. Of the three fugal works thought to be by Gabrieli, only one, the Canzona La Spiritata (no. 186), is so ascribed by Woltz. The other two, both entitled “Fuga Colorata,” are those mentioned above with attribution to Steigleder and without attribution.37 Of the numerous manuscript sources of Gabrieli’s fugal works, four stand out in importance:  Berlin 40316 (now in Kraków), Munich 1581, Vienna 34 Richard Charteris, Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555–​1612): A Thematic Catalogue of His Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of His Vocal Texts (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1996). 35 For a complete facsimile, see Johannes Woltz, Nova musices organicæ tabulatura (Basel: Johann Jacob Genath, 1617; reprint ed., Bologna: Forni, 1970. Twelve of the canzonas, all but one with fugal openings, are edited in Orgel-​Tabulatur von Johann Woltz, 1617, Heft I: Intavolierungen italienischer Canzonen von [A.] Gabrieli, Tresti, Banchieri, De Maque, de Monte, Guami, ed. Manfred Hug (Stuttgart: Cornetto, 1995). 36 “.  .  .  etlicher außerlesenen Latinisch:  und Teutschen Motteten und Geistlichen Gesängen /​ auch schönen lieblichen Fugen /​und Canzoni alla Francese, von den berhümbtesten Musicis, und Organisten Teutsch: und Welsch Landen. . . .” 37 The three appear as nos. 47 (La spiritata), 74 (the anonymous Fuga colorata), and 75 (the Fuga colorata ascribed to Steigleder) in Part III of Woltz’s print.

328  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Minoritenkonvent XIV 714, and the massive complex of sixteen manuscripts now housed in Torino, Italy. For none of the four is a secure date possible, although they all appear to have been produced in the 1620s and 1630s. The Berlin manuscript was almost certainly copied in the Low Countries, most likely Brussels; the others offer various clues that place their origins firmly in south Germany. Because all but the Munich manuscript contain works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, they are given thorough and up-​to-​date descriptions in Pieter Dirksen’s book on Sweelinck’s keyboard works, from which the following characterizations are derived.38

The Torino Manuscripts This massive complex of sixteen manuscripts and well over 1,000 pieces was clearly a major project: it is systematically organized by genre, with three of the sixteen devoted entirely to ricercar-​type pieces (Mss. Giordano VI, VII, and VII), two devoted entirely to canzona-​type pieces (Foà I and III), and one fugal volume of mixed genre (Foà II).39 The notation is German organ tablature. Both the systematic nature of the source and the organization by genre prove to be most revealing with regard to the way in which Gabrieli’s manuscript-​only fugal works were understood by contemporaries. Fifteen of his fugal pieces can be found here, considerably more than in any other manuscript source: seven placed with the ricercars, six with the canzonas, and two titled “fuga” but included among the ricercars. Berlin 40316 In contrast to the Torino manuscripts, Berlin 40316 is in staff notation and favors northern repertory, notably Peeter Cornet (organist in Brussels), his colleague Peter Phillips (in exile from England), neighbor J. P. Sweelinck, and the south-​Germans Hans Leo Hassler and Christian Erbach.40 Italy is represented by Frescobaldi and G. Gabrieli. The manuscript was probably copied in the 1620s, which makes it the earliest manuscript source for Gabrieli’s fugal works, of which there are three (two entitled canzona, one entitled ricercar). Dirksen considers the manuscript to be of Netherlandish origin, but the presence of so much south-​ German repertory points to close ties between the two areas.

38 Peter Dirksen, The Keyboard Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, (Utrecht: Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Miziekgeschiedenis, 1997). 39 The most useful inventory of these manuscripts remains that of Oscar Mischiati in his article “L’intavolatura d’organo tedesca della Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino,” L’Organo, vol. 4 (1963), pp. 2–​ 154 and 237–​238, which includes concordance information. Dirksen’s summary can be found in The Keyboard Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, pp. 23–​24. 40 Dirksen gives a complete inventory of the manuscript in Sweelinck, pp. 648–​650, and a summary of its importance on p. 27. For a more thorough treatment, with a more detailed inventory, see David J. Smith, “Early Seventeenth-​Century Keyboard Culture at the Court of the Archdukes in Brussels:  The Manuscript Kraków, Biblioteka Jagiellonska, Mus. MS 40316,” Revue Belge de Musicologie, vol. 63 (2009), pp. 67–​98.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  329

Munich 1581 A great many of the over 150 pieces in this source,41 notated in German organ tablature, are anonymous;42 the most frequently named composer is Erbach, followed by H. L. Hassler and a few minor Germans and other northerners. Again G. Gabrieli and Frescobaldi appear, but problems of attribution abound. Two of the three fugal works that are elsewhere reliably attributed to Gabrieli are here credited to Erbach, and at least one attributed here to Gabrieli is considered spurious. Little is certain about the manuscript’s date beyond its inclusion of works drawn from Woltz’s tablature of 1617. Of some interest is that the manuscript’s three fugal works by Gabrieli bear three different genre designations: ricercar, canzona, and fugue. Vienna Minoritenkonvent XIV 714 This is an impressive collection of nearly 500 works thought to date from the same years as the Torino manuscripts.43 It is notated in an unusually cramped version of staff notation with a few quirks suggesting a derivation from tablature.44 We find once again a preponderance of anonymous works, but among named composers, Germans and Italians are about equally represented. Much of the contents was copied from contemporary publications, including two of Gabrieli’s four four-​voice canzonas from his collection of 1608 and two à 6 from the 1615 volume. The other two fugal pieces can both be found in Woltz, where, as noted above, neither is ascribed to Gabrieli. Although Woltz gave these two the designation Fuga, they are, along with the other four mentioned above, designated Canzona in Vienna XIV 714.

Classic Canzonas Judging from the number of surviving copies, Gabrieli’s most popular canzona was the first of his four published in 1608 (Charteris no. 186), his only canzona to bear a subtitle: “La Spiritata.” Although its first datable appearance is in a lute 41 This manuscript is available as a scan on the website of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek under the category “Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum.” For a complete inventory, see Lydia Schierning, Die Überlieferung der deutschen Orgal-​und Klaviermusik aus der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961), pp. 55–​60. 42 For editions of these anonymous works, see München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms. Mus. 1581: An Anthology of Keyboard Compositions from a South-​German Manuscript, 3 vols., ed. Clare G. Raynor, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 40 (N. p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1976). 43 A complete facsimile and inventory can be found in Vienna, Minoritenkonvent, Klosterbibliothek und Archiv, MS XIV.714, introduction by Robert Hill, 17th-​Century Keyboard Music:  Sources Central to the Keyboard Art of the Baroque, no. 24 (New York: Garland, 1988). Dirksen’s summary appears on pp. 25–​26. 44 See R. Hill’s introduction, ibid., pp. v–​vi.

330  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century tablature published in 1601, its popularity was no doubt given a boost when, only one year after Gabrieli had it published in partbooks, Merulo’s student Girolamo Diruta chose to transcribe it into two-​stave Italian keyboard notation and include it in Part II of his instruction manual for organ playing entitled Il Transilvano.45 It can also be found in Woltz and in Torino ms. Foà 3, among many others.46 All sources but one retain Gabrieli’s original designation “canzona”; the sole exception is the lute tablature just mentioned, where it is titled “Fantasia septima” and without attribution. Although the piece lacks the characteristic long-​short-​short opening rhythm, it is in many other ways a classic Renaissance canzona: four clearly defined non-​overlapping sections with the repetition pattern A-​B-​C-​D-​D, the first and third imitative, the second and fourth not; simple counterpoint in the two fugal sections; and a lively affect with predominating quarter and eighth notes. Although the publication is in partbook format, all of the copies are in some form of keyboard or lute notation. Example 4.12 shows the A section edited from Gabrieli’s published version but notated on two staves and without the basso seguente part. One would like to imagine that Gabrieli’s avoidance of the clichéd long-​short-​ long rhythm, which is a feature of the other three canzonas from this set, played a role in the work’s popularity. The theme is artfully crafted from two motives, the first predominantly rising and featuring prominently the leap of a fourth (answered tonally with a fifth), the other quicker, entirely descending, and stepwise. Paired imitation opens the canzona, and Gabrieli varies the texture effectively, with plenty of rests to provide different combinations of voices. The third section of the piece likewise begins with paired imitation, and the fourth, although not begun fugally, offers considerable motivic work and interesting contrapuntal combinations in varied texture. No doubt organists would often have added idiomatic figuration here and there, as Diruta did for the fourth section of his intabulation. The remaining three canzonas in this publication similarly feature a sectional structure, with the opening A section returning at the end after one or more intervening sections. Beyond these four, five additional fugal canzonas for four voices (nos. 230 and 232–​235) survive among the Torino manuscripts with reliable attribution to Gabrieli. Two of these also appear in Woltz’s tablature, as noted above, where they are designated “fugue,” but all five were understood by the compiler of the Torino manuscripts to be canzonas. Each one features a subject that begins with the clichéd repeated-​note long-​short-​short pattern, and all have well-​defined

45 This volume is available in facsimile: Il Transilvano (1593, 1609) by Girolamo Diruta, introduction by Edward J. Soehnlen and Murray C. Bradshaw (Buren, Netherlands: Frits Knuf, 1983). Diruta’s transcription of La Spiritata appears in Part II, Book I, pp. 14–​17. 46 For a complete list, see Charteris, Thematic Catalogue, p. 251.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  331 sections and some sort of repetition pattern, including AABC (no. 230), ABA (no. 232), AAB (no. 233), ABCDA (no. 234), and AABB (no. 235). Only one four-​voice canzona ascribed to Gabrieli (no. 231, also found in Torino) does not open with fugal imitation. Example 4.12  Giovanni Gabrieli, Canzona prima “La Spiritata” (Canzoni . . . Libro primo, 1608). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 12/10, pp. 162–​163.

