A ricercar (or ricercare, recercar; the terms are interchangeable) is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 - 1600 Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 and 1750. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece. A ricercar may explore the permutations of a given motif, and in that regard may follow the piece used as illustration. In Music, a motif or motive is a perceivable or salient recurring fragment or succession of notes that may be used to construct the entirety or parts E. g. "Ricercar sopra Benedictus" would develop motives from a motet titled "Benedictus. " The term is also used to designate an etude or study that explores a technical device in playing an instrument, or singing.

In its most common contemporary usage, it refers to an early kind of fugue, particularly one of a serious character in which the subject uses long note values. In Music, a fugue (ˈfjuːg is a type of contrapuntal composition or technique of composition for a fixed number of parts, normally referred However the term has a considerably more varied historical usage.

In the sixteenth century, the word ricercar could refer to several types of compositions. Terminology was flexible, even lax then: whether a composer called an instrumental piece a toccata, a canzona, a fantasia, or a ricercar was clearly not a matter of strict taxonomy but a rather arbitrary decision. Toccata (from Italian toccare, "to touch" is a Virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or Plucked string instrument In music a canzona (also Canzone) was a 16th-century multipart vocal setting of a literary canzone and a 16th - and 17th-century instrumental The fantasia (also fantasy fancy Fantasie fantaisie is a musical composition with its roots in the art of Improvisation. Yet ricercars fall into two general types: a predominantly homophonic piece, with occasional runs and passagework, not unlike a toccata; and a sectional work in which each section begins imitatively, usually in a variation form. In Music, homophony (hoʊˈmɒfəni from Greek "homófonos" where ομοιο = the same and φωνή = a sound tone is a texture in which two or more In music imitation is when a musical gesture is repeated later in a different form but retaining its original character Examples of both types of ricercars can be found in the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. Girolamo Frescobaldi (baptized mid-September 1583 – March 1 1643 was an Italian musician one of the most important Composers of keyboard music in the late The second type of ricercar, the imitative, contrapuntal type, was to prove the more important historically, and eventually developed into the fugue.

This second, imitative type first appeared in the middle part of the sixteenth century, and developed parallel to the motet, with which it shared many of its imitative procedures. In Western music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions Instrumental transcriptions of motets were common in the early sixteenth century, and clearly composers began to create works which were like them in character but written for the instrument alone (keyboard or lute were common instruments represented in this development). Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck (either Fretted or unfretted and a deep round back or more specifically to an instrument from Since the text of the motet was no longer available as a structural or unifying device, some other method of musical organization needed to be found: variation form proved the most malleable and durable.

During the Baroque era, the imitative ricercar gradually evolved into the fugue, just as the instrumental canzona evolved into the sonata. Usage of sonata The Baroque applied the term sonata to a variety of works though most works in the Baroque Period were fugues and toccatas Some works which are indistinguishable from fugues were called "ricercars" even as late as Bach, with the difference that the note values were generally longer and the character slightly more serious. WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section.2 This article is written in British English including maximised use of "-ise" Good examples are the three-part and six-part ricercars from The Musical Offering (1747) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The Musical Offering (German title Musikalisches Opfer or Das Musikalische Opfer) BWV 1079 is a collection of canons Year 1747 ( MDCCXLVII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section.2 This article is written in British English including maximised use of "-ise"

References and further reading

• "Ricercar," "Fugue," "Counterpoint" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd. , 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. Gustave Reese ( November 29 1899, New York City – – September 7 1977, Berkeley California) was an American New York, W. W. Norton & Co. , 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. Manfred Bukofzer ( March 27, 1910 &ndash December 7, 1955) was a German - American Musicologist and humanist New York, W. W. Norton & Co. , 1947. ISBN 0-393-09745-5
• Ursula Kirkendale, "The Source for Bach's Musical Offering," Journal of the Amwerican Musicological Society 33 (2980), 99-141.
• The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5

  Also see Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter, which includes a section entitled "Six-part Ricercar". Gödel Escher Bach an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize -winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, described Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15 1945 in New York New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness thinking and creativity

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