Transcription
Well, again today, I'm going to talk to you about the genre of music known as the fugue. This is discussed in the *Camión* ninth brief edition, beginning at the bottom of page 113. So, the fugue is probably the most difficult type of piece to explain to people who are unfamiliar with this genre. It's also perhaps the most difficult type of piece to compose. It's maybe the most difficult type of piece to perform. It's just difficult in every way. So, just kind of bear with me, and I'll start at the beginning.
First of all, the word "fugue" is kind of interesting. It's root is the same root that we find in the word "fugitive." It means "flight." I am not sure what the connection is, and I think it probably has to do with something like a flight of imagination or a flight of fancy, kind of an old-fashioned use of the term "flight." But that's just kind of a guess on my part. I don't think anyone really knows why this type of piece is called a fugue or a flight, but that's my instinct.
So, a fugue: what it is is it is a polyphonic composition that is based on one main theme called the subject. The subject is the main theme of a fugue. Now, it's not the only thing that you hear, but it is the thing that you hear right at the very beginning of a fugue. All fugues begin with a presentation of the subject, and we hear the subject many times throughout a fugue, but initially we hear it all by itself in one layer. These different layers of the polyphonic texture of a fugue are referred to as voices.
Now, this is maybe the first potentially confusing aspect of it. The fugue is conceived of as if it were written for different voices. For example, a four-voice fugue: in a four-voice fugue, we would speak of an alto voice, a soprano voice, a tenor voice, or bass voice. But they need not necessarily be voices; it's more like voice ranges. So, for example, if I'm playing a fugue on the piano, well, my the upper two fingers of my right hand most of the time would have the soprano voice, and the lower two fingers of my right hand would have the alto voice, and the upper two or three fingers of my left hand might be presenting the tenor voice, and the lower few fingers of my left hand would be presenting the bass voice. If I was playing it on the organ, I could use my feet on the pedals to play the bass voice and my hands to play the other voices, however many there may be.
Since a fugue is a polyphonic composition, it has to have a minimum of two voices. I'm using the quote marks here because they aren't necessarily really voices. They could be: you could have a group of vocalists singing a fugue; you could have a group of instrumentalists playing a fugue; you could have one solo instrumentalist playing a fugue, as long as they were playing an instrument which is capable of playing more than one note at a time. So, as I said in an earlier lecture when I was sort of giving a preview of all these different genres, you cannot play a fugue on a flute or a trumpet, because those are instruments which can only play one pitch at a time. You can perform a fugue on the violin; the violin can play more than one note at a time, but it's trickier. It's a lot easier to play multiple notes simultaneously on the keyboard instruments. So, it just kind of turns out that most fugues were written for keyboard, and remember when I say keyboard, that's that's really how they spoke of keyboard instruments in the: they didn't necessarily make a big distinction between the harpsichord and the organ, which were the two most important keyboard instruments at the time; they just kind of used the generic word "keyboard" or "clavier."
So, a fugue isn't really necessarily an instrumental piece; it isn't necessarily a vocal piece; it's a polyphonic composition based on a main theme called the subject. So, if I were to compose a fugue, the first thing that I hope to—the first decision I would have to make is how many voices should there be in my fugue? Got to be a minimum of two, and I would say probably most fugues, for example by the greatest master of fugues, J.S. Bach—no question, J.S. Bach is the greatest composer of fugues, although lots of other composers wrote fugues—most fugues by J.S. Bach, let's say, are three-voice fugues or four-voice fugues. He did compose a few five-voice fugues, and it's theoretically possible—I mean, you could kite—you could have an unlimited number of voices, but the problem is, of course, the pitch range available to you is limited, and it's going to be hard to hear those different voices in their respective correct ranges. In other words, if they are overlapping too much, if they are encroaching on each other's ranges, it's going to be hard to hear those different voices as separate entities; it's going to be harder to sort of track them and maintain their separateness and maintain the independence of the different voices.