332  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.12 Continued

By contrast, only one of the five fugal canzonas in the 1615 publication, the first (à 5, no. 195), incorporates a repetition pattern (ABA coda). In the second (à 6, no. 196), the single subject is never absent for more than three or four measures at a time, until at the very end two brief non-​contrapuntal sections conclude the work. The subject of the third (à 6, no. 197) and fifth (à 7, no. 199) only appears in the opening section, but Gabrieli provides each one with a prominent countersubject, in the second case crafted so that the two function like the so-​called double subjects of Andrea. Easily the most sophisticated fugue of the set is found in the seventh canzona of the volume (à 7, no. 201). Here we find not only one of the very first fugal canzonas written in triple meter, but a dense thematic texture incorporating four subjects already all introduced in the first six measures, with very little non-​thematic material. Two-​thirds of the way through the piece, this contrapuntal interplay stops as the first subject is stated in the lowest voice in breves while the upper instruments answer each other with quick motivic work. The piece closes with a few non-​thematic measures, the first measures of the entire piece without thematic material. The opening, shown in Example 4.13, gives a good idea of the thematic density, worthy in that respect to stand beside the canzonas of Macque. The impressiveness of Canzona VII’s thematic density is to some extent undercut, however, by the piece’s musical impact, which suffers from a relentless long-​short-​long-​short rhythm that dominates all the parts with little introduction of counter-​rhythms. The effect, in short, is rather more reminiscent of fugal gigues from the later keyboard suite, or even the fugal B section of a French overture. Nevertheless, the last four of Gabrieli’s fugues for larger forces, with their lack of sectional repetition and multiple themes that interact, point clearly to seventeenth-​century  fugue.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  333 Example 4.13  Giovanni Gabrieli, Canzona VII (Symphoniae sacrae, 1615). From Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 12/11, pp. 52–​53.

334  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.13 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  335

New Models for Fugue (in Search of a Genre Name) Even more interesting are fugal works, designated either ricercar or fugue in at least one source, in which Gabrieli begins to break down the traditional genre barriers and carve out new territory. There is no clearer example of this breakdown than one of the two ricercars that Gabrieli contributed to the publication of 1595, which is otherwise dedicated to ricercars of his uncle. Gabrieli gave the piece the title “Ricercare del 10o tono” (no. 216 in the thematic catalog), but it also appears in the manuscript Foà 3 of the Torino complex, where it is titled “Canzon del decimo tuono Giova. Gabrie.” The piece is given in its entirety as Example 4.14. It takes little investigation to get to the heart of the genre ambiguity. The subject itself gives us our first clue. It is composed of two parts, the first in ricercar-​ like half and quarter notes but with a variant of the canzona’s long-​short-​short rhythm, the second in very canzona-​like running eighth notes. Since Gabrieli’s original appears in keyboard notation, one could conjecture that these quick notes might be simply an ornamented version of a skeletal line that will later appear in its white-​note form, but this is not the case; every statement of the subject incorporates these notes just as they appear in m. 2. Already Gabrieli’s subject straddles the line between ricercar and canzona. Structurally, certain elements suggest ricercar rather than canzona. The piece is monothematic, the subject makes numerous appearances, there are instances of stretto (mm. 14–​16 and 21–​24), and there is no evidence at all of brief sections clearly demarcated from each other or repeated exactly. Nevertheless, the liveliness of rhythmic motion, with eighths and sixteenths in almost every measure, points unquestionably to canzona. Closer analysis reveals that in the end the piece fits neither genre, but something new and innovative. The key to understanding it lies in its texture. Currently the most widely available edition is that of Sandro Dalla Libera, done in the 1950s for Ricordi and reissued in 1985.47 Dalla Libera makes a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to supply both consistent stemming and the many rests missing from Gabrieli’s two-​stave keyboard version in order to make it possible, should anyone so desire, to notate the piece in open score. The reason for the impossibility of this task becomes clear when one begins to look more closely at the six-​note motive first introduced in m. 10 and how the composer uses it. We see it, for instance, dominate mm. 10–​13, but as soon as the subject re-​enters in m. 14, it disappears. Measures 14–​16 bring two more subject statements, which the four-​voice texture of m. 15 shows to be in bass and alto, but as soon as these are complete, the motive once again takes over until the next two subject statements 47 Giovanni Gabrieli, Composizioni per organo, ed. Sandro Dalla Libera, vol. 1 (Milan: G. Ricordi, 1957), pp. 19–23.

336  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.14  Giovanni Gabrieli, Ricercare del 10o tono (Ricercari . . . Libro secondo, 1595). See Chapter 3, note 60, for the editorial procedure used for pieces from this source.

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  337 Example 4.14 Continued

338  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.14 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  339 Example 4.14 Continued

340  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Example 4.14 Continued

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  341 Example 4.14 Continued

342  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century enter in mm. 21 and 22. This alternation of subject statements with sequential passages based on the motive continues with absolute consistency until the final six measures of the piece, when a toccata-​like texture of running sixteenths brings the piece to a dramatic conclusion. What we have, in short, is the classic fugal structure of opening exposition followed by alternation between sections featuring full statements of the subject and episodes that are deliberately planned out and important in their own right. This is very different from the traditional series of overlapped points of imitation which, for each point, simply offer free counterpoint leading to a cadence after the last subject statement has concluded. The deliberateness of Gabrieli’s plan for these episodes becomes clear beyond any doubt when one realizes that he actually changes the texture for these sections. Every group of thematic statements incorporates four voices at some point, but there is for all practical purposes no four-​voice texture in any of the episodes, all of which rely instead on a three-​voice texture of quick motion in the part carrying the motive (most often on either top or bottom, i.e., in a keyboard player’s right or left hand) “accompanied” by slow notes in two others. Any attempt to figure out which of the four parts are represented in these three-​voice episodes is fruitless because the sections are not based on contrapuntal voicing. In other words, a four-​voice ensemble of single-​line instruments could not play this piece without some sort of adaptation. Episode 4 shows the problem most clearly. If the voice carrying the motive in m. 30 is to be the tenor, as its preceding notes in mm. 28 and 29 demand, then the two voices above it in mm. 31–​33 would have to be alto and soprano. But the alto voice cannot be present in these measures, since that voice unquestionably enters with the subject in m. 34. Dalla Libera addresses this problem by switching the voice that enters with the motive at the end of m. 30 from tenor to bass, so that the two quarter notes on A are assigned to two different voices. Technically this works, but it is undeniably contrary to how Gabrieli has put the music together. No earlier ricercar, Venetian or otherwise, worked like this. In contrast to Example 4.14, the other ricercar by Giovanni in this publication, no. 215, is a straightforward Venetian ricercar of the old type: its thematic material is presented at the outset as a double subject, the two halves interact throughout the piece in myriad ways, white notes predominate from beginning to end, the texture remains demonstrably four-​voice throughout, and the composer makes the various cadences marking the points of imitation crystal clear through sixteenth-​note ornamentation of the suspension figures that conclude the points. The fact that Gabrieli chose to title two such different pieces with the same word, ricercar, probably harks back to his uncle’s use of that designation for any piece based on sophisticated imitative treatment of thematic material, but it also points forward to serious terminological difficulties to come. Charteris’s thematic catalog includes eleven additional fugal works that he declares to be ricercars (nos. 217–​227) and two that he designates fugue (nos. 228

The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance  343 and 229). All are in some way or other like the two published in 1595; that is, they are for four voices which enter at the beginning in the orderly fashion of a classic fugal exposition (although not necessarily in the sequence subject-​answer-​ subject-​answer), and all are based on one, two, or three subjects that appear at the beginning of the piece and persist in one way or another through the entire piece, with no additional subjects to be found. Length is by and large modest; all but two are under 100 breves. Clearly, then, all of these pieces, whether they are called ricercar or fugue, belong together as a group, but musicians of the early seventeenth century struggled with the question of designation and ultimately applied the titles ricercar, canzona, fugue, and even fantasy in confusing and contradictory ways. The Torino scribe declared seven of them to be ricercars (including no. 215 but not 216, as we have seen) and two to be fugues, but the scribe of Berlin 40316 designated one ricercar and three canzona, including one called ricercar by the Torino scribe. Two additional works from the group appear in Berlin Lynar A1 and Lynar A2, where the second scribe chose ricercar for his piece (no. 226) but the first chose fantasia for his (no. 227). With reliance on contemporary designations out the window, careful analysis of Gabrieli’s structural types must serve instead, and such study leads to the identification of two prominent new models that transcend traditional genre lines. First, though, are those pieces that preserve the old model of a series of points of imitation with overlapped cadences. These are surprisingly few in number; in addition to no. 215 discussed above, only no. 228, designated fugue in its Torino source, fits this model unambiguously. One of the new models is that of Example 4.14 above, with its purposeful episodes. No. 218, designated ricercar in Torino but canzona in Berlin 40316, fits this model and likewise makes use of a brief motive to fill its episodes. A third prominent model involves ongoing presentation of the subject, passed from voice to voice, with almost no intervening measures of free counterpoint. This latter approach resembles that found in several of the large-​scale fugal works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, works to which Dirksen gives the designation “Ostinato Fantasia” even though, as he concedes, the subject serving as ostinato is constantly moving from part to part.48 One sees this approach most unambiguously in no. 217; the piece opens with a proper exposition of the subject in the voice order S-​T-​A-​B and continues with consistently maintained voicing throughout, while the whole unfolds as a seamless flow of thematic statements, following one after the other with neither overlapping nor gaps, until a final toccata-​like flourish brings the piece to a close. Nos. 219–​221 proceed similarly, with treatment of the subject in stretto in the second of these.



