[HN Gopher] The Art of Fugue - Contrapunctus I (2021)
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The Art of Fugue - Contrapunctus I (2021)
Author : xeonmc
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-05-27 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ethanhein.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ethanhein.com)
| diego_moita wrote:
| Wow! Each recording is better than the other!
|
| As a non-musician sometimes I have difficulty on following Bach's
| contrapunctus, particularly on orchestral and organ works.
|
| I like how most recordings here slow down the tempo, allowing us,
| the ignoramus, to follow the melodic lines.
|
| If you like this approach I highly recommend a few recordings of
| the Brandenburg Concertos with slower tempo made by an orchestra
| in St. Petersburg under a maestro called Alexander Titov.
| treetalker wrote:
| For the last week I've been listening to the recordings by The
| Academy of Ancient Music under Egarr, and by the Concerto
| Italiano under Alessandrini. The latter is fun and raw and
| jaunty -- it feels much more alive than the Academy of St.
| Martin in the Fields / Sir Neville Mariner recordings.
|
| Will check out the St. Petersburg Opera Orchestra / Titov
| recordings today -- thanks for the recommendation!
| tgv wrote:
| You can enjoy them either way: you can try to follow the
| individual voices, or listen to the overall texture, and you
| can switch too. It's all about enjoying the music as deeply as
| you can. Listen to it again, listen to other performances or
| re-arrangements, and see what you like best. There are people
| who don't like the organ, but many have been transcribed. Some
| organ pieces work even better on piano than organ.
|
| But it's not for everyone. I had a colleague who called the
| violin double concerto tedious and long-winding, whereas I
| think of it as a fantastic piece which by itself is enough to
| put Bach in the top tier.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| To be quite frank, as a high-trained musician, I like almost
| all of Bach's works played slower. You can almost always slow
| them down _more_ than whatever you think is too slow and find
| new things to appreciate. Paulstretch to the rescue!
| conorbergin wrote:
| Bach's fugues are amazing, they sound great on harpsichords and
| organs, whereas some piano music sounds very wrong when it is
| payed without all the volume modulation, the fugues are carried
| by the interactions between the melodies, the counterpoint.
| username223 wrote:
| Bach in general is amazing in terms of surviving all sorts of
| transcription and mutilation. Compare the Little Organ Fugue as
| originally intended:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4
|
| to the a cappella version by the Swingle Singers:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhU7euFPWwo
|
| Some music is very much tied to a particular instrument, but
| Bach is more or less universal.
| dmansen wrote:
| I fell in love with this piece hearing Michael Winograd play it
| on clarinet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI
| AriedK wrote:
| Ah yes, Vulfmon! Jack Stratton seems to love his Fugues.
|
| In case you haven't already: check out Vulfpeck /// Bach Vision
| Test; a really nice visualization of Contrapunctus IX a 4 alla
| duodecima.
|
| https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg?si=GF1mbszFHOky2QVd
| jll29 wrote:
| Amazing how Glenn Gould caresses that piano, in a performance
| that is almost a spiritual act.
|
| Apart from geek toys that often cause more hassle and annoyance
| than they're worth, the most appreciated material things that I
| purchased in the first half century of my life are:
|
| * The Art of Computer Programming (purchased the first volume
| aged 16, decades later I'm still waiting for volume 4 to be
| completed)
|
| * Encyclopedia Britannica
|
| * J. S. Bach: The complete organ Works on ten CDs.
|
| The Voyager space craft contains a disc with Bach's, The Well-
| Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1 on it,
| and the joke among space folks goes, one day a radio telescope
| will receive a message deciphered as S-E-N-D M-O-R-E B-A-C-H!
|
| Don't waste your life striving to be fashionable, aspire eternal
| beauty and knowledge!
|
| PS: I like the visualization, thanks for this blog post and
| bringing the beauty of Bach that is almost out of this world into
| a bleak Tuesday afternoon [on which nasty people drop bombs on
| children and people too stupid for the power they carry keep
| quiet about it]. I would like to see another visualization, which
| shows the music scores smooth-scrolling from right to left with
| all tones currently being played highlighted in yellow, and below
| the scores I'd like to see the hands playing said tones on the
| organ, all in temporal alignment.