This is a key thing about polyphonic texture. Remember, in polyphonic texture, you have multiple melodies going on at the same time, and it is understood that those different melodies are of more or less equal importance to each other. That's the definition of polyphonic texture. That's different from homophonic texture, where you have one main melody which is acknowledged and understood to be the most important thing, and anything else that might be going on is in the background; it's support. Okay, so all fugues—and I'm going to give you some more terms associated with fugues—the opening section of a fugue is called the exposition, and all fugues tend to start out the same way: they start out by presenting the subject in each of the different voices in succession. So, and it doesn't really matter where we start; we could start with the soprano voice, the highest voice, presenting the subject, and when that subject has been presented in its entirety, then maybe the alto voice will present it, and then maybe the tenor voice, and finally the bass. So, we could, for example, present the subject in each of the different voices from the highest to lowest, or we could do the reverse: from lowest to highest. We could start somewhere in the middle and work our way outward; it doesn't really matter. But what will happen is we will hear the subject presented in one voice at a time.
Now, let's say just for the sake of argument that I decide to begin my fugue with the subject appearing in the soprano. So, you will hear just that subject first, by itself, and then it will enter—the subject will make an entrance in some other voice. While this subject is appearing in some other voice, the soprano, or whichever voice started out, doesn't just stop; it carries on, but with some other material. It's gotta be something that blends well with the subject, alright, because now the subject is appearing in another voice; it's gonna be something different, but something that blends well with the subject. And after we've heard the subject in its entirety in that second voice, then it will appear in the third voice, and then both of the other voices which I already started will carry on with some different, contrasting melodic material, and so on. You—the idea—so the subject appears successively in different voices, keeping in mind—they aren't necessarily voices, but we think of them as voices—and as each—it's sort of like a relay race, except the runners, when they've handed off the baton, which is the subject, they don't just stop; they keep going, but with material that is different, that is not the subject, but other melodic material. Sometimes the thing that they present after they've handed off the subject to the next voice—something—is the thing that they present—is it appears consistently from then on. In other words, whenever the subject appears, then this other—what we call a counter-subject—may appear consistently. This is something that's optional in a fugue. If a composer decides to have a counter-subject, then he's kind of obliged to be consistent about it. Right now, a composer doesn't have to do this; he could just have any old stuff appear—different stuff each time—appear in conjunction with the subject whenever it appears. But if he decides to have a counter-subject, then that counter-subject is a constant companion throughout the course of the fugue. Whenever the subject appears, the counter-subject must appear, and if you're not going to do that, then you shouldn't have a counter-subject in the first place.
The fugue is kind of a funny type of composition because, in a sense, there are these sort of rules or procedures, but there isn't really necessarily a strict form. In fact, some music theorists, some composers say that fugue is not really a form; it's more of a procedure, and I don't know that you know how much seriousness to give that distinction, but there is something to it, because as you'll see as I talk more about fugues, there are certain things that all fugues have; there are a lot of things that are optional, like the counter-subject just explained, that most fugues actually don't have. And the reason some of these optional things don't appear is because a fugue is difficult enough to compose just with the standard stuff that you have to have, like the polyphonic texture and the repeated appearance of the subject. Right, even that is difficult enough on its own. Once you start incorporating other complications, like a counter-subject, for example, it compounds the difficulty.
