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18 - Steps to Parnassus: contrapuntal theory in 1725 precursors and successors

from B - Compositional Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Ian Bent
Edited by
Thomas Christensen
Thomas Christensen
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

For 250 years, the Gradus ad Parnassum of Johann Joseph Fox (1660–1741) has been a tabula by-no-means rasa on which theorists and pedagogues have written. The remarkable process of accretion and rewriting began within seventeen years of its initial publication, with its first translation – ironically into Fux’s own language, German – in 1742. There is no denying that Fux himself had drawn on theorists’ writings going back 200 years, indeed back to the Greeks; but the result was no derivative hodgepodge. For all its borrowing and recasting – mostly unacknowledged, in the twentieth-century, positivistic sense – it possesses a sharpness of focus and a singleness of purpose that remain perhaps unrivaled.

“Manuductio ad”…: Virgilian footsteps

The work’s title begins:

Steps to Parnassus; or, Guide to Musical Composition by the Rules, using a New and Sure Method, never before published in so Methodical an Arrangement

This title plays in complex ways with the reader’s expectations. According to the subtitle, it is a manuductio – a “leading by the hand.” Like many other treatises before it – for example, Samber’s Manuductio organica (Manuductio to the Organ; that is, Thorough and Sure Guide) (1704), and Niedt’s Musicalische Handleitung (1700–17) – it offers a certain reassurance that the reader will not be left unaided. As a -ductio, the Gradus distinguishes itself from theoretical works with such appellations as “Treatise,” “Method,” “System,” “Summa,” and “Compendium,” all of which offer a formalized statement of a theory or collection of theories. Moreover, it is not merely an intro-duction, but a manu-duction, recalling Virgil’s guidance of Dante through the Inferno and Purgatory (“He laid his hand on mine, and with a face / So joyous that it comforted my quailing, / Into the hidden things he led my ways”).

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The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory , pp. 554 - 602
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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