48 Dirksen, Sweelinck, pp. 344–​373.

344  Fugue in the Sixteenth Century Since the genre designations of the period do not, and cannot, account for these types, I  propose to call the three (1)  the Traditional Venetian Ricercar, (2) the Fugue with Purposeful Episodes, and (3) the Ostinato Fugue, respectively. Others among the pieces are rather more amorphous than these, including a few in which subject statements, in whatever fashion they are or are not grouped, are separated by brief passages of free counterpoint that neither lead to a cadence nor exhibit any distinctive characteristics of their own. Nos. 225 and 227 show this latter approach most clearly. It might be added that none of these pieces incorporates any learned contrapuntal devices beyond stretto and the occasional introduction of inganno. In a way, we should not be surprised that musicians showed a complete lack of consistency in designating and classifying these innovative works. After all, German musicians could not even agree on whether the Latin word fuga should most properly be applied to the Italian ricercar (per Praetorius) or the canzona (per Schmid and Woltz). And this is not to mention that also lurking about at the turn of the century was the word fantasy, long preferred by lutenists and promoted toward the end of the sixteenth century by the English. (In this context it is worth recalling that Praetorius’s definition equating fugue with ricercar famously borrows several sentences from Thomas Morley originally used to describe the fantasy.) By 1600, in other words, there was no going back to the relatively neat and tidy days when ricercars and canzonas by and large knew their place, but the dizzying array of terminology that ensued never achieved any sort of stasis or equilibrium until over a century later, when musicians finally discarded all but the word fugue. This story, needless to say, is the topic for another book.

Conclusion Fugue’s First Century

Western art music developed at the most fundamental level out of the desire to elaborate on and heighten the body of Gregorian Chant that lay at its heart. As this development unfolded, musicians settled on a scheme to slow the chant down, place it at the bottom of, or later within, a polyphonic texture, and adorn it with their own musical ideas and inventions. Such a long-​note cantus firmus served as the foundation of sophisticated composition for an astonishingly long time; indeed, thanks to Johann Joseph Fux, one could say that it has never entirely disappeared from compositional engagement. By the end of the fifteenth century, musicians had been laying out their most sophisticated music, whether improvised or composed, on top of and surrounding such a cantus firmus since at least the high Middle Ages, and this music thus had its structural foundation largely determined for it at the pre-​compositional stage. The musicians’ goal, then, was to adorn this foundation with all of the variety they could provide. Composers of the last quarter of the fifteenth century finally decided that the time had come to take music in new directions, and replacement of the long-​note cantus firmus as structural determinant was the biggest of several steps. What they replaced it with was a new approach to structure based on the return of musical material, and this return took one of two forms. The first was to tinker with the idea of canon, well-​known in the fourteenth century through its incarnation in secular music as chace in France, caccia in Italy, and fuga in Germany. As both Dressler and Zarlino put it, now composers would start with canon-​like writing but break the melodic line off at some point. This new entity, not quite a theme as we would understand the term, could then return as many times as the composer wished in what today we call a point of imitation, that is, one of a series of such sections, all neatly dovetailed for continuous flow. Here we see one of the origin points of fugue. It was the one that musicians chose to talk about, and it found its first significant home in the sixteenth-​century motet, arguably the most important genre of sacred music during the century. The relationship of this compositional strategy to later fugue is obvious. The other strategy for moving beyond the structural straitjacket of a long-​note cantus firmus was to work with a cantus firmus of only a few notes and bring it back multiple times. Here we can identify a particular composition as inspiration Fugue in the Sixteenth Century. Paul Walker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056193.001.0001.

346 Conclusion for future composers: Josquin des Prez’s Missa La sol fa re mi. In the course of this Mass, Josquin does not simply bring back the five-​note cantus firmus multiple times; rather, he continually manipulates its rhythmic shape and pitch level. This approach to keeping musical repetition interesting would not initially seem to have much to do with fugue, but composers of ricercar and canzona made great use of such thematic transformation in piece after piece that began with fugal imitation. It is the ultimate source of the variation canzona and variation ricercar of the seventeenth century. A third important strand in fugue’s early history was musicians’ conscious decision to retain the modes originally devised for monophonic chant and to adapt them for polyphonic composition. Among their adaptations was a consensus that the beginning of a composition should be modally conceived to match the final chord, quite in contrast to the often random nature of a chant’s opening notes. This rule played an absolutely vital role in fugue’s genesis, since it meant that from the very beginning fugal writing would be expected to take account of mode. Although occasional attempts have been made in later eras to detach fugue from mode and key, musicians have by and large rejected them, so that the German word Quintfuge, fugue at the fifth, has over time been largely just another way of saying fugue. With these compositional strategies in place, fugue was an almost inevitable outcome of compositional experimentation. At first it found its place at the beginnings of motets, where a canonic setup would cease after just a few imitated notes in each voice. From its origin as truncated canon it began, under the goal of musical repetition, to develop as composers started thinking of those “first few canonic notes” as material to be brought back, perhaps even multiple times. Eventually, such musical phrases come to form the basis for the first section of the motet leading to the first important cadence. In this way was the point of imitation born. Furthermore, if each phrase of text is so treated, and the sections are seamlessly dovetailed, we have the classic Renaissance motet. Josquin, Jean Mouton, and Nicolas Gombert were the first major composers of this development, and Gombert’s successors Thomas Crecquillon and Jacobus Clemens non Papa perfected it. Composers outside the orbit of these latter composers, which revolved around the court of Charles V, seem to have shied away from fugue in their motet writing, but Clemens and Crecquillon found successors in Palestrina, Guerrero, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Lassus. This rather small number of major composers to embrace the fugal motet seems likely due to the qualms expressed toward century’s end by Vincenzo Galilei and others about the textual confusion sown by such repetition. It is important to keep in mind that the matching up of fugue and mode bore as yet only partial resemblance to the tonic-​dominant polarity that lies at the heart of classic fugue. Although Gregorian melodies themselves seldom appear

Conclusion  347 as themes in motet fugues, the old Gregorian formulas and melodic patterns lurk behind much of the writing of the first two-​thirds of the century, so that, for instance, Phrygian pieces on E can be expected in most cases to take A and C, the old reciting notes, as their important notes after the final E, and generally to avoid B. Likewise, the reciting note C for mode 8, plagal Phrygian, shows up in any number of pieces in the tonal type G-​♮. Nor do most composers of motet fugue show more than passing concern for tonal answers, although these can be found. Similarly, the organization of thematic statements shows little of the careful planning of later fugue: entrances pile in on each other, often even at the very beginning of the fugue, and sometimes two or more statements on the same note will precede the first statement a fourth or fifth away. Contrapuntal devices, aside from inversion, are virtually nonexistent in motet fugues. The first systematic engagement with fugue as a product of returning thematic material was undertaken by Gombert in a series of motets published in the 1530s. The year 1540 then turned out to be a seminal one: Gombert himself left the chapel of Charles V, Crecquillon assumed greater responsibility at that court, and a publication appeared in Venice entitled Musica nova, devoted primarily to instrumental pieces featuring fugal imitation and given the genre designation ricercar. The composers’ approach to instrumental fugue differed from those of the motet fugue in two fundamental ways. First, in the absence of text it made sense for opening thematic material to play a role in the piece well beyond the first major cadence, since such a return helped to provide the kind of coherence formerly supplied by the text. Second, the composers clearly saw Josquin’s idea of thematic transformation as a way to keep the returning material recognizable but interesting and even unpredictable. From early on, then, composers of sixteenth-​ century ricercar had two rather different paths available to them: either the more straightforward musical repetition favored by the motet composers, or that involving the transformation of thematic material. Most composers chose to explore one or the other rather than both. The focal point of much of this activity was Venice, in particular St. Mark’s basilica, where many of the ricercar composers served as organists, including Jacques Buus, Annibale Padovano, Claudio Merulo, and Andrea Gabrieli. A surprisingly important role was also played by one of Venice’s maestri di capella, Gioseffo Zarlino. It was Zarlino who, in 1558, not only reinforced the rule concerning the importance of modal clarity at a composition’s opening, but also argued for the elimination of all of the old—​and, as he no doubt saw them, obsolete—​Gregorian reciting tones and their replacement by final and dominant that were always a fifth apart. The composer who first reflected this thinking in his fugal writing was Zarlino’s colleague Merulo, in his first published collection of ricercars in 1567. Ricercar composers had already been treating fugue in a more systematic structural way than the motet composers, but now

348 Conclusion Merulo introduced ricercars with themes designed for Zarlino’s newly defined modal clarity of tonic and dominant, rather than themes reflective of Gregorian patterns and solmization syllables. In the ricercars of Merulo and his organist colleague Andrea Gabrieli, there is a great deal of modern fugue to be found, including tonal answers, structural patterns that favor appearance of the opening theme later in the piece, and considerable use of such contrapuntal devices as augmentation and diminution. Reliance on thematic transformation, on the other hand, seems to have tracked more closely with retention of the older modal melodic patterns and the solmization syllables of the medieval hexachords. This strand largely developed outside of Venice. We can see it in the ricercar collections of Giuliano Tiburtino, working in Rome, Giovanni Battista Conforti, whose collection was published in Rome, and Giaches Brunel, working in Ferrara, among others. These composers even adopted a clever way of transforming their thematic material through the process of inganno, by which the theme’s solmization syllables were retained but at some point in the middle of the theme displaced to another hexachord a fourth or fifth away. These kinds of thematic manipulation, unlike the contrapuntal devices of the Venetian organists, bear much less obvious resemblance to the workings of later fugue, and they must also have been more difficult for a listener to follow, but they enjoyed a long life well into the next century, most especially in the particular manifestation of the variation canzona, with its several distinct sections, each based on a different but fixed variant of the opening theme. The fugal canzona developed later, beginning in earnestness in the 1580s, and its first home was Brescia. Its lively rhythms, stock melodic patterns, repetitive sectional schemes, frequent full stops, and less rigorous approach to counterpoint, all taken over from the chanson, might suggest that fugue was unlikely to find a congenial home in this genre, but quite the opposite is true. It appears to have been the northerner Giovanni de Macque, working in Rome and Naples, who first chose to elevate the canzona to the same level of compositional sophistication as the ricercar. In his hands, it was no longer principally contrapuntal rigor that distinguished the two genres but largely the nature of the thematic material, i.e., black notes vs. white notes, and the contrasting kinds of themes that these note values engendered. This common approach to the two genres proved to be fundamental to the fugal writing of Macque’s Roman successor Frescobaldi and the latter’s student Froberger. The most radical and forward-​looking trend of the closing decades of the century came from the pens of the Gabrielis, namely, the creation of a type of instrumental fugue that combined elements of the two traditional genres of ricercar and canzona in a single piece. Likely the first experiments in this direction were those of Andrea Gabrieli and, even earlier, Girolamo Cavazzoni, when they chose to write ricercar-​like pieces with thematic material taken from