Okay, so the exposition is the opening section of a fugue, and just remember, "exposition" meaning we are being exposed to the subject; we are being exposed to the musical material for the first time. Exposition is an opening section, and in that exposition, we will hear the subject appear in successively in each of the different voices, one at a time. We may also hear a counter-subject that is presented in conjunction with the subject whenever it appears. Okay, so let's say we get through the exposition of the fugue, and the subject has appeared in all of the different voices. Okay, so that means we will have heard it three, maybe four times, depending on how many different voices there are. What happens after that? Well, after that, we have a contrasting section called an episode. An episode is a section of a fugue where the subject is not being heard, where the subject is deliberately withheld, because remember this idea: we have to have continuity, but we have to have variety. The fact that we have this main theme called the subject that's going to appear and reappear throughout the fugue—that's what provides the continuity. But if all we were to hear was that same subject over and over again, we would quickly become bored. So, we need to have contrasting material, and that's the role of the episodes. The episodes are sections within a fugue where the subject is not heard, and instead we have some kind of contrasting material. So, typically in a fugue, we have an exposition, and then we have an episode, and then we will have—for that—for the rest of the fugue, we will have appearances, or we call them entrances, of the subject, and the subject may enter in one voice at a time; it might enter in two voices, what have you. If we have a counter-subject, then the counter-subject will have to appear—will be obliged to appear—whenever that subject appears. And when we've heard the subject a few more times, then we'll have a contrasting episode, and then that will prepare an eventual return of the subject, and we can go on like this for quite a while. Fugues can vary in length. Now, J.S. Bach wrote some fugues that are only two minutes long; he wrote some fugues that are 15 minutes long. They vary in length.
Okay, so so far, I've described pretty much all of the standard things that a fugue must have: it must be polyphonic; it must have a subject; it has an opening which is called the exposition; all fugues have that, where the subject appears in each voice at a time; it will have contrasting episodes periodically throughout the course of the fugue where the subject is not heard; and then we will see entrances of the subject in different voices. That's that's all the sort of standard equipment that we might find in a fugue. The rest of the things I'm going to talk about are optional things which, in most cases, add to the level of difficulty, of complexity, to what is already a very difficult and complex type of piece, both to compose and to perform. By the way, the difficulty in performing a fugue is particularly—if you are one person—if you are performing a fugue on a keyboard instrument, especially, or even more so maybe on a violin, because remember, it's harder to play—it's possible, but it's harder to play more than one note at a time on a violin—the difficulty of a fugue is you kind of have to split yourself into several different people. You have to—each—each different melodic line has to have its own shape and its own personality, and of course, each melodic line is independent from each of the others. So, imagine, for example, if it were possible with the human voice—again, you cannot sing a fugue all by yourself—but imagine if you could—imagine if you have three or four different mouths and three or four different sets of vocal chords—imagine you could sing three or four different melodies simultaneously, right, and shape each one of them. You know, it's kind of hard to imagine yourself doing that; you know, we're not used to even conceptualizing something like that, but that's exactly what you have to do if you're playing a fugue as a solo performer on, let's say, a keyboard instrument or a violin or a guitar—guitar's another instrument that could perform a fugue as a solo performer.
Okay, so anyway, uh, additional complicating things that we might find in a fugue. So, I already mentioned one, and that's the counter-subject; that's an optional thing, and it adds a certain level of difficulty. Here's some other things, and these are terms that you will also find in the book that are going to be in boldface type or italics. Okay, so one of them is a thing called stretto, s-t-r-e-t-t-o. Stretto literally means "stress" in Italian. Okay, so stretto means taking the subject of the fugue and, instead of having it—remember how I talked about the exposition where we get to hear the subject all the way through before it appears in the next voice, and then we hear it all the way through there, and then when it's through, we hear it in another voice—well, imagine instead of waiting for the subject to get all the way through, you had rapidly deployed, overlapping presentations of the subject. That's what stretto is; that's when the subject is answered before it hasn't had a chance to complete—it is answered in one voice before it is completed in the previous voice. Okay, so what's so difficult about this? Well, it means that you have to compose a subject—in order for this to work, you have to compose a subject that sounds good when juxtaposed against itself, slightly delayed in time, and not every subject is going to sound good when juxtaposed against itself, delayed in time, right? So, that means that if you're going to have a stretto, you have to have to first figure out if it will work with the subject that you've chosen, and if it doesn't, you either have to discard the idea of having a stretto or you have to change the subject so that it will work, so that it will sort of interlock well with itself. All right, so that's stretto.
