This chapter is based on ethical distinctions. Creating clarity in ethical thought depends on the clarity of distinctions we make in discussing ethical issues. Achieving clarity and consistency in ethical behavior requires understanding some basic distinctions.

As technology becomes more powerful, intelligent, and autonomous, its usage also creates unintended consequences and ethical challenges for a vast array of stakeholders. The ethical implications of technology on society, for example, range from job losses (such as potential loss of truck driver jobs due to automation) to lying and deception about a product that may occur within a technology firm or on user-generated content platforms. The challenges around ethical technology design are so multifaceted that there is an essential need for each stakeholder to accept responsibility. Even policymakers who are charged with providing the appropriate regulatory framework and legislation about technologies have an obligation to learn about the pros and cons of proposed options.

It has frequently been observed that the techniques that Purcell employed in his trio sonatas found a new outlet in his orchestral symphonies and overtures of the 1690s. Giovanni Battista Draghi’s 1687 Cecilian ode had shown how a large-scale work could begin with an Italianate orchestral sinfonia rather than the more conventional English take on the French overture, and in their odes and theatre music of the 1690s Purcell and Blow embraced this feature with enthusiasm. What is not often acknowledged is that, Draghi’s example aside, Purcell was effectively forced to invent this genre for himself, adapting the chamber sonata to the larger orchestral resources available at performances of court odes and in the theatre.

At the climax of his last great choral work, the orchestral Te Deum and Jubilate in D major for the St Cecilia’s Day celebrations of 1694, Purcell dusted off a contrapuntal motif familiar from the end of his much earlier Fantazia XII (Ex. 6.1). Moreover, he also used exactly the same compositional conceit in his working of this motif – no doubt, in fact, his very choice of materials was motivated by the desire to select an idea suitable for subjection to the extreme contrapuntal augmentation of bars 201–8, an illustration of the words ‘world without end’.

What was Purcell aiming to do when he wrote his Chaconne for two flutes in Act III of The Prophetess, or the History of Dioclesian (1690; see facing page)? Such questions are not always easy to answer, but in this particular case there are strong grounds for optimism. Even without the informative heading, it is quickly obvious how the piece is constructed. Neither the repetitive ground bass nor the canon at the unison between the recorder parts could plausibly have arisen fortuitously, so at least in the context of compositional technique we can disregard many of the usual caveats about intention: in this work, Purcell was seeking to compose a canon ‘Two in one upon a Ground’, with the second recorder following the first, two bars later, at the unison.

One way we can get at the kinds of creative strategies Purcell employed in his most contrapuntally intricate music is to examine it alongside contemporary theoretical writings, including his own. This chapter, then, is principally concerned with the establishment of a methodological basis for the analysis that follows later. This basis is unfolded in three parallel strands: the examination of theoretical texts by Purcell and his immediate contemporaries, the situation of these within the wider context of Restoration cultural discourse, and the analysis of Purcell’s music in the light of the insights gained from both. It culminates in a more detailed study of the first part of one of Purcell’s most accomplished fantazias, with the aim of recovering the composer’s working methods through a careful analysis of his use of counterpoint, or fugeing, as he called it in ‘The Art of Descant’.

Most of Purcell’s sonatas contain at least one fugal movement in duple time, usually the second movement of the sonata and frequently entitled ‘canzona’. In many respects this kind of movement enshrines in miniature the full range of issues behind the varied and contradictory reception of Purcell’s instrumental music examined in the Introduction. It certainly brings into sharp focus the dichotomy between, on the one hand, those who wish to hear in Purcell’s sonatas the echoes of a dying tradition of English consort music and, on the other, those for whom they sound a triumphant herald for the coming of the age of Bach and Handel. For all that Purcell’s canzonas superficially resemble the fugues familiar from eighteenth-century repertoire, however, the techniques he deploys in his canzonas and related movements can be clearly related back to his concern for compositional artifice.