Ricercar and Fantasia in the Sixteenth Century

It is on the ricercar that most treatments of pre-Bach fugue have focused. The genre’s focus on serious fugal counterpoint can be traced to the year 1540, at the point when Gombert’s experiments had borne fruit, in a publication of ricercars by Willaert and others active in Venice. The central early contributions to the genre came from Venetian organists, both Italian and northern, including J. Buus, A. Padovano, and especially, beginning in the 1560s, Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli. Thanks to the absence of text, composers explored a wide range of structural possibilities within the point-of-imitation model, including the return of thematic material later in the piece, such contrapuntal devices as augmentation, diminution, inversion, and inganno, and even the basing of an entire piece on only one theme. Later in the century other, more southerly Italian cities, including Ferrara, Rome, and Naples, also saw important ricercar cultivation.