Although Mozart was familiar with the traditional polyphonic practices of the Catholic Church, and was clearly influenced by this heritage in his sacred works, he took a special delight in the music of his baroque predecessors. He had been exposed to the works of J. S. Bach and Handel through the good graces of Baron Gottfried Bernhard van Swieten (1733–1803), a musical antiquarian and composer in his own right who administered the imperial library (Hofbibliothek) at Vienna and, from 1781, held the post of president on the Commission for Education and Censorship. In the same letter of 10 April 1782 in which he laments the death of J. C. Bach, Mozart expresses his enthusiastic interest in polyphonic composition, indicating that he was compiling his own collection of fugues by several members of the Bach family. He asks his father, Leopold, to send him fugues composed by Handel and Eberlin, with a view towards introducing those by the latter (the quality of which he later repudiated) at one of van Swieten's Sunday musical gatherings, where Mozart served both as a performer and arranger. A similar request would follow nearly a year later on 6 December 1783.

During the 1780s Mozart produced a substantial number of works with considerable contrapuntal content, among them the exquisitely Handelian Suite in C Major, K. 399/385i; the Fugue in C Minor, K. 426, for two pianos; the related Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 for string orchestra; the Prélude and Fugue for Piano, K. 394/383a; the opening Allegro of the Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533/494; the last movement of the String Quartet No. 14 in G Major, K. 387; and the magnificent finale of Symphony No. 41 in C Major ("Jupiter").

The latter is a derivative historicist movement whose first theme, taken from a fugue in Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, is combined "in simple and double counterpoint with five other motives: a countersubject, two bridge figures, and both of the two motives that make up the second subject of the sonata scheme," all of which appear together in the coda by dint of a combinatorial tour de force which remains unsurpassed in music literature.¹

Mozart's transcriptions for string quartet of keyboard fugues by J. S. Bach (K. 405) and several of Handel's choral works, including Messiah (K. 572), Acis and Galatea (K. 566), Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (K. 592), and Alexander's Feast (K. 591), also underscore his active creative engagement with the music of the Baroque.

During his stay in Leipzig in May of 1789, Mozart penned Eine kleine Gigue in G Major (K. 574) in a notebook of Leipzig Court organist K. I. Engel, evidently as a tribute to J. S. Bach, who had once been cantor at that city's Thomaskirche (appendix 2, no. 1).

This unusual piece is by no means in the style of Bach, although it has been compared to the gigue in Handel's Haprsichord Suite No. 8 in F Minor to which it does, indeed, bear some resemblance.² There are certain indications in this piece, however, that Mozart was not writing in a purely baroque idiom.

Most conspicuous is the fact that the contrapuntal texture is not employed as consistently as it probably would have been by Bach, in whose keyboard gigues there is generally greater emphasis on the integrity and independence of each voice. In Mozart's gigue, extended chordal textures crop up well in advance of cadences and tend to be a pronounced feature in the movement as a whole. The chordal passage beginning in m. 25 of the second section results in not entirely inconspicuous parallel octaves in mm. 26 and 28.³ Chordal textures do, of course, occur in Handel's harpsichord gigues, and parallel octaves occasionally are found in the keyboard music of both Bach and Handel. Mozart's gigue, however, concludes with more than five measures of octaves in the bass that ultimately form additional parallel octaves with the treble. These are not "defects," but should be understood, rather, in the broader context of Mozart's adaptation of the baroque style to a late-eighteenth-century keyboard idiom.

Like Mozart, Beethoven's growth as a composer was richly nourished by the music of Bach and Handel as well as Palestrina and the great masters of Renaissance polyphony. Despite his popular image as a rebellious innovator, Beethoven was a staunch historicist whose very innovations were largely dependent on a radical revisitation of the past.