Conclusion  349 chansons. Cavazzoni called his pieces canzonas, Gabrieli ricercars, and although Cavazzoni never followed up on his early effort, Andrea continued to experiment in ways that blurred the boundaries between the two. Because Gabrieli continued to prefer ricercar as the designation of choice for fugal works, we find in his oeuvre two canzona-​like pieces included among the Madrigali et ricercari of 1589, both titled ricercar, as well as several Ricercari amorosi. Then there is the Ricercar del Primo Tuono published in 1595, in which an overtly serious ricercar complete with statements in augmentation finishes with a very canzona-​like section in jaunty triple meter. Although his nephew Giovanni did not share the preference for calling all fugal works ricercar, he took fugue further toward the future by mixing characteristics of ricercar and canzona in even subtler ways, perhaps most notably in the mixing of the two in his very thematic material. Among the legacies of this flexibility was considerable terminological uncertainty, as musicians grappled with what to call the pieces that were no longer either clearly ricercars or clearly canzonas. As the sixteenth century closed, in other words, we finally see something approaching fugue as we know it: a way of writing imitative counterpoint that draws on a variegated palette of musical characters and purposes but is unified by the common thread of a few technical details, even if these details are not yet the ones that we point to today. We have almost no information from the sixteenth century about the contexts in which instrumental fugues—​whether ricercar, canzona, or mixed—​might have been played. Given the number of composers who were organists, and the presence of organs in churches, one assumes a certain incorporation of such pieces into liturgical or some other sort of public playing. Early in the next century Girolamo Frescobaldi, organist at St. Peter’s in Rome, offered his own suggestions on such insertion into the liturgy in his published anthology of instrumental music entitled Fiori musicali (1635). There he proposed substituting canzonas for the Gradual (“after the Epistle”) and ricercars for the Offertory (“after the Creed”), as well as introducing canzonas again at the end of the Mass (“after Communion”). Ensemble performance, by contrast, would likely have been for the edification and enjoyment of the players, while the works of Brunel and others notated in open score suggest a teaching motive aimed at aspiring serious composers. The context for vocal fugues, on the other hand, is quite clear. Charles V and his court must have heard the choir sing them as a routine part of just about every liturgical occasion, and later attendees of Mass and Office, depending on time and place, would no doubt have heard their fair share as the century came to a close. One can get a good sense of fugue’s way forward at the dawning of the seventeenth century by noting its role in the output of a few of the early century’s musical giants. From composers who wrote no independent instrumental music, first and foremost, perhaps, Claudio Monteverdi in Italy and Heinrich Schütz in

350 Conclusion Germany, we find almost no fugal writing at all. The most prominent organists, on the other hand, especially Girolamo Frescobaldi in Italy and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in the Netherlands, are widely known and admired for their fugues for organ, in Frescobaldi’s case favoring thematic transformation and the variation principle, in Sweelinck’s, favoring the style of the traditional Venetian ricercar (now called fantasy). As Giovanni Gabrieli’s fugal output demonstrates, cultivation of fugue quickly moved from its original center in Venice to north of the Alps, at first to southern Germany with the organ works of Hans Leo Hassler and Christian Erbach, then later to central and northern Germany with the music of Sweelinck’s German organ students. Around mid-​century, Frescobaldi’s German student Johann Jacob Froberger took the keyboard fugue even further afield to Paris. Fugue also saw cultivation and development after 1600 in music for instrumental ensemble, despite the marked preference for trio sonata and similar textures with their de-​emphasis, if not elimination, of alto-​and tenor-​range parts. Not until after mid-​century, on the other hand, did composers of vocal music dare to introduce fugal writing into their works in the modern style. Although the most likely place to hear a fugue performed today may be an organ recital, the attendee is not very likely to encounter a fugue from the sixteenth century. This is a pity. There may be plenty of overextended, dry ricercars out there, but if one invokes the strategies of sixteenth-​century organists for embellishing them in performance or seeks out those written with an eye toward greater variety and musical interest on their own merits, there is no reason to doubt the possibility of artistic success, to say nothing of the attractiveness of the lighter, more accessible canzona. Consort performers on viola da gamba, recorder, or cornetts and sackbuts can scarcely avoid encountering fugal works from the century if they are at all wide-​ranging in their exploration of the repertoire, and these works can be quite effective on the concert stage. Choirs and ensemble singers have perhaps the easiest access to sixteenth-​century fugue. Josquin’s Ave Maria  .  .  .  virgo serena, for instance, is not only the first Renaissance example in this book, but probably the most famous piece of all of the Renaissance examples here presented. Possibly a close second in popularity is a motet not discussed here, Palestrina’s Sicut cervus, a classic example of motet fugue. In short, a good deal of this music deserves to be much better known and much more often heard in concert and recital, to say nothing of liturgical contexts, than is currently the case.

Glossary: The Use of Terminology in This Book Because this book’s aim is to examine the roots of the classic tonal fugue, it focuses on music that is in most particulars not composed according to the rules of the classic fugue. This means not only that writers of the time had their own vocabulary for what they were describing, but also that they were not necessarily describing those things that most interest us today from our historical vantage point. It is necessary, in other words, to use a certain amount of anachronistic vocabulary for phenomena that are observable in the earlier music but for which no terminology was ever devised. The purpose of this Glossary, perhaps not a glossary in the true sense of the word, is to clarify how terminology is used in this book: what a particular word meant in the sixteenth century, what particular words mean with regard to the classic tonal fugue, and how I have appropriated certain later terminology for the earlier music. Much of this information is embedded in the book’s text, but all is gathered together here for ease of consultation.

Vocabulary for Renaissance Music Fugue To most sixteenth-​century musicians, fugue referred to either the compositional technique involved in writing pervading imitation or a single point of imitation. Toward the end of the century, some musicians also applied the word to the thematic material being imitated. The myriad subtleties of meaning of this word during the century can be found in my book Theories of Fugue.

Motet The word motet has been used continuously from the high Middle Ages to the present to designate a vocal composition, most commonly (and exclusively in this book) in Latin, that is not composed for a specific moment in that great program of the Church known as the Liturgical Year. The uses of these works were

352 Glossary many and greatly varied, but in the sixteenth century their texts were mostly of a sacred nature.

Point of Imitation This expression is a modern one and designates one in a series of sections, each built from a single phrase of text, that proceed in neatly dovetailed fashion to deliver the text of the piece. This compositional strategy grew up in the years either side of 1500 and served as the most common structural approach to most freely composed (i.e., not based on a long-​note cantus firmus) music of the century. The incorporation of the word “imitation” does not imply that each and every point is built from imitative entries, but only that imitative counterpoint is the most common feature of such points.

Pervading Imitation (German: Durchimitation) Another modern expression, this one indicating the pervasiveness of imitative counterpoint in pieces constructed with points of imitation.

Inganno This Italian word means “deceit” or “deception.” Sixteenth-​century musicians used it to describe the phenomenon of altering a returning theme somewhere in its course by retaining its solmization but abruptly moving the remaining syllables to a new hexachord a fourth or fifth away, thus drastically altering its contour at the point of disjunction.

Double Subject This expression was devised by Willi Apel for a very specific phenomenon: in a sixteenth-​century ricercar, the introduction at the outset of two thematic units, stated in succession by the first voice to enter but separated by a rest. Apel associated this phenomenon most closely with Andrea Gabrieli. Since the second voice to enter generally does not wait until both units have been stated, this approach resembles more than anything else the subject-​countersubject opening of a classic fugue.

Glossary  353

Fugue d’école This expression refers to a way of composing fugue according to a very specific pre-​established structure. It was developed for use at the Paris Conservatory and remains primarily associated with that institution. Its proponents freely concede that it is a pedagogical tool and is not based on particular pieces or bodies of fugal repertoire. Probably the best-​known text is that of André Gedalge, first published in 1901.

Measure The natural flow of sixteenth-​century music, based more than anything else on the handling of dissonance, is what we recognize today as 4/​2 time, sometimes now called “alla breve,” or “proceeding in units of a breve (i.e., double whole note).” In this book, therefore, the musical examples are consistently barred in this way, with the result that the word “measure” in a duple context refers, when not specifically indicated, to one of a breve in duration.

Vocabulary for Learned Devices Inversion In classic fugue, melodic inversion of the subject is generally introduced later in the piece in a systematic way for the purpose of adding interest. In Renaissance fugue, inversion most often occurs at the very beginning, especially in the guise of the answer.

Stretto Stretto refers to the overlapping of thematic statements such that the second enters before the first has finished. It most often serves in classic fugue as a way to heighten activity and excitement as the fugue approaches its conclusion. (In the fugue d’école, it is placed at a very specific point near the end.) By contrast, stretto is ubiquitous in sixteenth-​century fugue and can appear anywhere from the very first to the very last subject statements. Its role as a generator of increased energy is thus little in evidence during this period.

354 Glossary

Augmentation Strictly speaking, augmentation refers to the doubling of the rhythmic values of the subject later in the fugue. In Renaissance fugue, augmentation more often than not takes the form of a long-​note statement of the subject, that is, with the subject’s original rhythmic profile replaced by a statement with notes of equal, long value.

