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

increasingly entrenched, and it remains an inescapable part of formal musical
education to this day.
COMPOSITIONAL ANTHOLOGIES
Related to this was the practice of assembling anthologies of compositional
technique, for the benefit of the student and the connoisseur. This practice, which
flourished in the eighteenth century, appears to have received little scholarly attention.
These anthologies would seem to have been intended specifically as models for
composition rather than, as in most earlier or later examples (Musica transalpina,
Florilegium Portense, Der getreue Musik-Meister, Clementi’s Introduction to the Art
of Playing Pianoforte) as a convenient assemblage of pieces for performance or
teaching. With rare exceptions, 13 these collections of exemplary works showed the
same bias toward strict counterpoint to be seen in contemporary pedagogy.
Chief among these, of course, was Martini’s Esemplare ossia saggio
fondamentale pratico di contrappunto (Bologna: 1774-75); two volumes of fugues by
Italian masters of the previous two and a half centuries, with and without cantus
firmus, from two voices to eight, with detailed commentary on each. 14 The assembling
of anthologies was, however, a widespread activity, and other noteworthy examples
include Marpurg’s Fugensammlung (Berlin, 1758), Kirnberger’s edition of C. H.
Graun’s Duetti, terzetti … ed alcuni chori (Berlin and Königsberg, 1773–4), and
Clementi’s Selection of Practical Harmony (4 vols., London, 1801-15). The
publication in 1804 of six fugal overtures from J. G. Werner’s oratorios (arranged for
string quartet by Haydn), and of six of M. G. Monn’s seventy-year old string quartets
about the same time, were probably undertaken in a similar spirit. To be sure, this
13 The musical appendix to Kollmann’s Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London: 1799)
includes, as well as a generous helping of J. S. Bach’s music and some fugues of Kollmann’s own,
rondos by C. P. E. Bach and homophonic organ preludes by J. W. Häßler.
14 It is excerpted and discussed in Mann, Study of fugue, pp.263-314.
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