Beethoven found a devoted patron in the person of baroque and early-music enthusiast Baron van Swieten, who shared his antiquarian inclinations towards Bach and Handel as well as his admiration for Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. The Baron, who authored the libretti for Haydn's The Seasons and The Creation, would be privileged to receive the dedication of Beethoven's First Symphony, op. 21. It was van Swieten who had been instrumental in introducing Mozart to Bach and other earlier polyphonic masters (see above), and his influence on the young Beethoven appears to have been an especially happy one as well.

By 1809, Beethoven avowed that "in the old church modes the devotion is divine . . . and God permit me to express it someday." He would later thoroughly immerse himself in the study of sixteenth-century composers and early liturgical music, realizing in his Missa Solemnis an astonishing amalgam of archaic and modern styles "more deeply rooted in older traditions than any other work."⁴ Warren Kirkendale acknowledges, "Today we see that he not only retained traditional thought to an unexpected degree, but even uncovered much older, buried traditions, and formed musical 'ideas' in the plain and concrete sense of the century in which he was born—naturally with an incomparably freer, personal vocabulary."⁵ Solomon adds that "Beethoven's musical archaisms and reminiscences [in Missa Solemnis]—Dorian and Mixolydian modes, Gregorian 'fossils,' quotations from Handel's Messiah in the Gloria and Agnus Dei—and his employment of procedures and musical imagery derived from older liturgical styles are, in context, modernistic [sic] devices that also serve to stretch the expressiveness of his music beyond the boundaries set for liturgical music by his contemporaries."⁶ As with Peri and Monteverdi, Beethoven's historicism would fundamentally transform early nineteenth-century music, a fact which further explodes the modernist fallacy that courting the past is little more than a dereliction or diminution of creativity.

As early as the age of eleven, under the aegis of his teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748–98), young Ludwig was playing the preludes and fugues of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.⁷ As late as October 1825, he sketched an overture based on the celebrated "B - A - C - H" motto (B-flat - A - C - B-natural) which regrettably, like his earlier arrangement of the Fugue in B Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, he never did complete.

Beethoven held Handel in especially high regard, calling him "the greatest composer who ever lived."⁸ Indeed, the Sixth Symphony, usually cited as a harbinger of nineteenth-century program music, was no less than a symphonic transmutation of the pastoral tradition evident in various works by Handel, Bach, and other eighteenth-century composers. Their influence is equally apparent in the Diabelli Variations (1819–23), particularly in Variation 24—a fughetta "which might have issued from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 998," and in Variation 32, an expansive double fugue.⁹

A significantly high percentage of the major works of Beethoven's maturity feature either complete fugues or extended fugal and canonic sections, an historicizing feature which ran decidedly counter to contemporary stylistic currents. But it was precisely this revival of polyphony during a time when it had fallen out of common use that revitalized sonata-allegro form.¹⁰

An excellent case in point is the fugal first movement of Beethoven's own favorite string quartet—No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 (appendix 2, nos. 2a–2d).

A movement pervaded by the deepest pathos, this "Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo" dates from a particularly troubled time in the composer's life, darkened by the attempted suicide of his nephew, Karl, in August of 1825, and by serious illness from February to March of 1826 just several months before the quartet was completed. Like his masses, the Adagio is an adaptive historicist admixture of traditional polyphony and contemporary musical idioms.

The element of pathos is strongly dependent on a variety of stylistic factors. These include the choice of a minor key and slow, reflective tempo; sharp dynamic contrasts within the fugue subject itself; the use of expressive melodic shapes (the wide leaps in mm. 107 ff.); special tone colors (the unusually high cello part in mm. 63 ff.); striking textural contrasts (paired strings at mm. 68 ff.); rhythmic animation at key junctures (mm. 54 ff.); and dramatic harmonic inflections (mm. 112 through the end, including the terminal Picardy third, which imparts a powerful sense of release and closure). This is the only string quartet first movement that calls for a slow tempo from beginning to end.

Compositional integrity is achieved through use of the "archaic" fugal technique, with its recurrent subjects and answers that also provide much of the movement's episodic or developmental material. Beethoven makes ingenious use of a number of traditional devices, including modification of the subject in its subsequent appearances both melodically (mm. 34–38) and rhythmically or metrically through diminution, augmentation, displacement, and stretto (mm. 53–55, mm. 99–107, mm. 63–67, mm. 92–107).

