Time and the keyboard fugue

Chapin, Keith ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8220-7344 2010. Time and the keyboard fugue. 19th-Century Music 34 (2) , pp. 186-207. 10.1525/ncm.2010.34.2.186

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Abstract

Throughout the history of Western music, musicians have almost invariably discussed the keyboard fugue and other extreme forms of polyphony as signs of something that transcends human subjectivity. Despite the persistence of this critical topos, musicians shifted their approach to it around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shift involved both a change in the technique of counterpoint and a change in the way counterpoint was interpreted. Composers sought to invest the fugue with a new dramatic and teleological thrust suitable to modern times, and critically minded musicians changed their interpretive method so as to emphasize the passage of time. Whereas musicians of the early eighteenth century read counterpoint and the fugue allegorically and annulled time through the conceptual precision of the allegorical image, musicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries read the fugue symbolically and worked time into their interpretive process. In both eras, the practice of interpretation coincided with and affected the reading of the genre's temporality.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Music
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Additional Information:	Pdf uploaded in accordance with publisher's policy at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0148-2076/ (accessed 26/02/2014).
Publisher:	University of California Press
ISSN:	0148-2076
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	07 May 2023 06:03
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/15032

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