Ricercar

A ricercar (Italian pronunciation: [ritʃɛr'kare], also spelled ricercare, recercar, recercare) is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece. A ricercar may explore the permutations of a given motif, and in that regard may follow the piece used as illustration. For example, "Ricercar sopra Benedictus" might develop motifs from a motet titled "Benedictus". The term is also used to designate an etude or study that explores a technical device in playing an instrument, or singing.

In its most common contemporary usage, it refers to an early kind of fugue, particularly one of a serious character in which the subject uses long note values. However the term has a considerably more varied historical usage.

Subject of Bach's six-part ricercar from his Musical Offering.

Terminology

In the sixteenth century, the word ricercar could refer to several types of compositions. Terminology was flexible, even lax then: whether a composer called an instrumental piece a toccata, a canzona, a fantasia, or a ricercar was clearly not a matter of strict taxonomy but a rather arbitrary decision. Yet ricercars fall into two general types: a predominantly homophonic piece, with occasional runs and passagework, not unlike a toccata, found from the late fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, after which time this type of piece came to be called a toccata;^[1] and from the second half of the sixteenth century onward, a sectional work in which each section begins imitatively, usually in a variation form. The second type of ricercar, the imitative, contrapuntal type, was to prove the more important historically, and eventually developed into the fugue. Marco Dall'Aquila (c.1480–after 1538) was known for polyphonic ricercars.^[2]

Examples of both types of ricercars can be found in the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi, e.g. in his Fiori musicali.

See also

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, which includes a section entitled "Six-part Ricercar".

References

1. Arthur J. Ness, "Ricercar", Harvard Dictionary of Music, fourth edition, edited by Don Michael Randel (Cambridge: Belknap Press for Harvard University Press, 2003).
2. Randel, Don Michael (1999). The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Bibliography

• "Ricercar," "Fugue," "Counterpoint" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. ISBN 0-393-09745-5
• Ursula Kirkendale, "The Source for Bach's Musical Offering," Journal of the American Musicological Society 33 (1980), 99-141.
• The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5
• Arthur J. Ness, "Ricercar", Harvard Dictionary of Music, fourth edition, edited by Don Michael Randel, 729–31. Harvard University Press Reference Library. Cambridge: Belknap Press for Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01163-5.

External links

• The dictionary definition of ricercar at Wiktionary
• Petrucci Music Library Ricercar Collection