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

Playford’s Introduction to the Skill of Musick (twelfth edition) had been published in
1694, and the next, A. F. C. Kollmann’s Essay on Practical Musical Composition
would not appear until 1799. The early works of Samuel Wesley are thus a rare
glimpse of the way in which an unusually precocious and receptive musician taught
himself to compose.
He may have been dissatisfied with his first attempts at fugal writing in Ruth; at
any rate, by November 1774 (the year of Boyce’s visit) he had completed a set of ‘4
Fugues for the Organ’ KO 628 in what seems to have been a serious attempt to teach
himself the rudiments of fugal technique. 36 The subjects chosen are well suited for the
purpose, being simple and commonplace, and lend themselves readily to the more
typical fugal procedures. In Ruth Wesley had attempted to reproduce the splendour
and brilliance of Handel’s massive tuttis; here he was forced to come to grips with the
problem of handling basic contrapuntal textures. From the start, the appearance of
these pieces on the page bears a much closer resemblance to orthodox fugal texture
than Ruth; but appearances can deceive. The effort, though earnestly undertaken, is
not at first very successful. In particular the implied suspension of the first fugue’s
subject (over the barline between bb.1-2) gives him considerable trouble. He tries a
number of odd and ungainly solutions (Ex.2.11) before settling on the more
grammatical Ex.2.12 (although he may not have fully understood the harmonic basis of
the latter). There is little consistency in the number of voices from chord to chord; it
seems that when he confidently understands the progression he fills it out with three or
four parts, when he is writing at the limit of his understanding he keeps to two. The
texture is often extremely slender, a situation that does not improve some awkward
and unexpected register changes.
36 BL Add. MS 34996
137