| masswerk wrote:
| Ad Gould: The phrasing at around 2:40, where he has this voice
| stepping into the previously dominant legato voices, is
| tremendous!
| billfruit wrote:
| How did the Art of Computer Programming help you in those
| years?
| viccis wrote:
| Looks damn good on the bookshelf lol (I say with 3 volumes of
| the second edition right behind me)
|
| I've used it to settle a few combinatorics arguments over the
| years too.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Being able to compose fugues well is notoriously difficult.
|
| Mozart was never able to.
|
| Beethoven on the other hand...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Fuge
| https://youtu.be/hUaziUz4jx0
| baruchel wrote:
| So you want to write a fugue?
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8sogUjiqg2c
| castillar76 wrote:
| A music history prof in college described this as "the ultimate
| raised middle-finger to the audience -- Beethoven at his most
| I'm-writing-for-me-only."
| cynicalkane wrote:
| Mozart wrote several fugues considered very good, the most
| famous of which is the Kyrie from his Requiem, which is a
| double fugue to boot.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Check out John Mortensen's YouTube channel.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@cedarvillemusic/videos
|
| He can improvise fugues on the spot. A lot of earlier composers
| could do so as well because their training from the get-go was
| improvisation.
| vixen99 wrote:
| I thought I would check out your comment against other
| opinions: " Mozart's contact with the mastery of the German
| contrapuntal tradition opened a completely new musical horizon.
| He produced a number of stand-alone fugues, and this newly
| gained compositional skill helped to inform the creation of his
| final sublime orchestral masterpieces. Words simply can't
| describe the jaw-dropping and breathtaking fugal display of
| quintuple invertible counterpoint in the final movement of the
| "Jupiter."
|
| We should all listen to the Jupiter and decide for ourselves if
| 'Mozart was never able to'.
|
| https://interlude.hk/fugues-and-other-musical-charms-from-ba...
| jancsika wrote:
| > Mozart was never able to.
|
| * ending of the last movement of the Jupiter Symphony
|
| * Introitus of the Requiem (four-voice ricercare in the
| instruments, then cascading upward in SATB choral writing,
| _both_ combined with an operatic-style accompaniment)
|
| Here's a mind-blowing one-- at the end of his String Quartet K.
| 387 in G major. This is a modified rondo-sonata form where the
| rising figure of the rondo theme-- normally just a simple,
| catchy, tune-- is actually the subject and answer of a fugue!
| I'm fairly certain Mozart is the only composer of his era to
| substitute a fugal exposition for the rondo theme in a modified
| rondo-sonata form[1].
|
| Even more impressive, the 2nd theme is a different fugue which
| continues into the rondo theme for-- you guessed it-- a double
| fugue.
|
| All of this is so fast, effervescent and seamless that someone
| like OP could be forgiven for not even noticing the fugue. So
| now OP must ask-- how many _other_ examples are there of Mozart
| subtly shifting into and out of first-rate Bach-like
| contrapuntal textures?
|
| It's a question Beethoven undoubtedly knew the answer to, at
| least for all the Mozart scores he could get his hands on.
|
| 1: Haydn has a great musical joke at the end of the so-called
| "Lark" quartet-- in the middle of a fast, old-school Rondo he
| switches to minor and plonks down a thick four voice fugal
| exposition and development _against_ the fast-flowing
| figuration from earlier. It disappears as quickly as it came,
| like Carl Stalling but before the era of cartoons!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It took me until my 40s to _really_ enjoy Mozart. The thing
| is, if you approach it from the stodgy perspective of a
| "Classical Music Enthusiast" then it's easy to miss what's
| delightful about it, but if you aren't trained in listening
| to classical music, it's not that accessible.
|
| It's like that with a lot of jokes. If they don't make you
| grin and laugh, it's hard to "get" what's so special about
| them. Bach you can kinda just zone into and gradually uncover
| what's special (or not), and just keep uncovering, or fuguing
| out, or whatever. Mozart, the joke is here and gone, and if
| you missed it, the whole thing just kinda doesn't seem all
| that special.
