Johann Joseph Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" and the traditions of seventeenth -century contrapuntal pedagogy.
Item
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Title
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Johann Joseph Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" and the traditions of seventeenth -century contrapuntal pedagogy.
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Identifier
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AAI9997082
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identifier
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9997082
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Creator
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Clemmons, William Preston, Jr.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Barbara Hanning
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Education, Music
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Abstract
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Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) has set the standard for contrapuntal pedagogy for over two centuries. In his preface, Fux claimed that he developed the system over a number of years as a method for training his young students. Until the twentieth century, Fux's claims were undisputed, and Gradus was seen as embodying an attempt to codify the musical style of Palestrina. Knud Jeppesen, Claude Palisca, and Joel Lester have shown that Gradus only loosely resembles Palestrina's actual practice, that many of the key ideas in Fux's methodology predate Gradus, and examples in Gradus appear to have been copied from uncited sources. This dissertation provides a detailed comparison of Gradus's two-voice counterpoint section with a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises which predate it, for the purpose of locating the appearance of unique ideas from other treatises and identifying its sources. On the basis of this comparison it appears that Fux was acquainted with, and borrowed ideas from, Zarlino, Diruta, Chiodino, Banchieri, Zacconi, Mersenne, Kircher, Herbst, Bernhard, Bononcini, and Berardi, in addition to ideas best attributed to the oral tradition. Gradus is resituated as a conscious blending of what had been, prior to its publication, disparate strands of contrapuntal pedagogy from both Italian and German traditions. Fux is reassessed, not as an innovator, but as a widely read and well-studied music theorist whose greatest achievement was his transforming of the species approach from a curious and relatively minor strand of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian contrapuntal pedagogy into the de facto standard, replacing the centuries-old pedagogy of counterpoint associated with Zarlino and the teaching of the passaggi.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
