Julie Cumming: "Patterns of Imitation, 1450-1508"

ABSTRACT: 

In his article on Josquin’s Ave Maria, Joshua Rifkin states that “imitation at the fourth or fifth itself occurs rarely not only in Milan, but pretty much everywhere before the last years of the [fifteenth] century.”  While it is true that the imitative pattern alternating entries on the first and fifth degrees (1515, a standard opening gambit from Mouton to Brahms) is not common in the second half of the fifteenth century, I have found many other patterns of imitation at the fourth and fifth in the period.  I will discuss them with reference to techniques of improvisation and Peter Schubert’s imitative presentation types.

John Milsom has shown that what he calls “stretto fuga” – two-voice imitation at the fourth, fifth, and octave after one small mensural unit – is easy to improvise with simple rules of interval choice.  It is probable that most fifteenth-century musicians were taught these rules, and there are many examples of stretto fuga at the fourth and fifth from the mid-fifteenth century, some of which I will discuss.

I have collected information in a database on time and pitch interval of imitation for the beginning of the 366 partes in Petrucci’s first five motet prints (printed 1502-1508, but including pieces going back to the 1470s). Duos with imitation at the fourth and fifth are a common occurrence in these collections. Three- and four-voice “periodic entries” (in which voices enter individually after the same time interval) involving fifths and octaves, and their inversions and compounds, can be generated with principles similar to those of stretto fuga. Examples in the Petrucci prints tend to use degree patterns such as 1155, 5511, or 1115. These pitch choices are those produced by four-voice stretto fuga. Another type of periodic entry, the “stacked canon” (producing degree patterns such as 152), is found in the middles of pieces, because of the destabilizing effect of the third pitch class in the point of imitation.  There are also a few examples of the newer technique of “imitative duos,” in which a two-voice stretto fuga in one pair of voices is repeated by the other pair of voices. 

Rifkin comments that “the study of the interval of imitation and chronology remains essentially unexplored.” I document the expanding use of imitation at the fourth and fifth between 1450 and 1508: from duos in mid-century to three- and four-voice periodic entries toward the end of the period. Imitation falls into a limited number of patterns that derive from improvisatory techniques and serve specific formal functions.

 

ABOUT JULIE CUMMING:

Julie Cumming is Associate Professor in the Department of Music Research, Schulich School of Music, McGill University (PhD in Music and Medieval Studies, UC Berkeley, 1987).  She came to McGill in 1992.  She was Director of Graduate Studies in Music (2001-2003, 2009-2010), and the review editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2004-2008).
 
While she has done work on eighteenth-century opera and on Renaissance song reworkings, Cumming specialty is the Renaissance motet. Her dissertation was on music and politics in the early fifteenth-century motet, and she wrote a major study of the fifteenth-century motet c. 1400-1475, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge University Press, 1999) as well as many articles.  She is now working on a book on the motet c. 1500, with a focus on the first five Petrucci motet prints (published 1502-1508); another project (with Peter Schubert) is concerned with style change in the sixteenth century, focusing on the first single-composer motet prints of 1539.  She uses databases in many different ways in her work, including data on concordant sources (with information on the dates and types of sources), analytical data on the contrapuntal techniques found at the beginning of each section of each motet, approaches to text setting, source and type of text, source, type, and treatment of pre-existent musical material, and subgenre of the motet.  She teaches people to sing directly from Renaissance music notation, and is thus very interested in the potential of Medieval and Renaissance OMR for music research.  She collaborates regularly with her colleague in music theory, Peter Schubert, and also works with Ichiro Fujinaga.