(Fr.: ‘school fugue’).
A prescriptive model for writing fugue developed within the Paris Conservatoire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Important contributions to the writing of fugue were made by Fétis (1824), Cherubini (1835) and Dubois (1901), but André Gédalge’s Traité de la fugue (Paris 1901; Eng. trans., 1965) is acknowledged as the classic text. As enumerated by Gédalge, the structural components of the fugue d’école, generally translated into English as the ‘scholastic fugue’ or ‘school fugue’, are eight in number: (1) the subject, (2) the answer, (3) one or more countersubjects, (4) the exposition, (5) the counter-exposition, (6) the episodes (in French, développements or divertissements), (7) the stretto, and (8) the pedal point. This model follows the main outlines of the ‘classic’ fugue as outlined in Fugue, §1, but the prominence of a counter-exposition and of pedal point are far beyond their actual presence in fugal repertories of the past. Although Gédalge urged every modern composer to undertake the study of fugue, he readily acknowledged that the ultimate goal was not ‘expressly to write fugues, but to acquire the technical mastery that only fugal writing can bring’. It is widely though not universally understood, therefore, that Gédalge’s treatise, while deriving much of its detail and many of its musical examples from fugal writing of the past, is not primarily intended as a guide to the study and analysis of that repertory. The list of 20th-century composers who learnt this model while studying at the Paris Conservatoire includes most French composers since 1900.
PAUL WALKER