(Lat.: ‘flight’, from fugare: ‘to flee’, ‘to chase’).
The Latin (and Italian) cognate of the English ‘fugue’. In its Latin form the word first came to be associated with music in the 14th century, when musicians used it, along with the French ‘chace’ and the Italian ‘caccia’, to designate canon (see Canon (i)). The earliest writers to discuss these pieces, beginning with Jacques de Liège in the first half of the 14th century, indicated that they were so designated because the words referred to fleeing or chasing and thus pointed up the way in which the various imitative voices in a canon ‘fled before’ or ‘chased after’ each other while performing the same notes. As non-canonic types of imitation began to appear in 15th-century composition, the words ‘chace’ and ‘caccia’ fell from use, but ‘fuga’ continued to be applied, along with another Latin word, ‘imitatio’. Zarlino may deserve the principal credit for cementing the relationship between imitative counterpoint and the words ‘fuga’ and ‘imitatio’, and from his time onwards ‘fuga’ (in Latin and Italian) and eventually its various cognates (‘fugue’ in French and English, ‘Fuge’ in German) have enjoyed an association with imitative counterpoint in its myriad guises. This complex development is outlined in detail in the article Fugue. At no point along the way do musicians seem to have recognized any particular distinction between these various cognates, which they used in whatever form suited their purposes. (German writers, for instance, long used the Latin form, even when writing primarily in German.) Present-day writers almost always use their own language’s spelling of the word. (J. Haar: ‘Zarlino’s Definition of Fugue and Imitation’, JAMS, xxiv, 1971, pp.226–54)
PAUL WALKER