is not the casual beholder (or ordinary “consumer”), but rather the initiated connoisseur of craft, which in
practical terms means the composer’s fellow practitioners or producers. It is an art of guild secrets, of
tricks of the trade, of a self-selected and exclusive professional class. It is a new, inner-directed
manifestation of the aristocracy of talent. Its remuneration comes not in the form of public acclaim but in
professional prestige.
The all but interminable fourth item from the 1547 collection Ricercari di M. Jacques Buus,
Organista in Santo Marco di Venetia da cantare, & sonare d’Organo & altri Stromenti ..., Libro Primo,
a quatro voci (Ex. 15-7) has long been a famous piece because of the way it takes things to extremes. A
motetlike ricercare will generally proceed like a motet through several points of imitation, each based on
a new soggetto or “subject” (to use Zarlino’s word) as if crafted to fit a new line of text. Buus’s fourth
ricercare proceeds similarly and at unusual length, but with every one of its points based obsessively on
the same five-to seven-note motivic “head.” Ex. 15-7a shows the beginning of the ricercare with the
motivic heads set off by brackets. Ex. 15-7b tunes in again at the very end, some 83 measures (and a good
ten or a dozen minutes) later, to find the same motive still chugging away. While applying a technique that
had its origins in text-setting, Buus’s ricercare has thus clearly and deliberately transcended those origins
and has entered the utopian realm of abstracted technique. The aim now is not to match a soggetto to a
phrase of text but to show everything that can be done with a given soggetto within the technique normally
applied to texts. It is, in effect, the great motet in the sky. The irony, of course, is that a technique devised
to particularize the musical potential of a specific text—that is, in the humanistic sense, to enhance its
content through rhetoric—has left rhetoric behind in its pursuit of an ideal, exhaustive (which means,
ultimately, a generalized) consummation. From text-realization the technique has turned toward self-
realization. Depending on one’s point of view, that turn can be seen as an ascent or a descent—or,
perhaps, just a deviation. At any rate, the name of the genre seems eminently justified: the composer’s aim
has indeed been deflected from expression or communication to pure “research.” It will not be the last
time.
In pursuit of its own exhaustion, Buus’s soggetto appears in myriad variants. Most entries are
rhythmically unique, all have independent continuations, and a few have independent preparations (for
example the bassus in m. 7 and m. 10). The whole piece has a rudimentary “macrostructure” or overall
form, shaped around a section in the middle that features rhythmic augmentation of the soggetto and
counterpoint in syncopes. Enlargement in another dimension is achieved by varying the pitch of entries far
beyond what can be found in any texted piece. The vast majority of entries are made exactly where one
would expect to find them in a motet: on G, the final, and at the higher fifth or tuba (D). A large number
also take place at the reciprocal—that is, lower—fifth (C). Yet in the course of the piece the soggetto is
transposed to every note of the scale, even B. At times the secondary pitches stake out little contrasting
tonal regions. Thus the tonal contrast, too, announces a sectional division and contributes to the
perception of an overall shape. Rhythmic and tonal contrasts, in short, function in this ricercare the way
the words of the text do in a motet, as formal articulators.
EX. 15-7A Jacques Buus, Ricercare no. 4, mm. 1–15