Diminution The cutting in half of the subject’s note values is much less in evidence in the sixteenth century than is the augmenting of them as described above. Nonetheless, examples can be found, and the phenomenon can serve to drive the fugue toward the final cadence, that is, in much the same way that stretto does in classic fugue.

Vocabulary for the Modal System The basics of the modal system as it functioned in the sixteenth century are laid out in Chapter 1. Three particular terms are defined here.

Final Each mode has a note called the final that corresponds to the tonic note of a major or minor key. Pairs of modes (e.g., the two “Dorian” modes) share the same final.

Dominant (Reciting Tone) Each mode also has a note called the dominant, but this note is not always a fifth above the final, as is the dominant in tonal theory. Rather, in the sixteenth century the dominant is the mode’s reciting tone, which means that pairs of modes do not share the same dominant. Although in the second half of the century Zarlino attempted to legislate a change such that the dominant was always a fifth above the final, the older patterns never really completely died out until the whole system was superseded by the system of tonal harmony ca. 1700. In the text, I sometimes use the expression reciting tone when referring to modal dominants that are not a fifth above the final.

Glossary  355

Tonal Type This is a modern construct, born of the observation that, irrespective of the official modal designations found in the sixteenth century, there are a number of distinguishable tonal types that are identifiable by final note, given for convenience in either upper case, indicating a major “tonic chord,” or lower case for a minor one, and key signature, i.e., no flat or one flat. Using these two characteristics, scholars identify these types by a letter name followed by a natural or flat sign: g-​♭, C-​♮. These tonal types are often invoked with no attempt to label them in accordance with the sixteenth-​century modal system.

Vocabulary for Later Fugue and Its Use for Sixteenth-​Century Fugal Writing Classic Fugue Classic fugue is defined, and its constituent parts given, in the introduction to this book through the example of the C-​minor fugue from Book I of J. S. Bach’s Well-​Tempered Clavier. The definition understood here is that widely taught in American colleges and universities today.

Subject In classic fugue, the subject is the melodic unit that is stated by the first voice to enter. It is in the tonic key, is understood to have a well-​defined final note as well as initial note, and is, colloquially put, what the piece is “about.” The most important sixteenth-​century writer to define “subject” was Gioseffo Zarlino, who likewise understood it to refer to the pre-​compositional material that the piece was about, but in his case this mostly brought to mind a borrowed cantus firmus laid down in long notes in one part.

Answer In classic fugue, the second voice to enter always enters in the key of the dominant and is called the answer, or, perhaps more precisely, the answer form of the subject. When this answer form reproduces exactly the intervals of the subject, it is known as a real answer. When one or more intervals are altered for the purpose of keeping the answer from straying into the key of the supertonic, it is a tonal

356 Glossary answer. The most common form of tonal answer involves a subject that begins with a leap from tonic to dominant, as either an ascending fifth or a descending fourth, and is answered by a leap from dominant to tonic, either ascending by fourth or descending by fifth. These expressions will be used in the present book with similar meaning but without the implications of their being “in the key of the dominant.”

Countersubject In classic fugue, a countersubject is a very specific thing: a melodic unit that is stated by the first voice to enter immediately after that voice has completed its statement of the subject and that is then stated in turn in the same way by all of the other voices. Not all classic fugues have a countersubject, but when they do it is devised as a consistent counterpoint to the subject. When writing about sixteenth-​century fugue, modern scholars often use the word to designate any recurring melodic unit that functions in counterpoint with the subject, whether introduced at the piece’s outset or later in its course. I have chosen to use the word in the sense that it is used in classic fugue and to avoid its use in the more recent sense of thematic material introduced later in the piece.

Exposition The Exposition of a classic fugue comprises the opening portion of the piece ending with the conclusion of the subject statement in the final voice to enter. It is expected that within the Exposition each voice states the subject only once, and entries alternate between subject and answer forms. The phenomenon can be found in sixteenth-​century fugue but is far from the norm. In this book, Exposition will be understood in this classic sense.

Episode In classic fugue, an episode is any portion of the fugue in which the subject is not being stated in its complete form. Episodes may, of course, take as their melodic material subunits of the subject (or countersubject). The phenomenon of episodes that are purposeful and planned out does not exist, with rare exceptions such as that by Giovanni Gabrieli discussed in Chapter 4, for sixteenth-​century  fugue.

Glossary  357

Theme Outside the formal type of Theme and Variations, the word theme is today most frequently associated with Sonata Form. I have used the word in this book in a broad sense to refer to any melodic unit that returns, including even the subject itself. This is in part a way to avoid value judgments or determinations of purpose for the melodic unit.

A Word about Note Value Designations The highbrow music of the first half of the sixteenth century largely proceeds in what is often referred to as “white-note notation,” that is, predominantly with double whole notes, whole notes, and half notes, or, as they were named at the time, breves, semi-breves, and minims. In my discussions of this music I generally use the older terminology, as I do in designating the meter as “breve measures.” Gradually in the second half of the century composers began to introduce many more black notes. When I turn to this music I have chosen to favor American (and German) designations of quarter note and eighth note, rather than the British names crochet and quaver. There may be a certain inconsistency here, but this change can also serve to point up the important changes brought about by the gradual abandonment of the longer note values and corresponding emphasis on quicker (or at least quicker-looking) notes. All of the musical examples are given in their original note values and thus help to illustrate this notational evolution.

Bibliography Modern Editions Chapter 2: Fugue in the Renaissance Motet Byrd, William. The Byrd Edition, vol. 1: Cantiones sacrae (1575). Edited by Craig Monson. London: Stainer and Bell, 1977. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Opera omnia, vol. I, part 4: Missa Ecce quam bonum. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 4/​1/​04. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1966. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Opera omnia, vol. XIV: Cantiones Sacrae 5 et 6 vocum ex typographia Phalesii, 1554. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 4/​14. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1966. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Opera omnia, vol. XVI:  Moteta primum in lucem edita 1554/​55. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 4/​16. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1968. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Opera omnia, vol. XIX: Cantiones Sacrae ex Libris III & IV postume editis Lovanii MDLIX. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 4/​19. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1972. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Opera omnia, vol. XX: Cantiones Sacrae ex Libris V & VI postume editis Lovanii MDLIX. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 4/​20. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1973. Compère, Loyset. Opera omnia, vol. V. Edited by Ludwig Finscher. Corpus mensurabilis musicae, no. 15/​5. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1972. Crecquillon, Thomas. Opera omnia, vol. V: Motetta Octo, Sex, et Trium Vocum. Edited by Barton Hudson. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 63/​5. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1990. Ferrabosco the Elder, Alfonso. Opera omnia, vol. I: Motets. Edited by Richard Charteris. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 96/​1. N.p.:  American Institute of Musicology, 1984. Gombert, Nicolas. Opera omnia, vol. V: Motecta 4 v. Edited by Joseph Schmidt-Görg. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 6/5. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1961. Gombert, Nicolas. Opera omnia, vol. VII: Motecta 5 v. Edited by Joseph Schmidt-​Görg. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 6/7. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1968. Gombert, Nicolas. Opera omnia, vol. X: Motecta 4, 4 et 12 v. Edited by Joseph SchmidtGörg. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 6/10. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1975. Guerrero, Francesco. Motetes I-XXII. Edited by José M. Llorens. Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 36. Barcelona : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 1978. Guerrero, Francesco. Motetes XXIII-XLVI. Edited by José M. Llorens. Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 45. Barcelona : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 1987.

360 Bibliography Guerrero, Francesco. Motetes XLVII-LXXV. Edited by José M. Llorens. Monumentos da la Música Española, vol. 68. Barcelona : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Español de Musicología, 2003. Josquin des Prez. New Edition of the Collected Works, vol. 23:  Motets on Non-​Biblical Texts:  De beata Maria virgine. Edited by Willem Elders. Utrecht:  Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 2006. Lassus, Orlande de. The Complete Motets 1: Il primo libro de mottetti a cinque et a sei voci (Antwerp, 1556). Edited by James Erb. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, no. 114. Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1998. Lassus, Orlande de. The Complete Motets 13: Mottetta, sex vocum, typis nondum uspiam excusa (Munich, 1582). Edited by Rebecca Wagner Oettinger. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, no. 141. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 2005. The Medici Codex of 1518. Edited by Edward E. Lowinsky. Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. The Motet Books of Andrea Antico. Edited by Martin Picker. Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Mundy, William. Latin Antiphons and Psalms. Edited by Frank Ll. Harrison. Early English Church Music, vol. 2. London: Stainer and Bell, 1963. Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da. Le opere complete, vol. V: Il primo libro dei mottetti a 5, 6 e 7 voci secondo la ristampa del 1600. Edited by Raffaele Casimiri. Rome: Edizione Fratelli Scalera, 1939. White, Robert. Six-Part Latin Psalms, Votive Antiphons. Edited by David Mateer. Early English Church Music, vol. 29. London: Stainer and Bell, 1983.

Chapter 3: Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century Antologia de organistas do século XVI. Transcribed by Cremilde Rosado Fernandes with introduction by Macario Santiago Kastner. Portugaliae Musica, Series A, No. 19. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1966. Bakfark, Valentin. Omnia Opera. Edited by István Homolya and Dániel Benkö. Budapest: Editio Musica, 1976–​. Bariolla, Ottavio. Keyboard Compositions. Edited by Clyde William Young. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 46. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1986. Buus, Jacobus. Il secondo libro di recercari  .  .  .  da cantare, & sonare d’organo & altri stromenti  .  .  .  a quatro voci (Venice 1549). Edited by James Ladewig. New  York: Garland, 1993. Buus, Jacobus. Intabolatura d’Organo, Libro primo. Venice:  Gardane, 1549. Facs. ed., Biblioteca musica bononiensis, Sezione IV, no. 97. [Bologna:] Arnaldo Forni, 2004. Buus, Jacobus. Orgelwerke I:  Intabolatura d’Organo, Venezia 1549:  Quattro recercari. Edited by Thomas Daniel Schlee.Vienna: Universal Edition, 1980. Buus, Jacobus. Orgelwerke II: Recercari Libro I, Venezia 1547. Edited by Thomas Daniel Schlee.Vienna: Universal Edition, 1982. Buus, Jacques. Ricercari a quattro voci, Libro primo, 1547. 2 vols. Edited by Donald Beecher and Bryan Gillingham. Italian Renaissance Consort Series, no. 5. Ottawa, ON: Dovehouse Editions, 1983. Cabezón, Antonio de. Collected Works, vol. IV/​2:  Tientos. Edited by Charles Jacobs. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1972. Cavazzoni, Girolamo. Orgelwerke. Edited by Oscar Mischiati. Mainz:  B. Schott’s Söhne, 1959.

