Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Musical Times
Various publications have delved more deeply into this ascending for 'And Israel by Philistine Arms shall fall' in
Saul) to latterday theorists, one of whom (Sabatini, 1802)
interesting area since 1979 when I wrote briefly on it in four
numbers of MT (June, July, August, October); those essays showed that it could be a positive, firm theme suitable for
themselves were only a manifestation of the growing interest'et vitam venturi saeculi' in the Creed. But the theme was
in a subject around which much has been written in the also one suitable for counterpoint per se, particularly of
last three or four decades (see list of references at the endkeyboard counterpoint of no possible programmatic intent.
for some examples). However, these studies and disserta- One of those oratorio themes of Handel above is itself based
on an earlier keyboard fugue, and not the least interesting
tions - that is to say, the productions of scholars and writers
in general - are largely geared to therhetorical theory, or detail in the makeup ofJ.S. Bach's Art of Fugue is that despite
what is fancied to be such, behind the musical patterns or its key (D minor, the 'original' key for the Chromatic 4th)
motifs concerned: to study the melodic and harmonic cells and its encyclopedic variety (over 20 pieces based on a theme
of music, especially that of the 17th century and early 18th,going through many kinds of contrapuntal treatment) he
is to study the blocks from which one builds a hypothesis is so sparing with it. When he does use the Chromatic 4th,
about a composer's knowledge of and inspiration drawn from it takes the form of countersubjects to one or other thema
Rules of Rhetoric. J.S. Bach in particular is a beneficiary- for example, ex.la, b and c. Other chromatic ideas are
from or victim of (depending on one's viewpoint) wonder- Ex. 1
277