Flight paths

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Williams, Peter

Theories of fugue from the age of Josquin to the age of Bach Paul Mark Walker University of Rochester Press (Rochester, NY & Woodbridge, 2000); xiii, 486pp; 75. ISBN 1 58046 029 1.

By 'theories', Mr Walker means `what has been written by writers on music theory', predominantly German teachers of the seventeenth century, including schoolmasters writing for provincial students anxious to learn what they could from the Italians, and doing so according to their culture's passion to arrange systematically, one might say control. Composers of some of the most interesting fugues of the period concerned - Frescobaldi, Bull, Louis Couperin, Froberger, Buxtehude, Purcell, Corelli barely feature, if at all. Nor do JS Bach, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, which one might expect from the title `to the age of Bach'. The study consists of nearly 450 pages of quotations from theorists, commented upon and enlivened in the earlier pages with apt musical examples from real music (helpful, useful), and with all their terms explained. As such, the coverage is thorough and professional, in the way of well-produced, reliable ex-dissertations coming from American campuses.

Mr Walker's most valuable contribution seems to me the summaries of writings of Zarlino (1558) and Fux (1725), where the book is indeed a useful reference for what is fuga as distinct from imitation, how mode versus tone is involved, what seem to have been a teacher's priorities, what is a `permutation fugue' as distinct from an `invertible countersubject fugue', and so on. Translations are good, and the originals are there in the main text, not stuck in footnotes (here, endnotes). Buyers will need to decide for themselves how important to them are the books of Dressier, Herbst, Bernhardt, Burmeister, Schonsleder, Calvisius, Lippius, Nucius and the other latinised pedagogues of the German provinces. I hope they will not be disappointed to see an account of, for example, Buttstedt's writings on fugue but nothing on any actual fugues he published and which influenced JS Bach.

There is an important principle here. Presumably, the book focuses on what has been written rather than composed not so much because this is more easily done but because the practice of fugue writing is thought not to represent or realise or elucidate theory, or indeed to have any theoretical status. This is a very old-fashioned idea of theory.

The implication that composers are not theorists is both pedantic, a kind of false academicism, and uselessly partial, for the best ideas and observations (teoria) men have ever had about fugue - fugal imitation, fugal texture, fugal form appear in works of music, not of words. You know that Bach had theories about how a fugue-subject could be answered twice in the dominant because - voila there it is at the beginning of the Welltempered clavier. You know that Corelli theorised on the potential ritornello form that a lively continuo fugue could take because - voila - there it is in op. 1.

Furthermore, if perceptive early writers on counterpoint like Campion or Morley get such short shrift as they do because they seldom if ever use the actual word fugue, then Mr Walker has been infected by his German writers' pedantry. But since he must know that any musician's eyes will light up at a musical example in his pages from Weckmann or Clemens non Papa, I wish he had given more attention to what composers did irrespective of terms they used. A result of the approach is that those same musicians will find it hard to grasp once and for all such simple questions as what is a tonal answer and why the question arises. (To explain this as `primacy of mode over exactness of imitation' is too theoretical: it's to do more with tonics and dominants, fugue becoming the diatonic, non-modal paradigm.) Although the index lists all the Latin terms ever invented by bookish theorists, one can not easily find entry, answer, countersubject, episode, coda, codetta, hexachord, solfa, inganno, per giusti intervalli or terms bandied about in practical contrapuntal study as it used to be taught.

The greatest use for the book I have found is to learn from it the nature of certain traditions, especially for composing counterpoint of various kinds in complex combinations - traditions that would lead to the so-called unfinished fugue of The art of fugue or even the quodlibet of the Goldberg variations. (Or even the quodlibet in Die Meistersinger - was Wagner's counterpoint-teacher Theodor Weinlig still party to scholastic teaching?) Also, a virtue of the book is its timely appreciation of Carissimi and other neglected Italians, even if only insofar as they were known to German theorists.

But I still have a fear: that this and comparable books reflect the way musicstudy is going. As people write less fugue and counterpoint, in comes more theory of one kind or another, and it is as if teachers in higher music-study were wilfully misunderstanding St Augustine's dictum that to think is higher than to do.