Oh no, it's that crazy fugue guy again, with yet another of his endless stream of fugues! Everybody, hide! ;-)
*ahem*... OK, so here it is, another fugue from your resident fugue enthusiast. It has a long-ish subject, and the entire piece lasts for about 5 mins 15 secs. As usual, I wasn't satisfied with merely going through the paces of fugal writing, so there are some unconventional things in it, and I put a lot of effort into having an overall dramatic arc (you be the judge whether I was successful or not). Well, I won't bore you with a verbal description; listen and find out for yourself. :-)
The first version of the subject was written back in 2018, but it didn't actually take me 5 years to write this fugue; there were a lot of long pauses in between where I got stuck or otherwise put it on the backburner while working on other things. Finally I finished it today, and thought I should get some feedback on it here -- I'm still not 100% sure about some parts of it, especially the ending.
So, if you're not allergic to fugues, do take a listen and let me know what you think, good or bad. Esp. whether the ending works, or I should junk it and write a more "conventional" ending. (Or 5 mins of fugal joy isn't enough, and I should make it longer? ;-P)
Score: fugue13.pdf (obsolete)
Audio: fugue13.mp3 (obsolete)
Update 2023-10-31: after posting the original version, I listened to it again and felt quite unsatisfied with the original ending. So today I decided to rewrite the ending. Here's the updated version:
Score: fugue13.pdf
Audio: fugue13.mp3
I think this version is much better. What do you think? (Sorry Mike, after experimenting a bit I decided against doing a more chromatic ending; instead, I opted for the gradual fadeout with pacing aided by a high register passage, that I think you might like for the atmospheric effect. I did take up your pedal suggestion though!)
Update 2023-11-02: one of our resident Davids requested a harpsichord version of this fugue, so here it is, along with the MIDI for whoever wants to play around with different instrumentations of it:
Harpsichord version: fugue13-harpsichord.mp3
MIDI: fugue13.midi
Update 2023-12-21: recently I annotated the score with colors to indicate subject entries (blue), incomplete entries (green), and inverse entries (red).
Annotated score: fugue13-annotated.pdf
Replies
Apart from that subjective quibble, on one hearing it's quite an achievement and an excellent and skillful one at that.
I'm quite averse to the Picardy final, so I'm not inclined to do that, but upon further listening I do feel that the ending is too abrupt. It probably needs a slight lengthening to have better pacing. Using some chromatic motivic work sounds like just the thing to try for this purpose - it's a good way to allude to that F#-Ab diminished 3rd in the subject again as a parting reference. I'll look into something along these lines this week.
Don't worry about fugal analysis: I took quite a few liberties in the course of writing this piece, and it probably wouldn't stand up to scrutiny according to the "strict rules" of fugue anyway (whatever those are -- even Bach himself didn't always adhere to said "rules"). The main idea is taking the theme and playing around with it in various ways, some contrapuntal, some not. I simply took that idea and ran with it -- not really staying that close to the strictures of fugue otherwise. (Well, besides the exposition, I suppose -- but even there I sneakily took advantage of the entry of the top voice as a faux re-entrance of the main theme in an ABA type structure.) The impetus for the music was mainly driven by musical dramatic arcs rather than adherence to fugal conventions.
Unfortunately I have little inclination for choral music... my musical tastes lean strongly towards the instrumental. Maybe one day the choral bug will bite and I will have a spurt of inspiration to write something choral, like the atonal bug bit me once and I wrote the Wild Fugue. But currently that's rather unlikely.
But speaking of choral fugues, here's one that I liked, maybe you will too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Ojx9Ei5o4
I do wonder, and there's no agenda to this question whatsoever, but to touch on a topic that often comes up with fugues: do you view and write your fugues as artistic expressions of yourself, or do you write them with more of an academic agenda to refine your contrapuntal ability? I'm sure there's a little of both in there, but if you had to lean more one way or the other.
I'm not sure how well it would work on a harpsichord -- I did write some pianisms in there that probably would sound a bit odd. But nevertheless, in the name of experimentation, I substituted the piano patch with a harpsichord (not a very good quality one, I admit, but it does give you an impression of the result). I'll post that along with the midi in a separate top-level comment -- for some reason replies to comments don't have access to HTML so I can't link it directly to this reply. **UPDATE** apparently top-level comments don't work either. So I've attached the files to the original post instead.
