from Part I - Purcell’s ‘Art of Descant’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2019
One way we can get at the kinds of creative strategies Purcell employed in his most contrapuntally intricate music is to examine it alongside contemporary theoretical writings, including his own. This chapter, then, is principally concerned with the establishment of a methodological basis for the analysis that follows later. This basis is unfolded in three parallel strands: the examination of theoretical texts by Purcell and his immediate contemporaries, the situation of these within the wider context of Restoration cultural discourse, and the analysis of Purcell’s music in the light of the insights gained from both. It culminates in a more detailed study of the first part of one of Purcell’s most accomplished fantazias, with the aim of recovering the composer’s working methods through a careful analysis of his use of counterpoint, or fugeing, as he called it in ‘The Art of Descant’.
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