Yet the overall impression is one not of sections succeeding sections but rather the ultimate “leisurely
flow of melody”—so leisurely as to attract a great deal of censure over the years from modern writers
who have found it dull. Listened to the way modern listeners are encouraged to listen to “classical” music
—that is, as object of one’s full attention, with no other purpose than to repay that attention—Buus’s
ricercare can indeed seem dull. Given its technical rigor and its uneventfulness, it is easy to write it off as
music that only a composer could love; and that is actually not too bad a characterization of much
academic composition.
But while academic, Buus’s ricercare is not “absolute music” in the our modern sense of the term;
such a thing did not yet exist, even if a certain amount of sixteenth-century music is now listened to in that
way. Rather, Buus’s ricercare, like virtually all the music of its time, had a definite role to play within a
social occasion. Its primary purpose was to fill time otherwise empty of sound in church. Viewed as
accompaniment to action—yes, as background music—the piece seems quite apt to its purpose. That
purpose, in fact, explains the curious fermatas that appear about two-thirds of the way through the piece.
They denote not a “hold till ready,” but an alternative ending—to be used, we may assume, on days when
there was a light turnout for Mass and the communion ritual could be correspondingly curtailed.