Ricercar

One subject entering voice by voice, the laboratory of Baroque counterpoint

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RenaissanceBaroqueCounterpointLute

The ricercar is an instrumental genre of the Renaissance and early Baroque, one subject imitated voice by voice, standing between the prelude and the fugue.

Origins and era

It appeared in Italy in the early sixteenth century as a free lute prelude, the word naming the act of seeking out a subject. It then settled into one subject entering in each voice in turn, and Venetian and Roman composers expanded it into instrumental counterpoint for four or more parts, with Frescobaldi and Froberger moving it to keyboard and organ. Bach summed up the tradition with the six-part ricercar of the Musical Offering, after which the name fell out of use and the writing merged into the fugue.

What you hear

One subject, one movement, three to eight minutes. The subject is usually long with clear leaps, and voices enter one at a time until every part has sung it. Density thickens layer by layer, the middle works the subject in sequence, inversion and augmentation, and the bass often holds a long note. Keyboard ricercars insert chromatic transitional passages between sections, while lute versions leave pauses shaped by open strings and positions. Memorise the outline of the subject, then follow the pitch and the voice of each entry. The gaps between entries are filled with free counterpoint, and these transitions are where a ricercar still sounds closest to an improvisatory prelude. Lute versions rely on open strings to make the subject audible, since an open string rings louder than a stopped one and the subject surfaces whenever it lands on one.

Key figures

Francesco da Milano and Segni left the earliest lute ricercars, Froberger and Frescobaldi wrote keyboard versions, and Bach's six-part ricercar marks the end of the genre.

Lineage

It descends from Renaissance improvisatory preludes and imitative counterpoint and leads to the fugue, the canzona and the fugal sections of the sonata.

Common misunderstandings

A ricercar is not a casual warm-up, because once the subject appears it is handled by the rules of imitation. Nor is it a fugue, since early ricercars move more freely and stretch or split the subject, while a fugue fixes where subject and answer fall.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Ricercar, 用于核对从琉特琴到键盘的迁移
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 1, 用于核对十六世纪意大利器乐出版的背景

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.