musical composition for instruments in which one or more themes are developed through melodic imitation; it was prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries. The earliest ricercari, which were for the lute, appeared in late 15th-century manuscripts and in a publication dated 1507. Soon thereafter the style was adopted in keyboard music. Well-suited to the technical capabilities of the lute, they mixed passages in chordal style, running scale passages, and alternation of high and low phrases that suggested the many-voiced texture of polyphonic music. In succeeding decades a second style arose, characterized by melodic imitation reminiscent of the motet (a sacred vocal composition). Andrea Gabrieli (Gabrieli, Andrea) and other Venetian composers often wrote ricercari based only on one theme treated extensively in the manner of the later fugue—e.g., by stretto (playing the theme against itself with repeated, closely spaced entrances) and augmentation and diminution (playing the theme in longer or shorter note values). Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the fugue, used the term ricercar for two pieces in The Musical Offering (1747).

Other instrumental forms of the period, the canzona and fantasia, closely resembled the ricercare, particularly in the use of melodic imitation, and the names were often interchanged.