Bibliography  361 Conforti, Giovanni Battista. Ricercare (1558) und Madrigale (1567). Edited by Dietrich Kämper. Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1978. Five-​and More-​Voice Motets from the Motteti del fiore series: Part I. Edited by Richard Sherr. Sixteenth-​century Motet, vol. 11. New York: Garland, 1999. Frescobaldi, Girolamo. Opere complete, vol. 9: Recercari et canzoni franzese, Libro primo (1615). Edited by Gustav Leonhardt. Milan: Edezioni Suvini Zerboni, 2004. Gabrieli, Andrea. Ricercari für Orgel. 2 vols. Edited by Pierre Pidoux. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959. Gabrieli, Andrea. Ricercars from Madrigali et ricercari . . . a quattro voci (Venice, 1589). Edited by Robert Judd. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 8. New York: Garland, 1995. Gabrieli, Andrea. Sämtliche Werke für Tasteninstrumente, Vol. II: Ricercari, Libro secondo, and III: Ricercari, Libro terzo. Edited by Giuseppe Clericetti. Diletto musicale nos. 1142 and 1143. Munich: Doblinger, 1997–​1998. Josquin des Prez. The Collected Works of Josquin des Prez, vol. 27: Secular Works for Three Voices. Edited by Jaap van Benthem and Howard Mayer Brown. Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1987. Luzzaschi, Luzzasco. Il secondo libro de ricercari a quattro voci. Edited by Michelangelo Pascale. Musica rinascimentale in Italia, no. 6. Rome: Pro Musica Studium, 1981. Macque, Giovanni de. Opere per tastiera, vol. II: 14 Ricercari. Edited by Armando Carideo. Andromeda Editrice, 2002. Malvezzi, Cristofano, et  al. Ensemble Ricercars. Edited by Milton A. Swenson. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 27. Madison: A-​R Editions, 1978. Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, “Ricercari, Mottetti, Canzoni,” and Jacobo Fogliano, Julio Segni & Anonimi, “Ricercari e Ricercate.” Edited by Giacomo Benvenuti. Italienische Klassiker der Musik, vol. 1. Milan: I classici musicali italiani, 1941. Mayone, Ascanio. Diversi capricci per sonare, Libro I (Napoli 1603). Edited by Christopher Stembridge. Padua: G. Zanibon, 1981. Mayone, Ascanio. Secondo libro di diversi capricci per sonare (Napoli 1609). Edited by Macario Santiago Kastner. Orgue et Liturgie, no. 63. Bôle and Epinassey, Switzerland: Editions musicales de la Schola Cantorum, 1964. Merulo, Claudio. Il primo libro de ricercari da cantare, a quattro voci (Venice, 1574). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 5. New York: Garland, 1987. Merulo, Claudio. Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo (1567). Edited by John Morehen. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 122. Madison, WI:  A-​R Editions, 2000. Merulo, Claudio. Ricercari d’intavolatura d’organo, novamente ristampati (1605). Facsimile Edition. Bologna: Forni, 1982. Merulo, Claudio. Ricercari da cantare a quattro voci . . . libro secondo (Venice, 1607). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 6. New York: Garland, 1987. Merulo, Claudio. Ricercari da cantare a quattro voci . . . libro terzo (Venice, 1608). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 7. New York: Garland, 1988. Mudarra, Alonso. Tres libros de música en cifra para vihuela, Sevilla, 1546. Edited by Emilio Pujol. Monumentos de la música española, vol. 7. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas, 1984.

362 Bibliography Musica nova accommodata per cantar et sonar sopra organi et altri strumenti: Composta per diversi eccellentissimi musici. In Venetia, MDXL. Edited by H. Colin Slim. Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Narvaez, Luys de. Los seys libros del Delphin de música de cifra para tañer vihuela (Valladolid, 1538). Edited by Emilio Pujol. Monumentos de la Música Española, vol. III. Barcelona: Instituto Español de Musicología, 1971. Österreichische Lautenmusik im XVI. Jahrhundert [von] Hans Judenkünig [et  al.] und Unika der Wiener Hofbibliothek. Edited by Adolf Koczirz. Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 37. Padovano, Annibale. Il primo libro de ricercari a quattro voci (Venice, 1556). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 4. New York: Garland, 1994. Padovano, Annibale, and Sperindio Bertoldo. Compositions for Keyboard. Edited by Klaus Speer. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 34. N.p.:  American Institute of Musicology, 1969. Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da. Ricercate sugli otto toni and Thesaurum absconditum. Edited by Liuwe Tamminga. Colledara, Italy: Andromeda Editrice, 2003. Raval, Sebastiano. Three Ensemble Ricercars in Four Parts from Il Primo Libro de Canzonette, 1593. Edited by Milton Swenson. Italian Renaissance Consort Series, no. 1. Ottawa, ON: Dovehouse Editions, 1981. The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex: Giaches Brumel [?], Fabrizio Dentice, Anonymous. Edited by Anthony Newcomb. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 89. Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1991. Rodio, Rocco. Cinque ricercate, una fantasia. Edited by Macario Santiago Kastner. Padua: G. Zanibon, 1958. Tiburtino, Giuliano, et al. Fantesie, et recerchari a tre voci, accommodate da cantare et sonare per ogni instrumento (Venice, 1549). Edited by Robert Judd. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1994. Usper, Francesco. Ricercari et arie francesi à quattro voci (Venice, 1595). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 11. New York: Garland, 1990. Valente, Antonio. Intavolatura de Cimbalo (1576). Edited by Charles Jacobs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Vinci, Pietro, and Antonio il Verso. Mottetti e ricercari a tre voci. Edited by Paolo Emilio Carapezza. Musiche rinascimentali Siciliane, no. 3. Rome: Edizioni De Santis, 1972. Willaert, Adrian, et al. Fantasie recercari contrapunti a tre voci (Venice, 1551) and Ricercars from Motetta trium vocum ab pluribus authoribus composita (Venice, 1543). Edited by Robert Judd. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 2. New York: Garland, 1994.

Chapter 4: The Fugal Canzona of the Late Renaissance Antegnati, Costanzo. Canzoni alla Francese. Edited by Gabriella Dini. Bologna: Antiquæ Musicæ Italicæ Studiosi, 1992. Banchieri, Andriano. Canzoni alla francese (of 1596). Edited by Leland Bartholomew. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 20. Madison, WI:  A-​R Editions, 1975. Bariolla, Ottavio. Capricci, overo canzoni à quattro . . . libro terzo (Milan, 1594). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 12. New York: Garland, 1995.

Bibliography  363 Bariolla, Ottavio. Keyboard Compositions. Edited by Clyde William Young. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 46. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1986. Canale, Floriano. Canzoni da sonare a quattro, et otto voci . . . libro primo (Venice, 1600). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 14. New York: Garland, 1989. Canzoni alla francese: Extraits du Tabulatur Buch Strasbourg 1607. Edited by Jean-​Luc Gester. Strasbourg: Les Cahiers du Tourdion, [2006]. Canzoni francese libro primo: Ottaviano Scotto’s 1535 Collection of Twenty-​Three Chansons for Four Voices. Edited by Paul Walker. Middletown, WI: A-​R Editions, 2018. Cavaccio, Giovanni. Musica (Venice, 1597). Edited by Floyd Sumner. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 10. New  York: Garland, 1994. Cavazzoni, Girolamo. Orgelwerke, vol. 1: Libro primo. Edited by Oscar Mischiati. Mainz: Schott, 1959. Clemens non Papa, Jacobus. Chansons. Edited by K. Ph. Bernet Kempers. Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 4, no. 10. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1962. Francesco da Milano. The Lute Music of Francesco Canova da Milano (1497–​1543). Edited by Arthur J. Ness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Gabrieli, Andrea. Complete Keyboard Works. 6 vols. Edited by Giuseppe Clericetti. Vienna: Doblinger, 1997. Gabrieli, Giovanni. Opera omnia, vol. X: Instrumental ensemble works in ‘Sacrae symphoniae’ (Venice, 1597, Printed Anthologies and Manuscript Sources). Edited by Richard Charteris. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 12/10. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag, 1998. Gabrieli, Giovanni. Opera omnia, vol. XI: Instrumental ensemble works in ‘Canzoni et sonate’ (Venice, 1615). Edited by Richard Charteris. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 12/11. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag, 1998. Gabrieli, Giovanni. Composizioni per organo. 3 vols. Edited by Sandro Della Libera. Milan: G. Ricordi, 1957–1959. Keyboard Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Edited by Willi Apel. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 1. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1963. Macque, Giovanni de. Opere per tastiera, vol. 1: Capricci, Stravaganze, Canzoni, etc. 2nd ed. Edited by Liuwe Tamminga. Colledara, Italy: Andromeda Editrice, 2002. Maschera, Florentio. Libro primo de canzoni . . . a quattro voci (Brescia, 1584). Edited by Robert Judd. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 9. New York: Garland, 1995. Mayone, Ascanio. Secondo libro di diversi capricci per sonare (Napoli 1609). Edited by Macario Santiago Kastner. Orgue et Liturgie, no. 63. Bôle and Epinassey, Switzerland: Editions musicales de la Schola Cantorum, 1964). Merulo, Claudio. Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo. Edited by Walker Cunningham and Charles McDermott. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 90–​91. Madison, WI: A-​R Editions, 1992. Mortaro, Antonio. Primo libro de canzoni da sonare a quattro voci (Venice, 1600). Edited by James Ladewig. Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 13. New York: Garland, 1988. Mudarra, Alonso. Tres libros de música en cifra para vihuela, Sevilla, 1546. Edited by Emilio Pujol. Monumentos de la música española, vol. 7. München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms. Mus. 1581:  An Anthology of Keyboard Compositions from a South-​German Manuscript. 3 vols. Edited by Clare G. Raynor. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 40. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1976.

