Chapter 1 - In Counterpoint: Sources and Analysis

Summary

Given that the presence of arcane fugal devices in Purcell’s instrumental music is widely recognized as a stylistic marker of conservatism, it is surprising how little detailed and historically sensitive analytical work there has been in order to support this critical response. If the study of this music is to retain any place in modern musicological discourse it will require strong historiographical and analytical models capable of interrogating such commonplace ideas, and thereby illuminating the music to which they refer. Purcell’s ‘conservatism’, if such it is, is a matter of much more than simple stylistic affinity with music that was, by the 1680s, decidedly old-fashioned: one must consider what it was about such music that attracted Purcell, and how it acquired meaning for him and others in the cultural context of late seventeenth-century London.