As for your question about fugue writing: I definitely lean towards the artistic expression side of fugues. In fact, sometimes I go out of my way to poke fun at the academic side, such as in my Fugue in D aka "Noises in Two Voices" (an allusion to Dr. Seuss and his two havoc-causing characters Thing One and Thing Two in the story The Cat in the Hat), in which I set out to break the rules both in letter and in spirit by having the answer enter in all the "wrong" keys relative to the subject until the very end, where it finally chances upon the "right" combination, upon which the music interrupts itself, stutters, then walks away in a huff. (Once I also wrote a putative "fugue in one voice" -- which was a personal accomplishment in writing the longest unaccompanied melody I've ever written, even if the claim of it being a fugue is probably utter nonsense. :-D)
I view fugue writing as a way to force my music to "get to the point" -- the confines of the fugue (even if I do strain and kick against them!) forces me to really know my themes and develop them; there is no easy way out by padding it with fluff the way you could with, say, a sonata or rondo or whatever. So that forces my writing to be as meaningful as possible. It also opens up the possibility of developing an entire piece just from a short subject, an idea that appeals to me very much. (I know you could do the same in any other form too, but in fugal writing I'm *forced* to do it whether I like it or not, which forces me to seriously consider and face my musical challenges instead of sweeping them under the rug with filler and pretending that they aren't there.)
So yeah, I'm definitely in the artistic expression camp of fugue writing. I would say that almost every fugue I wrote was driven by some artistic urge with a particular musical message I wanted to convey; because of this, sometimes they defy convention. For example, you're not the first one who told me that one of my fugues should be played faster -- Mike told me the same thing about my C# minor fugue. But going too fast would, in my mind, ruin the message I wanted to get across, even though there is no technical reason why it couldn't be played faster. So I leave the slow tempo marking in the score. (Though OTOH I don't mind alternative interpretations of my music that contradict my vision of it -- I welcome them, in fact; they do bring out a different side to the music that may not have been apparent otherwise.) My fugue in E minor also breaks tradition by having answers come in at a minor 6th below instead of the conventional 5th (and it has a literal off-beat ending, haha). I also have sketches for fugues that push the envelope of what is a fugue: a fugue with a single-note subject, a fugue whose subject is a rest, etc..
I would say that currently my compositional output is exclusively fugal. Maybe that's just a phase that will pass, I can't really say. But whatever the future may be, fugue-writing definitely will have a lasting impact on my musical output.
This is my interpretation of the work in a DAW, through playing some passages and tweaking MIDI data for others; therefore, I don't consider this a true "performance," but rather, a "speculated performance" or a "heavily comped performance," for the DAW guys out there.
I personally believe that this piece is better suited for the harpsichord for a couple of reasons. First, there are no dynamics indicated on the score, which aligns well with the harpsichord's capabilities. Second, my favorite interpretation of the Goldberg Variations is played on the harpsichord. Speaking of the Goldberg Variations; I have always associated them (subjectively) as one of the finest examples of counterpoint in existence.
On the topic of fugues, the only four-voice fugue I've delved deeply into was the final movement of Beethoven's 29th Piano Sonata, commonly known as the "Hammerklavier." While I've spent time trying to understand what Beethoven was aiming for, it appears that many people don't hold it in high regard. Admittedly, I appreciate its uniqueness and quirks. Writing for four voices makes me tremble, but it also makes me ponder the question; what is the most well-documented piece of contrapuntal material that contains the most voices? (And is often regarded as a skillfully handled use of many voices).
The link is provided here: [https://youtu.be/Ev3XLtaCN8o]
I really fell in love with this piece. I'm sorry for rambling on, but it truly resonates with my recent studies into deeper counterpoint, and I can appreciate the mastery involved here. I was a member here some eight years ago, and I do remember HS Teoh already embarking on the "Fugue Phase" at one point. In fact, there was a kind of 'fugue madness' blossoming back then. Will it strike again? Time shall tell, but for now, I dare not tamper with the Fugue Sensei.
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