364 Bibliography Orgel-​Tabulatur von Johann Woltz, 1617, Heft I: Intavolierungen italienischer Canzonen von Gabrieli, Tresti, Banchieri, De Maque, de Monte, Guami. Edited by Manfred Hug. Stuttgart: Cornetto-​Verlag,  1995. Pasquini, Ercole. Collected Keyboard Works. Edited by Richard Shindle. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, vol. 12. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1966. Pasquini, Ercole. Opera omnia, vol. I: Toccate, Canzoni, Ricercari. Edited by Paul S. Kenyon. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2015. Passereau, Pierre. Opera omnia. Edited by Georges Dottin. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, no. 45. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1967. Pellegrini, Vincenzo. Canzoni de intavolatura d’organo fatte alla francese. Edited by Robert B. Lynn. Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, no. 35. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1972. Schmid, Bernard, the Younger. Canzoni alla francese:  Extraits du Tabulatur Buch Strasbourg 1607. 2 vols. Edited by Jean-​Luc Gester. Strasbourg:  Les Cahiers du Tourdion, [2006]. Schmid, Bernard, the Younger. Tabulatur Buch: A Facsimile of the 1607 Strasbourg Edition. New York: Broude Brothers, 1967. Vicentino, Nicolo. Opera Omnia. Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 26. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1963. Vienna, Minoritenkonvent, Klosterbibliothek und Archiv, MS XIV.714. Introduction by Robert Hill. 17th-​Century Keyboard Music: Sources Central to the Keyboard Art of the Baroque, no. 24. New York: Garland, 1988. Woltz, Johann. Nova musices organicae tabulatura. Basel: Johann Jacob Genath, 1617; facsimile ed., Bologna: Forni editore, 1970.

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Secondary Literature Allsop, Peter. The Italian “Trio” Sonata: From its Origins until Corelli. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Apel, Willi. The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–​1600. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Apel, Willi. The History of Keyboard Music to 1700. Translated and revised by Hans Tischler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Breitner, Walter. Jacob Buus als Motettenkomponist. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1977. Brown, Howard Mayer. “Embellishment in Early Sixteenth-​Century Italian Intabulations.” Proceedings of the Royal Music Association, vol. 100 (1973–​1974), pp. 49–​83. Brown, Howard Mayer. Instrumental Music Printed before 1600:  A Bibliography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Charteris, Richard. Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555–1612): A Thematic Catalogue of His Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of His Vocal Texts. Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1996. Coelho, Victor, and Keith Polk. Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–​1600: Players of Function and Fantasy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cumming, Julie. “From Variety to Repetition: The Birth of Imitative Polyphony.” Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation, vol. 6 (2008), pp. 21–​44. Cumming, Julie. “Text Setting and Imitative Technique in Petrucci’s First Five Motet Prints.” In The Motet Around 1500: On the Relationship of Imitation and Text Treatment?, pp. 83–​110. Edited by Thomas Schmidt-​Beste. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009. Dirksen, Peter. The Keyboard Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Utrecht:  Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Miziekgeschiedenis, 1997. Fallows, David. Josquin. Tournhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009. Ferer, Mary Tiffany. Music and Ceremony at the Court of Charles V. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2012. Gauldin, Robert. A Practical Approach to Eighteenth-Century Counterpoint. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988. Guido, Massimiliano. “Giovanni Maria Trabaci and the New Manner of Inganni:  A Musical Mockery in the Early Seicento Ricercare.” In Interpreting Historical Keyboard Music: Sources, Contexts and Performance, pp. 43–​64. Edited by Andrew Woolley and John Kitchen. Surry, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Gustavson, R. R. Hans Ott, Hieronymus Formschneider, and the Novum et insigne opus musicum (Nurembert, 1537–​1538). Dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1998. Haar, James. “The Fantasie et Recerchari of Giuliano Tiburtino.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 59 (1973), pp. 223–​238.

366 Bibliography Hermelink, Siegfried. Dispositiones modorum. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1960. Judd, Cristle Collins. “Josquin’s Gospel Motets and Chant-​Based Tonality.” In Tonal Structures in Early Music, pp. 109–​154. Edited by Cristle Collins Judd. New  York: Garland, 1998. Kennan, Kent. Counterpoint Based on Eighteenth-Century Practice, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Kerman, Joseph. “Byrd, Tallis, and the Art of Imitation.” In Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, pp. 519–​537. Edited by Jan LaRue. New York: Norton, 1966. Kerman, Joseph. The Masses and Motets of William Byrd. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1981. Kerman, Joseph. The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Ladewig, James. “The Origins of Frescobaldi’s Variation Canzonas Reappraised.” In Frescobaldi Studies, pp. 235–​268. Edited by Alexander Silbiger. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1987. Litterick, Louise. “Chansons for Three and Four Voices.” In The Josquin Companion, pp. 335–​391. Edited by Richard Sherr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lowinsky, Edward. “Early Scores in Manuscript.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 13 (1960), pp. 126–​173. Meier, Bernhard. The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony Described According to the Sources. Translated by Ellen S. Beebe. New York: Broude Brothers, 1988. Mesquita de Oliveira, Filipe. “Some Aspects of P-​Cug, MM 242:  António Carreira’s Keyboard tentos and fantasias and Their Close Relationship with Jacques Buus’s ricercari from his Libro primo (1547).” In Interpreting Historical Keyboard Music: Sources, Contexts and Performance, pp. 7–​18. Edited by Andrew Woolley and John Kitchen. Surry, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Milsom, John. “Crecquillon, Clemens, and Four-​Voice fuga.” In Beyond Contemporary Fame: Reassessing the Art of Clemens non Papa and Thomas Crecquillon, pp. 293–​345. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Mischiati, Oscar. “L’intavolatura d’organo tedesca della Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino.” L’Organo, vol. 4 (1963), pp. 2–​154 and 237–​238. Mischiati, Oscar. “Il Manoscritto Corsiniano dei ‘Ricercari’ di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina” in Atti del II Convegno Internazionale di Studi Palestriniani: Palestrina e la sua presenza nella musica e nella cultura europea dal suo tempo ad oggi, pp. 177–201. Edited by Lino Bianchi and Giancarlo Rostirolla. Palestrina: Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 1991. Ness, Arthur J. “Domenico Bianchini: Some Recent Findings.” In Le Luth et sa musique, pp. 97–​111. Edited by Jean-​Michel Vaccaro. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984. Newcomb, Anthony. “The Anonymous Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex.” In Frescobaldi Studies, pp. 97–​123. Edited by Alexander Silbiger. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1987. Newcomb, Anthony. “When the ‘Stile Antico’ Was Young.” In the International Musicological Society, Congress Report XIV: Bologna 1987, pp. 175–​181. Torino: EDT, 1990. Owens, Jessie Ann. Composers at Work:  The Craft of Musical Composition 1450–​1600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Bibliography  367 Powers, Harold. “Mode, section III.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. Powers, Harold S. “Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 1981), pp. 428–​470. Prout, Ebenezer. Fugue. London: Augener, 1891. Rees, Owen. Polyphony in Portugal, c. 1530–​c. 1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra. New York and London: Garland, 1995. Rifkin, Joshua. “A Black Hole? Problems in the Motet around 1500.” In The Motet around 1500:  On the Relationship of Imitation and Text Treatment?, pp. 21–​82. Edited by Thomas Schmidt-​Beste. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009. Rifkin, Joshua. “Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: Dating Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 56, no. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 239–​350. Rodin, Jesse. Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Schierning, Lydia. Die Überlieferung der deutschen Orgal-​und Klaviermusik aus der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961. Schulenberg, David. “Ornaments, Fingers, and Authorship: Persistent Questions about English Keyboard Music circa 1600.” Early Keyboard Journal, vol. 30 (2013), pp. 27–​52. Smith, David J. “Early Seventeenth-​Century Keyboard Culture at the Court of the Archdukes in Brussels:  The Manuscript Kraków, Biblioteka Jagiellonska, Mus. MS 40316.” Revue Belge de Musicologie, vol. 63 (2009), pp. 67–​98. Steinhardt, Milton. “Jacobus Vaet.” The New Grove II. Swenson, Milton. The Four-​part Italian Ensemble Ricercar from 1540 to 1619. 3 vols. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1970. Walker, Paul. “‘Fugue’ as a Genre Designation in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Schütz-​ Jahrbuch, Jahrgang 28 (2006), pp. 207–​230. Walker, Paul. Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000. Wegman, Rob C. The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470–​1530. New  York: Routledge, 2005. Wesner, Amanda Zuckerman. “The Chansons of Loyset Compère:  A Model for a Changing Aesthetic.” In Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts:  Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, pp. 483–​501. Edited by Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1996. Wesner, Amanda Zuckerman. The Chansons of Loyset Compère: Authenticity and Stylistic Development. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1992. Wiering, Frans. The Language of the Modes: Studies in the History of Polyphonic Music. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Index Aichinger, Gregor, 253 Antegnati, Costanzo, 9, 275–​277, 298–​299, 318, 327 Antico, Andrea, 45–​46, 76, 105, 143 Apel, Willi, 143, 146, 157, 163, 230 Attaingnant, Pierre, 76–​77, 105, 257   Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1–​2, 4, 7, 18, 75, 113, 142, 144, 257 Bakfark, Valentin, 151 Banchieri, Adriano, 9, 275, 325, 327 Bardi, Count Giovanni de, 242 Bariolla, Ottavio, 252–​253, 275–​276, 307, 318–​319,  324 Benoist, Nicolaus, 147 Berlin, MS. 40316 (now in Kraków), 327, 343 Berlin, MSS. Lynar A1 and Lynar A2, 343 Bernhard, Christoph, 18, 127 Bertali, Antonio, 87, 298 Bertoldo, Sperindio, 188 Bianchini, Domenico, 151 Brahms, Johannes, 1 Brunel, Giaches, 178, 193–​196, 201–​202, 210, 215, 240–​242, 244, 247–​249, 252, 348–​349 Burmeister, Joachim, 87, 98, 113–​114, 117, 122 Buus, Jacques, 8, 152, 165–​168, 171–​179, 187–​189, 192, 195, 202, 204, 217, 239, 347 Buxtehude, Dieterich, 1 Byrd, William, 8, 133–​135, 139   Cabezón, Antonio de, 151 Calvisius, Seth, 113, 117, 122 Canale, Floriano, 275, 326 Carreira, António, 177 Cavaccio, Giovanni, 275, 325 Cavazzoni, Girolamo, 147, 152, 157–​158, 162–​163, 174, 243, 267, 271, 273–​274, 348 Cavazzoni, Marc Antonio, 143, 157 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 29, 76, 85, 111–​112, 143, 346–​347, 349 Charteris, Richard, 326, 342 Christine of Lorraine, 242 Clemens non Papa, Jacobus, 8, 29, 41–​42, 44–​45, 75, 84–​85, 92–​101, 103, 105–​106, 111, 127, 129, 165, 220, 257–​258, 260, 283, 299, 346

