What's in a Name....
Fugue
"A fugue is a piece of
music in which the voices come in one after another and
the audience go out one after another."
---anonymous
I always did have a habit of chasing
after the impractical. In this first installment of
"what's in a name," a series dedicated to hunting down
and killing with words of explanation some of those
musical buzzwords that stand between great artists and
the average not-so-sure-I-want-to-be-a-concertgoers,
we're going to tackle one of the most forbidding types
of music around, the Fugue.
I'll start by pronouncing it
for you. Music is sound, after all. Notice how, in spite
of the apparent symmetry of the word on the page, and
the fact that we arrive at the g when the written word
is merely half over, "fugue" is only one syllable. "fugu" on the other hand, which
is two, is a
potentially poisonous Japanese fish, and not a
very musical one at that.
A fugue is possibly the most difficult
kind of piece to write, and, unfortunately, not always
much easier to listen to. This is because there are so
many things happening at the same time. That, in fact,
is the point. For centuries, composers have been trying
to show their mastery at setting several independent
parts to sound together, harmoniously and effectively.
In some respects, it is like a musical sodoku challenge
gone amok. Or three-dimensional chess. Or the Sunday
crossword puzzle in the New York Times. Just about
anybody can write a tune and put a few chords with it,
but it is a real intellectual challenge to write a piece
in which, what is happening from moment to moment has to
line up well so that is makes a pleasant harmony, and
yet, at the same time every single part has to make an
interesting melody of its own. In other words, it has to
work vertically (all the stuff happening at the same
time conveniently lines up vertically on a page of
music) as well as horizontally (a line of written music
flows forward in the same direction as the English
language).
At first, the idea of having several
voices singing their own individual parts probably
happened naturally. This might be hard to explain to a
modern musician who thinks in terms of chords--that is,
blocks of sound, in which three or four notes make up
what we think of as a single harmony. But the history of
western music suggests that at first, everybody sang the
same tune together. When composers started adding other
parts to the mix, they were still thinking of melodies
that moved through time from beginning to end. Anything
that happened to line up was simply a product of the
collision of melody lines, not a preordained harmony. At
that time, there were no organs or pianos where you can
plunk down a fistful of notes at once and call it a
chord. There were no 100-piece orchestras. For a while,
most of the music that was written down was for the
voice, and, unless you are a
Tuvan throat singer,
you have a hard time singing several notes at once.
Because of this natural bias against hearing several
things happening at once as part of something larger,
(like a chord) composers just didn't think that way.
When composers started writing music for instruments,
they still treated them like individual voices (which is
why, in the column at the left, and in any technical
discussion of fugue, the different "melody" lines are
referred to as "voices" even though they are not sung.
They behave the same way, and that is what counts).
Sometimes the instruments merely played along with the
voice parts, and the organ music from the time sounds
like it could easily be sung by a choir because the way
it is written is identical to the way in which the choir
music of the time was written. Usually, in fact, the
music was written on several different staves, the same
way it was written for choir. Each part was on its own
staff. A manual on how to compose music for the time
actually suggests writing the entire tenor part from
beginning to end and then doing the same with each
additional part. It does not seem very concerned with
how the parts will sound together at any point in time
(yikes).
What I've just described is the
historical birth of counterpoint (the art of putting
note against note). Almost everything that was written
down during the Renaissance (1400-1600 AD) is
contrapuntal (the secular songs, too, in some cases).
During the Baroque era (1600-1750), things started to
change. People were already complaining that music had
gotten too complicated, and some of those people were
musicians themselves. They started writing in a new way,
with tunes that were filled out by other parts that were
there only for support. This was a real innovation, and
lots of ink was dedicated to the idea.
It is, then, a bit ironic, that the
universally acknowledged master of counterpoint lived
during the Baroque period. His name, of course, was J.
S. Bach.
Bach was a master of all things
contrapuntal. He rarely wrote music that wasn't, and he
is particularly known for the most difficult type of
piece in the contrapuntal family--the fugue.
I need to pause here because I have
often heard people refer to anything that sounds
complicated, with two or more things going on at once,
as a fugue. This is not the case. A fugue is a very
specific (and advanced) type of aural adventure. It is
really the king of complexity, and has a series of
special rules, or procedures, that must be followed in
order for it to actually qualify as a fugue, rather than
simply a piece with a lot of stuff going on at once.
Generally, people's ears are not practiced in sorting
out many different strands of melody, so they tend to
lump it all in the same category: can't sort it all out,
must be a fugue. But after reading this article, you'll
have a better idea.
So, what makes a fugue a fugue?
