J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

throughout much of the seventeenth century, but not much of this remained by 1700;
and Handel’s expansive contrapuntal style showed little kinship to the intense,
wayward manner of Locke, Purcell, and Blow. In harpsichord music there was no
recent contrapuntal tradition at all—the suites of John Blow, of William Croft, and of
Jeremiah Clarke show not the faintest anticipation of the fugues in Handel’s Eight
Suites, or of his Six Grand Fugues.
Barry Cooper has shown how 1720 was a watershed year for keyboard music in
London. 15 Under the overwhelming influence of Handel’s Eight Suites composers at
once forsook the French-influenced style of John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, and William
Croft (style brisé, slow courantes, infrequent gigues, exclusively dance movements)
and began to copy Handel’s more Italianate style (flowing two-part counterpoint,
semiquaver figuration, variable movement structure, occasional fugues).
Although Handel left very little organ music apart from his organ concertos
(which attracted imitators from T. A. Arne in 1751 to the Camidge brothers in 1800), 16
English organists felt Handel’s influence equally strongly. The characteristic British
genre of the time was the Voluntary—a word that remained a synonym for
‘improvisation’ through much of the nineteenth century, but in printed form it had
achieved a remarkably stable form by the middle of the eighteenth century. It was
usually in two movements: the first a ‘Corellian’ adagio for diapasons or a weighty
exordium for full organ, the second a concerto-like allegro for a solo stop or a fugue.
There were, of course, exceptions, but as one looks through the publications of
Stanley, Greene, Boyce, Bennett, Travers et al (with which the editorial labours of C.
H. Trevor have acquainted the vast majority of organists of the English-speaking
world) one is struck by their consistency of approach. Handel never contributed to this
genre, but his influence can be seen throughout.
15 English solo keyboard music of the middle and late Baroque (New York: Garland, 1989), p.249 ff.
16 The only works that could be reasonably so-called are the Six Grand Fugues or Voluntaries of 1735
—not voluntaries in the usual contemporary English sense.
123