INVENTION

in music, any of a number of markedly dissimilar compositional forms dating from the 16th century to the present. While its exact meaning has never been defined, the term has often been affixed to compositions of a novel, progressive characteri.e., compositions that do not fit established categories. The earliest-known use of the term in Premier livre des inventions musicales (1555; First Book of Musical Inventions) by the Frenchman Clment Janequin clearly alludes to the composer's highly original programmatic chansonssecular French part-songs containing extramusical allusions (e.g., imitations of battle sounds). Similarly capricious or novel effects occur in John Dowland's Invention for Two to Play upon One Lute (1597); Lodovico da Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiastici . . . Nova inventione (1602; One-Hundred Ecclesiastical Concerti . . . New Invention), the first sacred collection to require a basso continuo; and Antonio Vivaldi's Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione, opus 8 (1720; The Contest Between Harmony and Invention), which contains, among others, a number of programmatic concerti. Best known perhaps is the set of two-part inventions and 15 three-part sinfonias (often called Three-Part Inventions) for clavier (c. 1720) by J.S. Bach, each of which is characterized by the contrapuntal elaboration of a single melodic idea and for which Francesco Bonporti's Invenzioni for violin and bass (1712) may have served as a model. Twentieth-century composers of pieces entitled Invention include the Austrian Alban Berg, the Germans Boris Blacher and Wolfgang Fortner, and the Russian-American composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who followed Bach's lead more or less directly.