Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (review)

Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach. By Paul Mark Walker. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000. (Eastman Studies in Music, 13.) [xi, 485 p. ISBN 1-58046-029-1. $120.]

Toward the end of this authoritative book, Paul Mark Walker praises the great eighteenth-century theorist Johann Mattheson for "his unparalleled knowledge of German treatises after 1660"--a bibliographic mastery that leads Walker to describe the work of his august, if often inflammatory, predecessor as "the culmination of German Baroque fugal theory" (p. 347). Mattheson had a large library, the relentlessness of a committed researcher, and a flair for adapting theoretical constructs to practical (as well as polemical) purposes. But his comprehensiveness, determination, and command of the sources have been far surpassed by Walker himself, whose survey of a multitude of treatises, primers, and lexicons spanning the two centuries from Gioseffo Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558 to Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739 is truly awe inspiring. Built on enviable linguistic and analytical skills, Walker's is a book of admirable scholarly dedication, humanistic breadth, and, most important, enduring utility.

How can one not be impressed by Walker's exhaustiveness, for where else can one read about the definition of fugue offered by, say, Cyriacus Schneegass in his Isagoges musicae libri duo of 1591, and then turn the page--a page that includes a lightning exegesis not only of Schneegass, but of Christoph Demantius's Isogoge artis musicae (1632), Laurentius Ribovius's Enchiridion musicum (1638), and Maternus Beringer's Musicae (1610)--to find a chronological list of all Lateinschule music texts in which the word "fuga" appears (pp. 131-33)? The names of the authors and the titles of their books are almost enough on their own to conjure a world, to bring to life a culture of intense learning, profound love of and care for music, and not a little pedantry.

The quantity and complexity of the material in Walker's purview makes clear that this is not an area of research for the underqualified or impatient. One gets the feeling that Walker has not only seen all the sources but understands them, at least to the extent that the legion of ambiguities and imprecisions can possibly be sorted out. The theoretical texts Walker investigates and the definitions he parses are dominated by internal references, borrowings, improvements of and confusions over long-lived but ever-changing concepts. The crucial issue of terminology--one of Walker's main concerns--is marked by appropriation and misappropriation, invention and reinvention. For example, Walker begins by laying out the normative role of Zarlino's theoretical work and his definition of the slippery terms "imitatione" and "fuga" (meaning, respectively, faithfulness or laxness with respect to exact intervallic mimicry), and he traces their subsequent use across two centuries. This is not an easy task, for the confusion and error accompanying many of these reinterpretations and transformations would flummox most historians--but not Walker.

When there are questions about the authorship of a given treatise, as with the so-called Carissimi/Bertali manuscripts (three important, partially concordant sources of the mid-seventeenth century that are assigned in two cases to Antonio Bertali and in the other to Giacomo Carissimi), Walker judges the evidence with circumspection and expertise--in this case weighing in persuasively on behalf of Bertali. Indeed, Walker navigates these choppy intertextual waters with such skill and purpose that he can tell us, in a commanding display of control of his material, that the introductory paragraph on fugue from Musica poetica of 1643 by Johann Andreas Herbst is "derived from Calvisius (via Crüger?) and Nucius (via Thuringus?)," with a conclusion "based on Calvisius and Crüger" and with influences from Gallus Dressler thrown into the mix (p. 129). This brace of internal references is packed into two sentences.

As such density of information suggests...