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Music and Transfiguration

Treasure Hunt

In just about any subject, particularly if you're studying it from a historical perspective, it doesn't take long before you start to realize that the really juicy stuff, the knowledge that you can really sink your teeth into, is sometimes not easy to get to. In music, for example, C.P.E. Bach's Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments was long neglected, even in Germany, and did not appear in an English translation until the 20th century. Other treatises have suffered similar fates. The writings of Mattheson, Kirnberger, Niedt and Albrechtsberger, just to name a few, are often difficult to find and cost an arm and a leg. The last copy of F.E. Niedt's Musicalische Handletung I saw for sale was over $500, yet, it's the book that supposedly J.S. Bach modeled his own teaching method after.

My most recent hunt is for Giovanni Battista Vitali's Artificii musicali. Vitali was an early Baroque Italian composer. The above mentioned piece is pretty much his claim to fame. From what I can gather of the piece, it is perhaps the most comprehensive contrapuntal tour de force predating Bach's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering. It is comprised of canons from two to twelve parts, some making use of advanced contrapuntal techniques. There is even a duet written simultaneously in the key of G and F, which may be the earliest example of bitonality. However, finding this piece, even in a library, has been difficult. I think this is what attracts me to it, though. It could turn out that the piece isn't worth the time to study it. However, from what I've read of it, its apparent obscurity and lack of availability lead me to believe that there is something in there worth knowing.