Now, here's something that can be added that is not a complicating factor, okay, and there's something that we find fairly commonly in fugues, and that is a pedal tone or a pedal point. The book also refers to it as an organ point, but nobody really calls it that; they call it a pedal tone or a pedal point. This is very—this is very simple to understand. Imagine you have a bunch of melodies going on simultaneously, let's say two or three melodies going on, but then accompanying that—let's say—let's say that one of the layers of melody has a single note that is sustained. All right, that's what a pedal point is. It's called a pedal point because it's the kind of thing that's very easy to do on the organ; you just smash down on one of those pedals while your fingers continue to play lots of different notes, and what will happen is that pedal tone will sometimes form a consonance; sometimes it'll blend well with the notes that are going on in the melody; sometimes it'll form a dissonance, right? So, it creates an interesting effect, and in the fugue that we will listen to—the fugue that's in your listening—the G-minor fugue by J.S. Bach—there is at least one instance of a pedal tone, and it's very easy to pick out, and I'll—what we're going to do is we're going to listen to that fugue, you know, I'll point out some of these features as they happen. So, pedal point: fairly simple to execute, and it's fairly commonly found in fugues.
The next few things I'm going to talk about are ways that the subject itself can be manipulated or can be altered within a fugue. Alright, so the first one of these—four, and they are listed in the book—is inversion. Inversion is simply when we take the profile of that subject—let's say it goes up and then it goes down a little bit, then it goes back up—whatever that shape is—if we invert it, we simply turn it upside down. So, with the subject starting with, let's say, an upward leap and then a downward step, well, now it's going to have a downward leap and an upward step. Alright, and again, this is—this is a complicating factor because a subject that sounds good in its original form might not sound good when it's flipped upside down, when it's inverted. And so, inversion is one way of altering the subject, and the point would be that somewhere in the fugue you might have a presentation of the subject that is inverted, and if you can pull that off and have it sound good—like it doesn't sound artificial and contrived, right, and not forced—sounds like, "Oh, that makes sense. If you know—I didn't even notice—oh, that's an inverted presentation of the subject. How clever!" Here's another one: retrograde. Retrograde is when we take the subject—whatever it is—the pitches, the rhythms of that subject, and we flip it around, back to front; we simply reverse it. So, let's say if the subject started out with the notes A, B, C, D, alright, well, once we retrograde it, now it's going to end with the notes D, C, B, A. Alright, so retrograde simply means backwards, and we're free—we've heard this term "retro" all the time—means looking back. So, something that is presented retrograde is simply backwards, in the reverse order, right? And again, this—this might—it might be difficult to pull off because a subject that sounds good in its original form might not necessarily sound good anymore when it is backwards, right? Okay, so both retrograde and inversion are fairly rare in fugues. Again, it's difficult enough to compose a good fugue without giving yourself that extra challenge of saying, "Hmm, I wonder if I can work in a retrograde version of the subject, or an inverted one, or a retrograde inversion"—you could do that as well—you can have it be upside down and back to front, right?
Okay, so two other ways that the subject can be inverted, and these are a little bit simpler, and these both have to do with rhythm. Okay. Augmentation is when we take all of the time values of the notes in this subject—let's say we've got—let's say two quarter notes and a half note and then an eighth note—if we take all of those time values and we double them—we exactly double them—well, what did I say? Two quarters, a half note, and an eighth note. Well, now we would have two half notes, a whole note, and a quarter note. So, the subject will end up being exactly twice as long in time as it was before, right? And usually when we see this in a fugue, what the composer will do is somewhere in the course of a fugue he will have an augmented—I think that's the current—augmented—augmented version of the subject juxtaposed against a conventional, normal presentation of the subject. The opposite of augmentation is diminution, and this is when we take all the original time values, the original rhythmic durations of the notes, and we chop them all in half. So, now the subject is going to be exactly half as long in time as it was before. That's diminution. So, augmentation and diminution both have to do with—strictly speaking—the time values of the notes, the durations of the notes of the subject.