This haunting Adagio may either be taken prima facie as a fugue which replaces the typical sonata-allegro first movement, or as fugal reinterpretation of sonata-allegro form itself. In this analysis, the exposition would begin with the successive "SATB" entry of each of the four voices in mm. 1–16, and merge seamlessly with a long development section beginning approximately with the modulation to the relative key of E major in m. 34. The recapitulation is reached in m. 92, when the opening subject reappears in the viola in C-sharp minor.

Historicism continued to thrive in the twentieth century despite the neglect and censure to which it was routinely subjected by modernist music critics. But it tended to take on an increasingly "exotic" character as a multiplicity of traditional non-Western elements were eagerly assimilated by composers as diverse as Gustav Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde, 1907–09); Claude Debussy (see chap. 6, "The Pastiche Argument"); Olivier Messiaen (Turangalîla-symphonie, 1946–48); John Cage (Music of Changes, 1951); Alan Hovhaness (Lousadzak, 1944); and Terry Riley (Shri Camel, c. 1976). Indeed, this very assimilation of traditional styles, forms, and ideas derived from Asian, African, and other sources in the so-called "developing" world became inextricably associated with modernity itself, although fundamentally it was a continuation of the romantic eclecticism already so much in evidence in the eighteenth century.

By the late twentieth century, postmodern critics began to equate this assimilation with appropriation, or more accurately, misappropriation, exploitation, or marginalization of the cultural patrimony of the "Other," conquered and colonized by the West. The fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology themselves were not immune to such critical scrutiny:

Composer Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000) presents a particularly interesting case study in this connection. Born in Somerville, Massachusetts to an Armenian-American father and Scottish-American mother, Hovhaness was discouraged by the latter from embracing his Asian heritage, and did not adopt his Armenian surname until after her death in 1931. But during the course of his long, distinguished, and astonishingly prolific career, his creative work would encompass not only the musical traditions of Armenia but also those of Turkey, India, Japan, Korea, China, and Bali, and would lead him to important explorations of other non-Western cultures such as those of Russia, Greece, and Egypt.

Trained at New England Conservatory, and at Tanglewood by Bohuslav Martinu, Hovhaness also proved to be a prodigious contrapuntist whose polyphonic style has suggested to many the great choral and instrumental traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque. A master of Western instrumentation and orchestration, he produced nearly seventy numbered symphonies and scores of additional orchestral, chamber, choral, and operatic works, many of which he evidently suppressed or destroyed.

The sheer magnitude of his accomplishments might already have occupied scholars for decades, but in fact Hovhaness is only sketchily documented in the academic and popular presses. There are probably various reasons for this comparative neglect, including issues of personality. Evidently predisposed to a life of intense aesthetic and philosophical reflection, Hovhaness was a very private individual. Although his music was global—even universal in scope—he tended to stand apart from society and seems almost to have preferred remaining a rather solitary figure.

Relatively few personal details about him are publicly known. One can infer from his six marriages that there were spousal difficulties, but Hovhaness's last marriage, to Japanese soprano Hinako Fujihara, was a stable and productive union that lasted twenty-three years until the composer's death in 2000. He abjured attachments to Academe and the musical establishment, eschewing current stylistic trends (viz., Copland's populism, Schönberg's atonality, Boulez's serialism) while steadfastly pursuing his own vision. It is likely that this was his greatest handicap, for in spite—even because of—the extraordinary accessibility of his music, Hovhaness the historicist and eclectic epitomized romanticism in a modern age that pretended the past was irrelevant.