|
| Like a joke, you can have the punchline explained to you, but
| it won't make it funny, and you'll question the taste of
| those who do. But if you find yourself grinning, you'll only
| find more things to grin at the more you listen. As a kid and
| young adult I kinda hated Mozart. I was really surprised when
| I started liking it, more and more, and now I can't get
| enough.
|
| That's been my experience with Mozart, anyway.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| First, I did want to point out that my claim that "Mozart was
| never able to" didn't mean that I thought he wasn't able to
| compose fugues, rather I thought he wasn't able to compose
| fugues WELL--definite emphasis on "well".
|
| Second, what I mean by "composing a fugue well" is to be able
| compose a piece or movement whereby three or more, usually
| four, voices are heard in a contrapuntal, not harmonic, manner
| for an EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME (i.e., maintaining this for many
| measures).
|
| I looked closely at some of the examples people brought up like
| the last movements of both the Jupiter Symphony and his String
| Quartet No. 14 and nowhere do I see 4 voices simultaneously
| acting contrapuntally for more than just a handful of bars.
| Mozart would often write a given voice contrapuntally, but
| would often quickly revert that voice to a harmonic function.
| If you look at measures 91 to 106 in the last mvt of Quartet
| No. 14, that writing is a joke if you say he can write fugally.
| The second violin, viola, and cello are all mainly serving a
| harmonic function; they're just playing chords. One part that
| might look truly fugal would be in measures 112 to 117, but
| that's just one small part and not extended, as in the great
| fugues of Bach and Beethoven. Measures 61 to 90 kind of look
| truly fugal, but he really only has 3 voices going
| contrapuntally here at any given time, not 4. Look at measures
| 63 until 68 where the cello is playing an extended rest, for
| example.
|
| Yes, Mozart wrote fugues. Did he write truly sophisticated,
| truly "fugal" fugues? I still think not.
| treetalker wrote:
| For the J.S. Bach fans, here's a fun site that organizes his
| cantatas calendrically: https://whichbachcantata.be/
| throw0101a wrote:
| BBC Radio 3 has show _Record Review_ (aka _Building a Library_ )
| where they go over various recordings of a particular work and
| recommend particular one(s):
|
| * https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06w2121/episodes/player
| throw0101a wrote:
| The Netherlands Bach Society is trying to record all the works of
| Bach and make them available:
|
| * https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach
| kkylin wrote:
| Since no one else has done it, I'll plug the Canadian Brass
| recording -- it's one of my favorite recordings of the Art of the
| Fugue, and (among many other things) just shows how flexible and
| instrument-agnostic this music is.
| organman91 wrote:
| I adore the Canadian Brass' recording, and also the other Bach
| pieces they have transcribed.
|
| I'd also like to plug the album released by the Academy of St.
| Martin in the Fields, who did a double album of the Art of
| Fugue and the Musical Offering, and used a variety of different
| scorings for each movement.
| queuebert wrote:
| This and their Pachelbel's Canon were what ignited my love for
| classical music as a child.
| yousif_123123 wrote:
| The Emerson quartet version blew me away when I first heard it. I
| recommend it over the piano versions because I think you hear the
| full extent of the voices better (coming from someone that loves
| and play the piano).
| vixen99 wrote:
| The Art of Fugue itself was unfinished but if as the story goes,
| he died as he was penning the last bar of fugue 15, then he kind
| of signed himself out in the sense that the notes corresponding
| to the letters (in German) BACH are spelled as a motif as B flat,
| A, C and B natural in the 8th to the 5th bar before the final bar
| which is unfinished. I have no idea if this true. We do know that
| this unfinished fugue was the last piece he wrote.
| ethanhein wrote:
| Every once in a while I get a giant traffic bump on an old post,
| and it's because someone shared it here. It's always a nice
| surprise. Thanks for reading!
| xeonmc wrote:
| Thank you for the wonderful post. I was humming the Nomai
| leitmotif from Outer Wilds[0] when two earworms came up
| simlutaneously: this, and the Little Fugue, and for some reason
| they comingled in my mind that I couldn't remember which
| subject was which, so I went googling which was how I found
| your post.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/zHm-GAuy8CI?si=8iSgsn_D5g0LFovt&t=72
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Excellent article and great analysis of the state of the fugue
| - your insight has motivated me to dig out some Bach from the
| old piano bench and give things a bit of a bash.
