The fugues of British Library Additional Manuscript 29486: A transcription of folios 54--81 with commentary

British Library Additional Manuscript 29486 is one of the few surviving examples of keyboard music from the francophone Southern Netherlands in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Comprised mainly of anonymous liturgical organ music, it is known primarily for its copy of the intonations by Giovanni Gabrieli and a "Fantasia" by J. P. Sweelinck. Located in the last third of the manuscript is a collection of fifty-two contrapuntal pieces, averaging between 23 and 88 measures, copied sequentially in one hand according to the eight modes, and inscribed at the end "finis tonorum 27 Semptembris 1618." To date they remain unstudied. While the majority of the works are without titles, two of the pieces are labeled "fuga," making the group—along with the twenty fugues found in Johannes Woltz's Nova musices organicae tabulatura (Basel, 1617) by the Netherlandish composer active in Geneva, Simon Lohet—one of the earliest collections of pieces arranged by mode called fugue. All of the pieces are in four parts, and begin with a point of imitation exposition, often with a great deal of stretto, based on a monothematic subject. The normal technique is for the subject to keep sounding in one part or another almost continuously, with at most a bar between entries. The same compositional procedure for writing fugues was explained in 1650 by the Parisian Jean Denis in his Traité de l'accord de l'espinette. The 52 fugues in British Library Add. MS 29486 therefore represent an early example of a later French technique of composition that may have its roots in the Southern Netherlands.;The first part of this study explores the scholarship history of the manuscript and its provenance in the Southern Netherlands, surveys the characteristic organs and their registrations in that area ca. 1618, and also includes analytical observations of the 52 fugues as well as a brief commentary on the importance of the pieces in the development of fugue in the seventeenth century. Because of the unique notational format of the manuscript, the second part of the study features two different transcriptions. The first is a contrapuntal version in four voices, done in order to show the voice leading that at times is obscured by the chordal textures that result from the placement of more than one note on a stem in the manuscript. The second is a non-contrapuntal transcription that represents an attempt to remain faithful to the indications for left or right hand given in the stemming of the original. This study makes the 52 fugues of British Library Add. MS 29486 newly accessible to organists interested in the performance of early Netherlandish keyboard repertoires, and will be of value to musicologists and theorists with interest in the development of fugue as a genre in the seventeenth century.