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  • Ingo Lee September 30, 2017 at 3:44pm

    Before listening to the works of you and HS Teoh I thought of fugues as wonderful museum pieces that belonged in glass cases and could be visited occasionally but never touched.

    Your piece here uses more modern language with extended harmonies and syncopations very effectively and I like it a lot. It shows me very convincingly that "fugue" is an open ended concept, not a relic. 

    Your works on SoundCloud are impressive and I'm happy that you are publishing them but since your output has grown it might be nice if you had your own website where your work could be better organized and displayed?

  • gregorio X October 1, 2017 at 7:51am

    Ingo, Thanks so much for offering your thoughts.  I too believe it needn't be a relic.  It it wonderful and heartening  to hear others see it that way.. and i feel fortunate if my music had an affect on your perspective.. Im sure HS would love to know that as well. 

    Thank you for the kind words!

    ……... about a website.. Im currently working on one :)

  • H. S. Teoh October 1, 2017 at 11:05pm
    Ingo, glad to hear that Gregorio's fugues changed your perception of fugue. Just wait till I get around to my tradition-breaking fugue that's neither tonal nor atonal, but an altogether alien thing. It's going to seriously challenge your ears about what fugues are supposed to sound like. If I ever get to it, that is. :-P
  • Ingo Lee October 2, 2017 at 1:52am

    Well HS, to be fair, what I said above was:

    "Before listening to the works of you (Gregorio) and HS Teoh I thought of fugues as wonderful museum pieces that belonged  in glass cases and could be visited occasionally but never touched."

    I'm glad you mentioned this because that brings up an important point, ie that you both are accomplished fugue writers, and yet you're both able to clearly express your individuality within the parameters of a form which I had assumed was too narrow and rigid to allow for anything other than imitations of Mr. Bach. That is an eye opener, because when I try to write a fugue, at worst it is a jumble and at best it is still just one of those lesser imitations I mentioned, so your efforts give me hope!

    So yes, I will be listening for a tonal/atonal fugue. I was also quite fascinated by the idea of a tango fugue :-)

  • H. S. Teoh October 2, 2017 at 4:41pm

    Haha, the idea of a tango fugue certainly occurred to me... but as I mentioned in the other forum, I doubt I will have the time to do a decent job for it, given that I know almost nothing about tango as a musical form. I did do a quick, cursory probe online, and it seems to revolve around certain rhythms and accents, which would seem to make it well-suited for adaptation into fugal form. But how, specifically, is as yet unknown. It's unlikely I'll be able to pull it off within the timeframe of Gav's contest, though, given that Exuberance was supposed to be an entry to the Emotions contest, but was at least 4-5 months late in completion. :-(

    In any case, I'm not sure about being called an "accomplished fugue writer"... I feel as much a student of the fugal art as yourself, and while my (rather short!) experience of fugue writing has certainly given me some degree of experience with them, I think I still have a long way to go.

    As far as the rigidity and narrowness of fugue (or anything else, really) is concerned, my take is to learn by pushing the boundaries, by questioning the "rules" to unwrap the letter and see if there's anything really worth keeping underneath.  In the course of my study, I have discovered that the textbook fugue, as widely taught these days, is truly an artificially-constricted and straitjacketed form capable only of producing Bach pastiches (and IMO poor ones at that).  IMO there is much more, so much more, to fugue writing than merely imitating Bach (and poorly).  Once we free ourselves from the letter of the supposed "rules" (most of which Bach himself "broke" in one instance or another anyway), and grasp the "spirit" of fugue, we discover a vast unexplored territory outside the confines of the garden of Bach.  Mike Hewer's atonal fugues represent some really fine examples of what lies out there, and of course Gregorio's.  Even more well-known composers like Shostakovich wrote excellent fugues that definitely lie beyond the confines of the strict, academic interpretation of Bach all too often inflicted upon composition students that thus scars them for life w.r.t. fugal writing.

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