Interestingly enough, the next best thing to a dead
giveaway that you are listening to a fugue will be the
way it starts--with only one single note at a time! The
other parts will join it, one at a time (as our cynical
correspondent notes in the quotation heading this
article). When they do, they will be imitating the first
voice, at least for a while. This is because every fugue
has what is known as a "subject." The first notes you
hear will in fact, be that subject. For example:
[listen] to the subject from Bach's Fugue in
G, Well-Tempered Clavier book two
In a few seconds, this voice will
be joined by a second voice, imitating it, at what we
call a fifth higher (five notes up if you count the
first note as 1). Now, it is one of the secrets of
fugue writing that you have to know the best way to
bring in that second voice--exactly as the first, or
by "fudging" it a little. There are rules for that,
too. Then, after a brief bit of "connective tissue" we
arrive back in the original key, and a third voice
enters, again with the subject. If there are four, or
five, voices (Bach once wrote one with six!) the same
thing happens with their entrances, alternating
between the original notes and five notes up from the
first. This whole section is called the subject area.
During the arrival of the additional voices, the old
ones keep on "singing" but they do not have to keep to
any particular tunes, because the newly arrived ones
are not going to keep imitating them. It is only the
subject that is important--although there are some
fugues which also contain something called a
countersubject, just as there are double fugues
and lots of other interesting things. I'm assuming you
don't really want to know all that much about a fugue
at the moment; if you do, there are entire textbooks
written about them because it is indeed a large subject
(sorry).
When all the voice entrancing has been
accomplished, they all begin to dance around according
to the inspiration of the composer. This more optional
section is usually referred to as an episode, as in "I'm
having an episode, and if you don't go away I may have
another one."
The chances of this happening are quite
good, because, if the composer is smooth enough, he has
just moved you into a new key during the episode, in
which you can often hear short bits of music which seem
to be repeating themselves a bit higher or a bit lower
(technical term: sequence). When he is ready, he will
launch into another subject area, in which you will hear
the subject make several more appearances. This may be
followed by another episode, and another subject area,
if and until the composer feels like you've had enough.
Which is one of the difficulties with
fugues. The fugue is different from some other
forbidding sounding pieces like Sonata, or Symphony, or
Rondo. In those, if you are one of those people who
spend a good portion of the piece looking at their watch
wondering when it is going to be over, reading what I
have to say about how they are put together will at the
very least give you an idea of how long you can expect
until they are over. They are like plots in literature
or movies. After the bad guy dies, it is a pretty safe
bet there is only about five minutes left until they
roll the credits. In a fugue, there is no particular
plot that the composer must follow. He can continue
bringing the subject into all the voices one by one, and
then letting it disappear altogether for a while in
endless alterations between a subject area and an
episode, subject area and episode, until he is convinced
that you acknowledge him the lord fugue-master of the
universe. Although, as it happens, the fugue below is
rather short. It contains only one subject area, and the
rest (beginning at about :22) is all free episode. As it
happens, the episode is built on the first portion of
the fugue subject, so it will not sound very different.
Fugue
in G
If you are one of those people who
absolutely must have a phrase you can drop into
conversation at a cocktail party (what else is classical
music good for, you know?), here is one: "fugue is a
procedure, not a form." This is another way of saying
we're not exactly sure when it will end, although the
typical fugue is not in excess of five minutes, so I
wouldn't worry about it too much.
Since listening to a fugue is a lot
like trying to speed-read a novel, in terms of sheer
amount of stuff happening, your ears could easily glaze
over. Or you could spend your time listening to that
fugue subject keep bursting in on you like fireworks,
now in the high voice, now in the low, now in the
middle. A composer can have a lot of fun trying to hide
it from you, by slowing it down (augmentation) or
speeding it up (diminution), playing it upside down (AND
slower!) or having the different voices interrupt each
other, bringing in the subject in the next voice before
it is finished in the first (stretto). Don't let him!
(hide it from you, that is)
Fugue may sound awfully intellectual,
and academic, which for many people means it must be
boring, and monotonous. As if all these fugues are going
to basically sound the same: one big dull procession.
But one of the reasons Bach is so often admired as a
writer of these things is that he was able to put a
great deal of variety into them. And if aesthetic beauty
and a logical stream of notes doesn't excite you, you
may find a great deal of emotional range in them as
well. Some may strike you as passionate, others
dramatic, some humorous, or grandiose: despite the
apparently rather restrictive set of rules, with a
creative fugue composer, you never know exactly what you
are going to get.
Which is, perhaps, one reason people
keep on writing them, even, occasionally, into the 21st
century. Below are some examples of fugue, in some cases
written well after Bach. Sometimes you can hear the
stiff pedantry in them, but just as often, the sheer
exuberance of showers of simultaneous melody, and a
composer exulting in what he can do with his mind--and
his heart.
Bach: (in order of difficultly for
the listener)
Fugue in G,
Bwv 577, "Jig"
Fugue in g minor, "little"
Bwv 578
Fuguein D, Bwv 532
Fugue in g
minor, "great" Bwv 542
Fugue in Eb,
Bwv 552, "St. Anne"
Buxtehude:
Praeludium
in F BuxWV 145
(this has a great little fugue that
starts at 2:25)
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