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

DEFINING FUGUE
But what are they? What is it that makes a fugue a fugue? One might have expected
that a genre that has been subject to the codification of generations of theorists—from
Zarlino to Bernard to Fux to Marpurg to Cherubini to Prout—would surely have
arrived at some reasonably definitive shape by now. 11 Near the beginning of his New
Grove article on ‘Fugue’, however, Paul Walker admits that ‘there exists no
widespread agreement among present-day scholars on what its defining characteristics
should be’ 12 —or even, one might add, about what kind of a thing it is. Is it a form, a
texture, a style, or a genre? Does it refer to a kind of passage within a piece, or to a
movement in toto? The answer, of course, is ‘it all depends.’ There are three main
reasons for this.
First of all, the word fugue has meant substantially different things at different
times. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was applied (along with ‘chace’ and
‘caccia’) to pieces involving literal canonic imitation. It could refer either to the piece
itself, as in the ‘Fuga’ of Oswald von Wolkenstein (c.1376-1445), or to the technique,
as with Josquin’s Missa ad fugam. In the sixteenth century, while Zarlino and his
followers attempted to preserve this original meaning, northern theorists such as
Gallus Dressler (Praecepta musicae poeticae, 1563) used the term to describe a point
of imitation. Only later did the word come to refer to an entire movement, imitative
but not necessarily canonic. Walker cites a collection of twenty small, unpretentious
fugues by Simon Lohet (c.1550-1611; published 1617) as the first, but he also
mentions Bernhard Schmid’s Tabulatur Buch of 1607 which described pieces by
11 G. Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558); C. Bernhard Tractatus compositionis
augmentatus, (Dresden, c1657); J. J. Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum (Vienna, 1725); F. W. Marpurg,
Abhandlung von der Fuge (Berlin, 1753–4); L. Cherubini and F. Halévy, Cours de contrepoint et de
fugue (Paris, 1835); E. Prout, Fugue (London, 1891); Fugal analysis (London, 1892).
12 P. M. Walker, ‘Fugue’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online.
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51678 (accessed 14 July 2008).
The following two paragraphs are condensed largely from Walker’s account.
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