Compère, Loyset, 21, 26, 28, 105, 143 Conforti, Giovanni Battista, 178, 188–​190, 192–​194, 201, 204, 210–​211, 242, 298, 348 Cornet, Peter, 328 Crecquillon, Thomas, 8, 29, 48–​49, 75, 84–​85, 92–​93, 96–​100, 105, 111–​112, 127, 129, 220, 274, 299, 301, 346–​347 Cumming, Julie, 21, 44   Dalla Libera, Sandro, 335, 342 Dentice, Fabrizio, 202 Dirksen, Peter, 328, 343 Diruta, Girolamo, 193, 240, 324, 330 Dressler, Gallus, 13, 30, 41, 44, 85–​87, 95–​96, 98, 100, 127, 164, 284, 324, 345 Duruflé, Maurice, 1   Edward VI of England, 129 Elizabeth I of England, 129 Erbach, Christian, 328–​329, 350   Fallows, David, 22, 28 Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 242 Ferrabosco the Elder, Alfonso, 129–​130 Festa, Costanzo, 45, 122 Finck, Hermann, 75–​76, 84 Fogliano, Giacomo, 143 Formschneider, Hieronymus, 78n18 Francesco da Milano, 143–​144, 151 Franck, César, 1 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 146, 164, 219, 239, 314, 328–​329, 348–​350 Froberger, Johann Jacob, 164, 239, 314, 348, 350 Fux, Johann Joseph, 18, 345   Gabrieli, Andrea, 8, 84n20, 203, 211–​212, 220–​223, 230–​231, 238–​242, 249, 252–​254, 274, 276, 299–​ 301, 306, 314, 318, 326–​327, 332, 342, 347–​349 Gabrieli, Giovanni, 8, 220–​221, 301, 314n27, 326–​333, 335–​336, 342–​343, 348–​350 Galilei, Vincenzo, 111–​113, 346 Gardano, Angelo, 78, 82, 187, 220 Gauldin, Robert, 2 Gesualdo, Carlo, 243, 248 Gintzler, Simon, 151

370 Index Glarean, Heinrich, 15, 17 Golin, Guilielmo, 147 Gombert, Nicolas, 8, 29, 75–​82, 84–​85, 88–​89, 92–​93, 96, 98–​100, 105, 108, 110–​112, 127, 129, 143–​145, 147, 162, 165, 193, 346–​347 Guami, Gioseffo, 325 Guerrero, Francisco, 127–​129, 346   Haberl, Franz Xaver, 203 Handel, George Frederick, 2 Handl, Jacobus, 128 Hassler, Hans Leo, 240, 302, 328–​329, 350 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 2 Henry VIII of England, 129 Hermelink, Siegfried, 15–​16 Hindemith, Paul, 1   Il Verso, Antonio, 241, 248   Janequin, Clément, 220 Jeppesen, Knud, 18 Josquin des Prez, 21–​23, 25, 28, 45, 75–​76, 88, 105, 128, 142–​143, 147–​148, 150, 164, 188, 267, 273, 346–​347, 350 Judd, Robert, 286, 299   Kämper, Dietrich, 298 Kennan, Kent, 2 Kerman, Joseph, 134   Ladewig, James, 314, 318, 326 Lassus, Orlande de, 8, 113–​115, 117–​118, 122–​123, 127–​129, 133–​134, 212, 220, 301, 346 Lhéritier, Jean, 45 Liszt, Franz, 1 Litterick, Louise, 147 Lohet, Simon, 327 Luython, Carolus, 327 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, 241, 243–​245, 247, 251   Macque, Giovanni de, 8, 219, 248–​252, 254–​255, 307–​308, 314, 317–​318, 324, 327, 332, 348 Malvezzi, Cristofano, 241–​243 Mary Tudor, 129 Maschera, Florentio, 9, 275–​277, 284–​286, 297–​302, 324, 327 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, 112 Mayone, Ascanio, 314 Mazzi, Luigi, 253–​255 Mendelssohn, Felix, 1 Merulo, Claudio, 8, 84n20, 188, 203, 211–​222, 239–​242, 244, 252, 275–​276, 284, 300–​303, 305–​306, 325–​327, 330, 347–​348

Milán, Luis, 143, 151 Moderne, Jacques, 77–​78, 147, 165 Monte, Philippe de, 112 Monteverdi, Claudio, 18, 112, 139, 349 Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare, 18, 139 Morales, Cristóbal de, 111, 122 Morley, Thomas, 344 Mortaro, Antonio, 275–​277, 298–​302, 326 Mouton, Jean, 8, 21, 29–​31, 45–​46, 48, 75, 105, 110, 128, 143, 147, 346 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1–​2 Mudarra, Alonso, 151 Mundy, William, 133 Munich, MS. 1581, 327, 329   Narváez, Luis de, 143–​145, 148, 150–​151, 153, 164 Newcomb, Anthony, 194–​195, 202, 244, 252 Nucius, Johannes, 29, 48, 75, 99, 141–​142   Ott, Hans, 78   Padovano, Annibale, 177–​180, 182–​183, 187–​189, 192, 194, 203, 211–​212, 214–​215, 247, 252, 347 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 8, 15, 18, 112, 122–​124, 126–​129, 134, 203–​205, 207, 210–​211, 325, 346, 350 Parabosco, Girolamo, 147, 211, 243 Pasquini, Ercole, 307, 314–​315, 317–​318 Passereau, Pierre, 257, 267–​268, 273 Pellegrini, Vincenzo, 275, 325–​326 Peri, Jacopo, 242–​243 Petrucci, Ottaviano, 22, 45 Phillips, Peter, 328 Phinot, Dominique, 75 Plato, 22 Powers, Harold, 16–​17, 87 Praetorius, Michael, 29, 141–​142, 152, 240, 267, 277, 344 Prout, Ebenezer, 2   Raval, Sebastian, 253–​254 Reger, Max, 1 Reubke, Julius, 1 Richafort, Jean, 45–​47, 100 Rifkin, Joshua, 29 Robertsbridge Codex, 267 Rodio, Rocco, 241–​243 Roman de Fauvel, 267 Rore, Cipriano de, 110–​112, 194 Rosen, Charles, 1   Scacchi, Marco, 324 Scarlatti, Domenico, 2

Index  371 Schmid the Younger, Bernard, 276–​277, 284–​285,  344 Schumann, Robert, 1 Schütz, Heinrich, 326, 349 Scotto, Girolamo, 76, 78–​79, 84, 88, 145, 267n5 Segni, Julio, 147–​150 Sermisy, Claudin de, 105, 110–​111 Silva, Andreas de, 210 Spinacino, Francesco, 142 Steigleder, Adam, 327 Sumner, Floyd, 274 Sutherland, Gordon, 146 Sweelinck, Jan Pieterszoon, 13, 239, 328, 343, 350 Swenson, Milton, 146, 242   Tallis, Thomas, 134 Tiburtino, Giuliano, 152, 163–​164, 174, 188–​189, 194, 215, 248, 348 Tinctoris, Johannes, 21 Torino MSS.–​302, 306, 318, 328–​331, 335, 343 Trabaci, Giovanni Maria, 314

Usper, Francesco (Sponga), 253–​254 Vaet, Jacobus, 112–​113, 123 Valente, Antonio, 151 Verdelot, Philippe, 76n17 Vicentino, Nicolo, 274, 299 Victoria, Tomás Luis de, 123, 128, 139 Vienna, Minoritenkonvent MS. XIV 714, 328–​329 Vinci, Pietro, 241, 248   Wert, Giaches de, 178 White, Robert, 133 Wiering, Frans, 87 Willaert, Adrian, 13, 110–​111, 113, 145–​148, 152–​ 153, 157, 162–​165, 167, 174, 188, 194, 212, 298 Woltz, Johann, 276, 298, 302, 307, 314n26, 327, 329, 344   Young, Clyde William, 318   Zarlino, Gioseffo, 12–​15, 30, 44, 85, 93, 110, 122, 126, 164, 212–​215, 239, 247, 252, 284, 298, 324, 330, 345, 347–​348