Okay, I think I've covered most of these things: pedal point, episodes, yup. Now, here's some other things about fugues. A fugue can be simply a one-movement, standalone composition. In fact, the one that we're gonna listen to—the one that's in your listening—the Bach Fugue in G minor—by the way, Bach wrote an awful lot of fugues in G minor. So, this one has a nickname to distinguish it from the other fugues that Bach wrote in the key of G minor. This one's known as the "Little Fugue" because it's only about four minutes long. There's another fugue by Bach in G minor that's called the "Great Fugue," which is longer. Bach wrote so many fugues, I would not be surprised if he wrote dozens of fugues in G minor. So, this particular fugue is a single-movement work, and sometimes a fugue is a single-movement work; sometimes a fugue is part of a multi-movement work. So, here's a very common combination: a two-movement work called "Prelude and Fugue." Alright, I talked a little bit about what a prelude is in an earlier lecture and in the overview of different instrumental genres. A prelude is just a piece that comes before something else; that's all that it means, and that's really all that you can say about it, because a prelude can be in any style; it could be composed for any instrument or group of instruments; it simply means a piece that comes before something else. So, a very common combination—and Bach wrote literally dozens of these preludes and fugues—in fact, one of his best-known compositions is called *The Well-Tempered Clavier*. Actually, there are two books of *The Well-Tempered Clavier*; each book is a prelude and a fugue in each different key, major and minor key. So, there are 24 preludes and fugues in each—in book one of *The Well-Tempered Clavier* and book two of *The Well-Tempered Clavier*.
Okay, so sometimes we have a two-movement composition: prelude and fugue. They would both be in the same key; they would be intended to be performed together, one after the other. They would probably have a contrasting character, though. Remember that the whole idea of a multi-movement piece is that we can have contrast of mood from one movement to the next. Within a given movement, we usually have one basic mood, but from one movement to the next, we very often have contrast. Another common two-movement work was the Toccata and Fugue. The book doesn't really mention—I don't believe the book mentions the toccata—I'm going to talk a little bit about the toccata. The toccata—the word "toccata" literally comes from the Italian word for "touch." In fact, if you see it spelled T-O-C-C-A-T-A, the TOC part—it comes from the Italian verb "toccare," which means "to touch," and it's kind of a similar word in English, right? It's "touch" in English, but it's "toccare" in Italian—to touch. And so, this is a piece—a toccata is a keyboard piece that is designed to show off the performer's touch—that is, their technique on the instrument. It's a flashy kind of a piece; it will often have lots of fast runs, and it also is supposed to sound kind of improvised, and very often keyboard players at that time did improvise toccatas. Sometimes they would be improvised and made up on the spot; sometimes they would be written out, but if they were written out, they were written out in such a way as to sound improvised, so that even though it's written out, it has this spontaneous, unpredictable kind of character to it, and that's probably what makes it such a good companion to the fugue, because the toccata sounds improvised and kind of unpredictable; the fugue, on the other hand, is a kind of piece that is hyper-organized and rigorous and, you know, very demanding. Now, believe it or not, there were people back in the old days—and there are probably still some geniuses today—who can do this, but J.S. Bach, for example, could improvise a fugue. And that's—
Probably, that is the most difficult musical feat that I can think of: to improvise a few, to come up with a polyphonic composition on the spot, in which each of the different voices presents a subject consistently. It's that's something that I sadly cannot do. Okay, so took cotton fugue, a very common to movement composition, and in fact, probably one of the this is this is a piece you might recognize. I'm just gonna play the first few notes of the most famous Toccata and Fugue, which is thought to be by J.S. Bach. It's usually credited to J.S. Bach. We're not really 100% positive if this piece is by J.S. Bach, but if you've ever heard this thing, which people associate with like Halloween, it's like scary music. [Music] That's the opening section, and then we have these runs later. [Music] Lots of stopping and starting. [Music] Like I'm not even sure what I'm gonna do next. You [Music] And it goes on from there, but you get the idea. It's it's sort of grandiose, right? It's sort of bombastic. It is; it gives the impression of being like I'm making it up as I go along, and that's why there should be sort of dramatic pauses in it. That's all very much the