ABSTRACT
Comprised of nearly 300 pieces, embracing virtually all the common genres of French organ repertoire, notated on 540 pre-ruled pages, with hitherto only sixteen pieces securely attributed to the esteemed organist of Louis XIV, Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue, Le livre d’orgue de Montréal is the principal manuscript of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French organ music. Some of the organ fugues interspersed throughout Le livre d’orgue de Montréal form part of larger polyphonic settings of Magnificats and organ masses. The manuscript also includes organ fugues specifically identified in the context of the liturgy and subsumed in alternatim practice, the alternation between organ versets and repeating psalm tones. This study focuses on yet another group of thirteen consecutive fugues, which, by the absence of a psalm tone, are treated either as a cantus firmus or as a paraphrase thereof, and on account of their peculiar placement outside an identifiable liturgical context, are suggestive of solo concert repertoire or pedagogical purposes.
