I call my novel, The Seventh Partita, a novel in the form of a ricercare. But what is a ricercare and how can this be?
Ricercare is a contrapuntal Western musical form, a predecessor to the fugue perhaps, and—this is important—not particularly well defined in its own time. In the good ole days before academic definitions of musical forms, the actual practitioners, the composers themselves, got to decide what to call the fruits of their creation. Untidy, selfish bastards!
Johann Sebastian Bach used the term late in life with his set of works called Das Musikalische Opfer, or as we call it in English, “The Musical Offering.” In this showpiece of contrapuntal virtuosity, there are two ricercars, one for three voices and one for six. Yet each has a very different structure from the other. And although I use the term “voices,” these ricercars, like most, are for instruments. These parts are called “voices” because each part is a single line, a melody, as though sung by a human (or angelic) voice.
A novel as a ricercare emulates that contrapuntal musical form. The very word “ricercare” means to search, to seek out.” This describes how one line of music would start and the other would launch to seek out the first line. In writing, you can’t easily use the same technique to write different lines simultaneously, but you can write different narratives that happen at different times and seek each other out before finally resolving.
In my interpretation of the form, every character in it is seeking something, so there is a sense of exploration characterized by a unified resolution that functions as the conclusion of the work.
I think of my novel as more than just a search for a missing work by Bach. It describes an alternative reality (euphemism for a slightly lunatic world) of current-day Honolulu, where all the action takes place. We don’t really have to pay a fee to renew our citizenship. Yet. We don’t have a separate sovereign nation-state area where foreign states can conduct business and society as they determine. Yet.
But some things are absolutely real-world real. There really is a treasury of up to 200 undiscovered works by Bach that may actually still exist. When I went to Leipzig in 2024, I talked to a couple of scholars about this. The music is still realistically up for grabs somewhere in the world. And if these priceless works have survived the brutality of time, why wouldn’t they be in Shanghai, where someone with the required worldly resources could give them a home?
I’m a huge fan of contrapuntal music, particularly that of Johann Sebastian Bach (of course!). I try to emulate the form by creating narratives separated by time. The novel is in the third person past tense, but all dialog is in the present tense, the way screenplays are written. The dialog is set apart with different formatting so many readers sense it without explicitly noticing it.
Before I wrote the novel, I created a map to follow for the different “panes” of time because some had to be presented before other panes to make sense. Here’s an image taken from my working table of panes. You’ll see each chapter, it’s size, name, and “When” which has a code with “0” meaning the now, and negative numbers as places in the past. These past events shed light on the panes that they precede. A pane for everything and everything in its pane.
Anyway, someone asked me, “how is a novel a ricercare?” and this is how. At least to my mind. Love, peace, and good vibes,
Doug
Alewa, Oahu, Hawaii
14 April 2025
PS One of the elements the novel chases is the definition of “authentic,” and presents questions about the authenticity of the protagonist’s harpsichord, nominally by Pascal Taskin. After all, these are exceedingly rare. Taskin is sometimes called the Stradivari of harpsichords, but while there are more than 200 authenticated surviving Stradivari violins, there are only six such surviving Taskins! I got to see and touch one (the sign said Do Not Touch, but I couldn’t help myself) in a museum in Hamburg, Germany in 2024. The name emblazoned on the front was not his, but of Andreas Ruckers.
