Conference Agenda

No fair copy of BWV 1087 (Fourteen Canons on the Goldberg Ground) exists, and J.S. Bach’s manuscript is enigmatically notated. The first two canons feature backward clefs, key signatures, and time signatures, indicating simultaneous straight and retrograde readings of a single written line. Other canons instruct performers to transform the notated melody in performance—for instance, “by means of augmentation and diminution.”Most scholarship has focused on the relationship of BWV 1087 to Bach’s fugal compositions (Crean 2010, Crean 2009, Stauffer 2024). Collins (1993) and Wolff (2020) trace Bach’s contrapuntal technique to Zarlino’s Le Istitutioni harmoniche (1558), treating this source as a foundational theorization of invertible counterpoint. As Fourteen Canons is indisputably an exercise in strict contrapuntal technique, scholars are correct to link it to Early Modern treatises on the subject. However, this focus on musical content bypasses a characteristic feature of the manuscript, limiting scholarly analyses of its historical precedents.

By foregrounding the enigmatic notation of BWV 1087, this paper links Bach’s compositional practices to an even earlier tradition than Zarlino’s invertible counterpoint: fifteenth-century canons. Franco-Flemish composers frequently instructed performers to read notated music in unconventional ways (Schiltz and Blackburn 2015). Such techniques were a powerful compositional device: by creating sonic transformations of a visually consistent source melody, composers could construct large musical forms based on thematically related musical materials (Zazulia 2021), as in the Missa Pour quelque paine/Pourquoy (mid-fifteenth century, variously attributed to Cornelius Heyn or Johannes Ockeghem) and Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Grecorum (c. 1490). Like Fourteen Canons, these examples use enigmatic notation to generate melodic transformations, combining retrograde readings with inversion, augmentation, and transposition.

Late Medieval and Early Modern canons are both well-studied repertoires, but current scholarship has yet to consider them comparatively. This paper intervenes in Bach studies as well as the history of music theory by arguing that the antecedents of Bach’s compositional techniques extend further than previously proposed. When juxtaposed with examples by earlier composers, the enigmatic music notation in BWV 1087 becomes an invitation to consider what fifteenth-century enigmatic canons may have contributed to the development of Early Modern invertible counterpoint.

In the reception history of Stravinsky’s neoclassical output, analyses penned by such writers as Richard Taruskin, Martha Hyde, Edward Cone, and Lynne Rogers concur that Stravinsky appropriated the tonal tradition from without, through compositional practices ranging from dissociation to eclectic imitation. Yet, a critical shift has taken place. Analysts such as Sarah Iker and Malia Roberson—inspired by Kofi Agawu’s work on Stravinsky’s cadences and Donald Traut’s notion of displacement—use tonal theories to examine a subset of Stravinsky’s neoclassical pieces, arguing that while Stravinsky modified the common practice’s harmonic and contrapuntal conventions heavily, he nevertheless operated within that tradition.

My paper contributes to this new turn through the lens of schema theory: I shall demonstrate that a not insignificant portion of Stravinsky’s neoclassical output employs schemas which, however distorted or “deformed,” are able to maintain their intelligibility precisely because the composer’s techniques of distortion stem from “non-default” compositional procedures already present in the 18^th-19^th centuries. As such, it would not be anachronistic to apply established tools/concepts of normalization to Stravinsky’s often dissonant musical surfaces, thus distilling discrete passages into underlying schemas. These concepts include the aforementioned displacement, but also elision, pacing “plasticity” (Samarotto 1999), inference of obbligato voices (Rothstein 1990), unconventional filling-in of a schema’s inner voices, tonal ambiguity, “functional extravagance” (Smith 1986), and fused/simultaneous cross relations (my own term). Excerpts from the 1928 ballet Apollo (unaccompanied violin opening from "Variation of Apollo"), the 1940 Symphony in C (the Larghetto's first section), and the 1943 Ode (first movement's fugal opening) serve as examples.

The music of Hélène de Montgeroult (1764–1836) has recently come into focus through the advocacy of a number of keyboard performers and scholars. While the reception of her work so far emphasizes her role as a pioneer, “anticipating” the style of the romantic generation, more remarkable may be her evocation of baroque models, especially in her magnum opus, the Cours complet pour l’enseignement du forté piano (first published 1816). Each of the 114 études contained in this publication is preceded by a technical-stylistic commentary, many of which make approving reference to the “anciens auteurs”. For Montgeroult the developing genre of the étude seems to relate to the practice of “preluding” most familiar to us now from its embodiments in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Thus many of her études are effectively monothematic, with little or no deviation from one ruling pianistic figure.

A startling exception is Etude No. 99, which offers not the usual type of technical-manual task but instead involves “la difficulté de la mesure”. More mixed rhythmically and texturally than is the norm for Montgeroult’s études, it also parts company with the “continuous legato” that she advocates so strongly elsewhere. These differences arise from a surprising circumstance: the étude contains echoes of the finale of Haydn’s late string quartet Op. 76 No. 6 (published 1800). Without quoting the movement directly, Montgeroult provides a series of teasing allusions. Her aim, I show, is not just to evoke, but to exceed the mercurial rhythmic sense of the original, “visiting” different parts of Haydn’s finale at speed. The unusual qualifier “accelerato” added to the “Allegro” designation encapsulates this whirlwind quality. Montgeroult also finds quite independent ways of snagging the player and listener in a web of metric-rhythmic ambiguity, including forms of notation that deliberately confuse expected patterns of accentuation. This is no respectful revival of an “old master”, but a seemingly unlikely piece of comic-manic emulation. The work complicates a narrow emerging image of Montgeroult’s creative sensibilities and more broadly any comfortable sense of which music from the past appealed to the “romantics” of the early nineteenth century.