style of a toccata. Now, that's just the beginning of the toccata. If you find—and I think I put up a recording of it actually in my saved videos—that piece is not in your listening, but it's such a familiar piece. I found a recording of it; I put it up in the save videos so that you can actually see an organist recorded live performing that piece. So you'll hear the Takada, and it comes to an ending, and then you hear the few, the subject of that particular few goes like this. [Music] Anyway, so you can find that one and listen to it. But what we're gonna do right now is we are going to listen to the fugue that is in your listening. Now, you should listen to this separately as well, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on my little CD player, and we're going to listen to it, and I'm going to make some commentary as we go along so that you can hopefully make sense of this a little bit better. I'm going to point out when the subject appears and point out when we have episodes, when we have that pedal tone, etc. When you look for this piece in the in the saved videos, I've got two versions of it up. Okay, the same piece, but about two different versions. I've got one version with the organist Tom Copeman—his name is a very well-known organist—and you can see him there playing it on the organ. But I've got another version of it where it is visualized, and and we have this graphic with it's not it's not musical notes, but we have these little colored strips that correspond actually really well with the different notes and the different durations. So the pitches are like on the vertical axis and the durations of the notes on the horizontal axis, and the thing scrolls past, and it's really good for trying to understand the few because they what they do is they put each of the different voices of this fugue as a different color. And if you watch it this way, it written the polyphonic texture really makes a lot of sense. This is the kind of thing that's, you know, as I said, the fugue is difficult; it's difficult to teach about; it's difficult to compose; it's difficult to perform; and it's kind of challenging for the listener because we are just not used to listening to music where there's multiple melodies going on at the same time. And if we can visualize it, if we can see, aha, different colors corresponding to different strands of melling, different layers of melody, then I think that really works well. So do click on that in my save videos, but for now, I'm going to push the button on the CD player, and we will hear the version that is in your in your camión listening, and it goes a little something like this. So the first thing we'll hear is that the soprano voice, the highest voice, presenting the subject. Okay. Now the alto voice appears, but the upper voice is still carrying on. So now I got two voices going on. Now the third place, the tenor voice, is about to enter. Here comes—cuz we got three voices going on. Now one more left to enter, the bass, be played with the feet. There it is. [Music] So this is our exposition. We've heard the subject now in all their voices, and now we have an episode. Your subject is not being heard, and notice the texture is also thinned out. We only have two voices going on, but the subject has just made another entrance. [Music] Pedal tone. Hear that pedal tone in the bass, just a single long sustained tone, and now just drop down, drop down again. [Music] Your comes to subject again. At the moment, they only have two voices going on, just because this is a four-voice view doesn't mean that all four have to be carrying on all the time. Sometimes some of the rest. So right now we're in an episode, and again, only two voices going on at the moment, but the subject's about to come back. Here it is. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Now we're about to have another episode beginning right here. [Music] We're hearing different stuff; we're not hearing the subject. [Music] Subject's about to come back though. [Music] And another episode beginning right here. Notice there's variety of texture because sometimes you get really have two or three voices going on, sometimes we have all four voices going on. So, for example, here we have another episode; we have three voices going on at the moment. Subject's about to come back. [Music] Believe this is the last entrance of the subject; the whole thing's about to come to a stop, right? [Music] There you go. Okay, so that's the few in a nutshell. All right, if you have any questions about it, I know I gave you a lot of terms, and as I said, I recognize that this is a difficult kind of piece maybe to wrap your mind around. Tomorrow, certainly for me to teach. I hopefully I made sense, but if not, feel free to send me an email, and I'll be happy to explain. And listen a couple times to the different views that I've got there and you're listening, especially the one with that that graphic visualization. I think that will really help. See you next time; we'll talk about this sweet bye-bye.