Papers by James S . MacKay
HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America, 2025
Haydn composed many hundreds of minuets during his long career, enriching the courtly dance with ... more Haydn composed many hundreds of minuets during his long career, enriching the courtly dance with compositional skill and ingenuity. One of the ways in which he sought to elevate the minuet genre was through contrapuntal artifice, including canon. The famous “Hexenmenuett” (“Witches’ Minuet”) from his “Quinten” Quartet, Op. 76 no. 2, dating from 1797, is the most famous of these works, in which the viola and cello duplicate the leading voice of violins I and II at the distance of an octave. Haydn’s interest in canonic minuets dates back to the early 1760s, however. Minuets from three early symphonies (Nos. 3, 23, and 44) are in canon, along with a keyboard minuet from the early 1770s (Hob. XVI: 25), and another from a baryton trio (Hob. XI: 94) dating from the same time-period.
This study, building on the concepts of Denis Collins, Alan Gosman, Melanie Lowe, and Gretchen Wheelock, examines these five early canonic minuets, exploring Haydn’s rationale for incorporating the strictest type of counterpoint into what is typically the lightest movement of Classical multi-movement works. Various precedents for canonic minuets (by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Georg Philipp Telemann, among others) exist in mid-18th-century Europe: moreover, the Baroque musical taste of Haydn’s employer and patron, Nikolaus Esterházy, likely played a role. Haydn’s canonic minuets display his playful command of polyphony: the fusing of stylized dance and learned style in these movements displays his lifelong quest to compose "a really new minuet."
Haydn’s Last Creative Period, ed. Federico Gon. Speculum musicae, Volume 42. Turnhout: Brepols, 2021
In an 1829 letter, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously described the string quartet as “an intell... more In an 1829 letter, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously described the string quartet as “an intelligent conversation between four rational people.” This quote, however, describes a state of affairs that had existed in the genre at least since Haydn’s Sun Quartets, Opus 20 of 1772. Haydn’s use of imitative counterpoint in these works, from Baroque invention-like beginnings to concluding fugues, was a departure from the violin-dominant quartets that he and other composers largely favored prior to then. However, fugue and invention, though democratic in that (ideally) they distribute melodic material equally amongst the performers, still fall short of the interplay of true conversation. The material’s initial statement (and thus the performer who first presents it) has priority, while the following voices simply reiterate, rather than respond to, or develop from this statement. Using the learned imitative artifice of his Opus 20 quartets as a point of departure, this study will explore how Haydn adapted and transformed Baroque contrapuntal devices to mesh with an aesthetic of conversational counterpoint in his later quartets (chiefly Opp. 50-76), in which the polyphonic development of opening material arises naturally out of the musical discourse without dominating it, as it often threatened to do in Opus 20.
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Papers by James S . MacKay
This study, building on the concepts of Denis Collins, Alan Gosman, Melanie Lowe, and Gretchen Wheelock, examines these five early canonic minuets, exploring Haydn’s rationale for incorporating the strictest type of counterpoint into what is typically the lightest movement of Classical multi-movement works. Various precedents for canonic minuets (by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Georg Philipp Telemann, among others) exist in mid-18th-century Europe: moreover, the Baroque musical taste of Haydn’s employer and patron, Nikolaus Esterházy, likely played a role. Haydn’s canonic minuets display his playful command of polyphony: the fusing of stylized dance and learned style in these movements displays his lifelong quest to compose "a really new minuet."