It is not clear how Hovhaness has thus far fared among postmodernists, although contemporary criticism equating "orientalism" with colonialist predation would not find an easy target in a composer of European, American, and Asian extraction. In the current climate of multiculturalism and New-Age "spirituality," with both the popular media and Academe acknowledging such composers as Sophia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), Arvo Pärt, (b. 1935), Terry Riley (b. 1935), Philip Glass (b. 1937), and John Tavener (b. 1944), there is at least reason to hope that a new generation of scholars will at last give Hovhaness the attention his vast and varied oeuvre surely merits.¹²

Hovhaness's Three Haikus, op. 113, were published by C. F. Peters in 1968. They grew out of the composer's firsthand experience of Japanese culture, which began in 1960 when Hovhaness was invited to appear as conductor of the Japan Philharmonic and Tokyo Symphony in what turned out to be a series of notably successful performances of his own music. In 1962 he obtained a Rockefeller Grant that enabled him to return to Japan, where he studied its traditional courtly and ceremonial music under the tutelage of Masataro Togi and began a number of original scores on Japanese subjects.

One of his best-known works from this "Japanese Period" is the Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints (1965). Scored for xylophone and orchestra, the Fantasy, which had been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, was performed with considerable éclat under the baton of Seiji Ozawa.

The Three Haikus are far lesser known, but reveal the composer's profound engagement with Japanese culture in a significantly different light.¹³ In these miniatures for piano Hovhaness is at his most concise: the entire score takes barely three minutes to perform. But by virtue of the very brevity of each movement, he remains absolutely true to the poetic genre from which his music is derived.

The haiku makes use of a highly compact seventeen-syllable framework—its English-language form typically being a three-line structure consisting of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The very condensation required by the genre compels the poet to convey only what is essential about his/her poetic perception of man's relationship to Nature, resulting in imagery that is at once highly concentrated and powerful. Significantly, the haiku form, which originated in the sixteenth century (or even earlier) was much favored by Ezra Pound and the Imagists, whose modernism was paradoxically undergirded by the eclectic-historicist tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticism.

The first of Hovanhess's Three Haikus is exactly seventeen measures in length.

Measures 1–5 and mm. 13–17 of the right hand part are identical, and consist of a descending four-note pianissimo motif that might be taken to represent tears figured as dissonantly falling raindrops (or vice versa). This minimalist motif and its intervening variants (see below) unify the movement through continuous repetition.

Measures 6–12, corresponding to the second line of the haiku, maintain the same basic motif, but this time in two variant forms appearing in mm. 6–9 and mm. 10–12, that is to say, in a 4 + 3 = 7 configuration.

The left-hand part, notated in the bass clef, does not enter until m. 4, but remains continuous from that point through the end. It consists of three simple melodic gestures of five measures each, all of which occur within the range of a perfect fifth, and make exclusive use of the pitches g - a-flat - c' - d-flat' - and d'. This scalar material is inflected in a distinctively Japanese manner, unlike the dissonant figuration above.

The first gesture (mm. 3–7) rises a perfect fourth from g up to c' and back again. The second (mm. 8–12) expands upon the first, rising now a diminished fifth from g to d-flat' before descending along the same pitch pathway. The third gesture toggles plaintively between d' and d-flat', then falls to g. These gestures might be taken to represent the gently undulating topography of an imaginary landscape, or even the basic lineaments of a human face. Hovhaness provides no specific verbal clues, but leaves the meaning of his musical imagery to the listener's own interpretation.

The extremely dissonant, disjunct style of the treble motif contrasts conspicuously with the nearly stepwise melodic movement in the bass. The right hand and left hand are also performed at two subtly but distinctly contrasting dynamic levels, pianissimo and piano. The movement concludes with a sustained minor sixth, whereupon dissonance is resolved and the whole fades into a misty pianississimo.

Apart from any poetic imagery the listener might bring to this piece, it is clear that Hovhaness is intentionally juxtaposing Western modernity (treble) and Eastern tradition (bass), thus suggesting the fundamental unity of ostensible opposites. He is also erasing the boundaries between instrumental music and literature, a genre-bending feature that is not only consistent with the romantic programmatic aesthetic but which has become increasingly evident in the proliferation of collaborative multimedia projects produced by artists during the past several decades.