|
| As a musician, stuck in a bit of a rut of late, this kind of
| thing really helps get the juice flowing again. I've spent 15
| minutes churning through some fingering and activating old
| muscle memory I'd forgotten about completely since the piano
| lesson days, and tonight's jam session with my band is going to
| have some new flavours to introduce.
|
| Good stuff, thank you!
| viccis wrote:
| The visualizations here remind me of the old Bach WTC analysis
| and commentary website that used David Korevaar's performance
| (and some others for the ones on organ or harpsichord) and Tim
| Smith's analysis. Problem was, they were all done using Flash.
|
| Some amazing person uploaded video versions to Youtube. I would
| highly recommend them:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8Tlc...
|
| This one in particular is beautiful:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU
| codedokode wrote:
| I can understand when there are 2 voices, but when there are 4
| independent voices how on Earth does one follow them.
| gatlin wrote:
| I prefer to simply be taken along.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| It happens when you don't think about it.
|
| Practising Bach's music certainly helps.
|
| But yes, just letting it flow and paying attention without
| trying to learn or remember anything, is probably the best
| answer.
|
| It's like an orchestra (or the different sections of one), the
| melodies are written to fit together perfectly.
|
| There are many almost "poppy" feeling fugues in the Well-
| tempered clavier with four voices.
|
| In comparison, The Art of Fugue feels more academic and dry to
| me personally. I still like it, but don't feel as connected to
| it in as to many of his other works.
|
| Tangent ahead: even good pop songs require melodies that are
| more than just homophonic. Best example in rock, pop, disco for
| this are good bass lines I think.
|
| Incidentally, "bass lines" are also an important fixture in the
| history of baroque music.
|
| I'm not preaching here, I'm not good at music theory or playing
| music. But I think many pop songs also follow counterpoint
| rules, at least to a degree. There are also varying degrees of
| strictness regarding these rules in Bach's music.
|
| It doesn't need to be an academic puzzle as many make it out to
| be, I think the intent was to formalize how to write good music
| for multiple voices.
|
| All that said ... you are still right :D
|
| But it's even more impressive the way solo keyboard artists can
| articulate these voices.
|
| Not to mention the organists.
| devrandoom wrote:
| Fugues are still being written. Here's one from 2016, although a
| bit controversial:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxCAqCUgug
| leephillips wrote:
| I don't see anything controversial there.
| chasil wrote:
| Here is a free recording of a piano performance of the Art of the
| Fugue by Kimiko Ishizaka:
|
| https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-o...
|
| This artist also has a free recording of her Goldberg Variations
| available:
|
| https://opengoldbergvariations.org/
|
| Her bandcamp page also has the Well-Tempered Clavier, and two of
| her own albums:
|
| https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/
| sambapa wrote:
| Also worth reading:
| https://listenlearnanddo.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/bach-badas...
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Also, let us never forget what Laibach have done to it
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k0PDQPcIZG5_gJ...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Such a pleasure to read. using beats seemed almost profane at
| first but it allows for chunking the complexity where it could
| really help someone _get_ what 's going on. I don't listen to the
| fugues much, and really mainly guitar arrangements of his work
| I'd like to be able to play one day (allegro assai, lute suite
| prelude, etc), but it's hard not to get mystical about it.
| jubilance is the word I'd use for his work. for me the music
| forms an imaginary navigable space when I hear it, and as
| everything that lives can hear and count, every piece seems like
| a meditation on what can be aligned, harmonious, and essentially,
| _True_ in a universal sense- the awe of a creation for its
| creator.
|
| I'm an absolute amateur dilettante musician, but for someone just
| starting to hear his work, I'd suggest the skill is in being able
| to listen for separate voices and then follow them, and then to
| practice following them in simple pieces with enough dissonance
| in them to make you intellectually keep track of what's going on.
| the simplest possible polyphony someone can use to hone their
| attention that has analogues to early music may actually be Arvo
| Part's work, as once you can separate voices, the richness of
| Bach and other composers kind of explodes.
|
| great fan of hein's writing, a pleasure to be reminded of it and
| to get to comment.
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