Happy Unknown Birthday, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina!(c. 1525 – February 2, 1594) Once upon a time, music history books taught that Italian composer Pierluigi (born in Palestrina, near Rome), was the “Savior of Church music.” It’s a long story, but not particularly accurate. But Palestrina is as great a composer as any to be the […]
The Art of the Fugue may well be Bach’s seminal work and contains 14 fugues and four canons, all in D-minor, and arranged in increasing difficulty. … Instead of calling them “counterpoint(s),” Bach preferred the Latin word “Contrapunctus.” Number IX (9) is a study of turning that simple subject into a new derivation and into a double fugue (two themes treated as a fugue at the interval of a twelfth, thus the subtitle “alla duodecima”)…