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

the chief musical environments in which fugue-writing continued to survive, and the
ways in which fugal technique was affected by contemporary stylistic developments.
FUGUE AND ITS CULTURAL HABITATS
CHURCH MUSIC
First of all, consistently and primarily, fugue was associated with the church.
The analogy between divine order and well-wrought counterpoint—theological
orthodoxy and contrapuntal correctness—might seem to be obvious; but very few
theologians have actually drawn such conclusions. The reasons for the survival of
fugal writing appear to have been pragmatic and cultural rather than strictly
theological.
Roman Catholic or Protestant, the liturgy was much more stable than the
institutions and practices of contemporary concert life, and so musical change took
place according to a different time-scale. ‘Ancient music’—Palestrina, Jacobus Handl,
or Byrd, according to geography—was still to be heard; the example of past masters
had a relevance and authority unparalleled outside the church until the rise of the
musical canon. Furthermore, the very nature of a choral ensemble itself requires that
the counterpoint be ‘strict’ in one sense at least: the separate voices are not just
compositional abstractions but literally present in the flesh. Likewise, the presence of
a text freights each line with a greater significance, making it harder to polarise the
texture into the wide variety of melody/accompaniment textures on which the galant
style depended.
Even the Viennese tradition of sacred music, long criticised for its ‘frivolity’
and ‘worldliness’, showed a much greater sense of continuity than contemporary
secular music. Despite the hiatus of the Josephine reforms in 1782-90, its progression
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