VINCENZO LAVIGNA, Sei Fughe per Organo. Casa Musicale Edizioni Carrara, Bergamo (Italia), No. 4513. Vincenzo Lavigna (1776–1836) was, in his youth, maestro al cembalo at La Scala, and in later years, maestro di solfeggio at the Milan Conservatory, and private teacher to Giuseppi Verdi. These pieces are transmitted in a neatly written manuscript from the Milan Conservatory, entitled Sei Fughe per Organo, Per uso Di me (“for my personal use”), and dated November 1, 1792 (a terminus ante quem, signifying that they were composed earlier). Each piece consists of a Largo or an Andante that ends on the half-cadence, and is then followed by a lengthy fugue. It was once customary to view fugal writing from this period as a kind of decadent fall from the “golden age” of the baroque, but perceptions change, and one may now see in these examples simply a non-emergence from the purely harmonic outlook that was common to both periods. What is remarkable is the stylistic congruity between the slow and fast movements––that the fugue is in no way an “intentional archaism,” but seems to flow as naturally out of this late-18th-century style as, say, the consecutive movements in an Italian sinfonia. Also remarkable is the wonderful disregard for many of the strictures that came later, in codified, academic fugue-writing––such as regular countersubjects, uniformity of texture, orderly voice progressions, and even formal exposition. The feature that best characterizes this music is what, in a later period, would have been termed “continuous song,” or, in an earlier period, “fertility of invention”––the ability to generate a new idea or perspective in almost every musical sentence, rather than to dwell laboriously within the confines of predetermined themes and motives.