PROGRAM NOTES Point/Counterpoint: Fuguing in Renaissance Music “Counterpoint, that part of music most necessary to make good use of every other part, has for its aim not only the foundations of music, but perhaps even more, artifice and the most detailed subtleties of this art, which are fugues forwards and backwards, simple or double, imitations [echoes, etc.], canons, and perfidie [counterpoint over ostinato bass] and other elegances made like these, which, if used at the right time and place, adorn music marvelously.” Pietro della Valle, Della musica dell’età nostra… (1640), translated by Margaret Murata Introduction and Definitions Call it what you will—contrapuntal, polyphonic, fugal, imitative, canonic—the music that generated this program and makes up the greater part of the selections featured was in one form or another the highest achievement of the composers’ art from at least the middle of the fifteenth century right through to Johann Sebastian Bach in the eighteenth. One can trace its beginnings particularly with the works of Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410/25–1497), in which one sees the style of imitative polyphony at its most obvious onset, a style in which each voice of a polyphonic composition has equal weight, melodic significance, and shared thematic material. No viola parts in these works! However, we chose, as a chronological parameter and as a programmatic artifice, to begin with Jakob Obrecht’s commanding Fuga and follow the subsequent compositional journey up to J. S. Bach himself, presenting contrapuntally inspired and adorned music in much of its great variety. The program presents much more than just fugues, however, at least in the more limited definition that word seems to hold for most people today. A look at the word’s etymology and broader scope in late Medieval through Baroque compositional history is most instructive here. The root fug- has a long and surprisingly circumscribed meaning from its Indo-European origins through the present. Here is a part of that lineage: Origins in the Greek φυγή, ῆς, ἡ – fleeing, flight To the Latin fuga, -ae, f. – flight, running away Verbal forms in Latin: Fugio, -ere (intransitive) – to take to flight, run away Fugo, -are (transitive) – to put to flight, chase away Into French and English as early as at least the fifteenth century Fugue
2021–2022 Season
13
