Contrapunto Fugato: A First Step Toward Composing in the Mind

Abstract

Jessie Ann Owens marshaled evidence of a stage in Renaissance compositional process that did not use writing; Julie Cumming believes it was composers’ training as choirboys, which included improvisation, that enabled them to do this; and I propose that what they were doing was contrapunto pensado, Lusitano’s “thought-out” counterpoint, a category lying between on-the-spot improvisation and composition. This article details strategies for “composing in the mind” as it might have applied to a particular technique that singer/improvisers learned early on (after note-names, intervals, and rhythmic notation), called contrapunto fugato. It consists of singing a freely invented line containing repetitions of a motive against a cantus firmus (CF) in long equal values. Although this technique is easy to describe, no one has investigated the difficulties that are involved in repeating a motive against a CF. I will show what needs to be thought out beforehand (pensado) and what needs to be held in the mind so that the result can be sung immediately or written down later. The strategies that I “reverse engineer” from Lusitano’s examples give concrete reality to this ephemeral practice and offer a useful tool for our own pedagogy, for thinking about Renaissance music, and for refining our concept of improvisation. Lusitano’s examples are supplemented by examples by Banchieri and Ortiz.