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
(BTW, the private messaging function is dependent upon the "friend" feature on this site; I have sent you a friend request. Should you accept it, we will be able to communicate in private in the future.)
As for playing this particular fugue on the harpsichord: it's an interesting concept, for sure, with interesting results. Totally not how I conceived of the music, I have to say, but I'll grant that it's an interesting interpretation. Now, the reason I didn't notate any dynamics in the score was because I wanted to leave it up to the player's interpretation, rather than set it in stone. In the MIDI, I actually programmed the dynamics very carefully in order to bring out what I envisioned the music should sound like. Certain passages I carefully programmed in order to make subject entries stand out better, for example, mm.36-39 and mm.59-62, 3rd voice. (Arguably, though, that's a weakness in my writing -- the ideal is that I would craft the counterpoint such that the subject would stand out in spite of the thick counterpoint surrounding it, a skill that the masters of old like Mozart or Bach would doubtlessly have applied in such cases.) I actually made a version of the score with dynamics marked for a pianist that I hired to record the piece for me. If you're interested I can post it here for comparison.
The 12 bars of the coda were also written with a specifically pianistic sound in mind -- in another version of the score I indicated the entire passage as pp, with a fadeout to ppp in the last bars, the idea being a ghostly echo of the subject over the tonic pedal that gradually fades into the shadows. This is reflected in the hidden MIDI dynamics. Obviously, this effect isn't possible on the harpsichord, so you end up with much stronger statements of the subject and its opening motif, which changes the perceived structure of the fugue. (Not that I'm against the harpsichord interpretation; just that it does convey a somewhat different structure than the piano version.)
As far as the tempo is concerned, I'm still of the opinion that it should be on the slower side, rather than rushing onwards as if there's no tomorrow, which is what your version sounds like to me. :-D Incidentally, I did actually try to double the tempo myself yesterday, just to hear what it would sound like. The result was similar to what you have here, entirely different in mood from how I originally conceived of the subject (an introspective nighttime contemplation), it even sounded somewhat comical. But then again, Mike also did disagree with me about the tempo in my C# minor fugue, which he felt should be much faster than I had indicated. So perhaps I'm just bad at writing slow pieces -- people keep telling me they should be faster. :-D (OTOH though, I was told my fugue in E was too fast -- even though in my conception it should be full of energy and rushing forward, rather than slow and stately. I often seem to be at odds with my audience. :-D)
So I don't know. Maybe your version is actually the better one, who knows? Or maybe the music just inherently lends itself to multiple divergent interpretations -- an interesting characteristic I've noticed about fugues: once you take care to put the notes in proper counterpoint, they suddenly acquire this independent, or relativistic, quality, that would sound good almost regardless of instrumentation, dynamics, or tempo. It's another of those things about fugal writing that keeps me hooked.
Really good work here! Kudos!
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