More fugue…

I happen to love fugues. It’s just my thing. I found fugues exciting when I was a kid, I always wanted to learn how to write them, and, though with much delay, I did. I can write a totally competent fugue now. Yay me. 

Now, I am well aware that fugues haven’t been “cool” for over 300 years. I am not sure they were ever “cool”—it’s just the whole concept of hipness is about 300 years old, at least as applied to music, and as soon as an independent market for music presented itself, fugues went out of fashion. J. S. Bach,  the ultimate master of the fugue, was an anachronism already in his own time. Sure, one had to master the fugue to be a composer in XVIII century, but mostly because writing for church was still a big part of the composer’s profession, and fugues were still sine qua non of liturgical music. Obviously, the church didn’t care about hipness. 

Even as the church market started to decline in XIX century, fugue remained an essential part of a composer’s training. In some parts of the world it still is, and it should be. I strongly believe that mastering fugue is essential for any aspiring composer. The ability to write and, even better, improvise a competent fugue is an indicator of the composer’s musicianly fitness. I remember hearing an important Russian theorist Victor Fraenov say that one is not a real musician until one has mastered counterpoint. Now, I had a chance to study with the guy, and I blew that chance, but, in my defense, I was 15, clueless, and possessed of the idea that I’d be the next Rostropovich. Nobody told me that Rostropovich, in fact, did learn how to write a fugue. 

As much as I am pro-counterpoint-and-fugue training, there’s a danger—it can dry out the composer. Rimsky Korsakov, according to his memoir (which is essential reading for an aspiring composer, alongside with Prokofiev’s memoir) went through a period where he became obsessed with fugues and wrote dozens of them; however, as his contrapuntal proficiency grew exponentially, his creativity declined sharply to the extent that everyone could hear that (I’m simplifying for brevity’s sake). He realized what was happening and got over it, so his creativity returned while he got to keep the technique.

Anyway, skipping to the present day, there was a Facebook fugue writing contest and I thought I’d participate. To my dismay, my fugue that I was rather pleased with was awarded 3rd place with a grade of 6.5 out of 10, mostly downgraded for the short subject, light character, and being shorter and less ambitious than the two graded higher. Now, I didn’t approach the composition of that fugue with the intention of flexing my contrapuntist muscle; my priority was to create an attractive piece of music, which I accomplished. In fact, the organizer of the competition (not the same person as the judge) left me a message about how much he loved my fugue, the harmonic progression of it in particular, and how he wanted me to be to him what Bach was to Count Kaiserling (the dude who commissioned Goldberg Variations) or something to that effect, which was very flattering. I am still waiting for my goblet of golden coins. Or do I have to write something of the scope of Goldberg Variations first? 

In seriousness, I feel that the real challenge when it comes to a fugue is to make it into a living, breathing musical organism as opposed to it being a dry scholastic exercise. However, not winning that contest did bring up the notion that I, while perfectly capable of writing a competent and even attractive “simple“  fugue, have not in fact written anything complex in this genre—I’ve been sticking with a single subject, kept it light on strettos and avoided  things like inversions, augmentations etc. and never written any double, let alone triple fugues. 

So I thought—what if my decision of purposely not flexing the contrapuntist muscle was influenced by the fact that there’s not as much muscle to flex as I’d like to think. Also, I just got an idea of a piece with a triple fugue as its centerpiece, and that triple fugue would be absolutely necessary for the piece to express what I need it to express. So I figured that before I embark on writing that triple fugue in my own style, I need to work my way up to it and write a few exercise fugues increasingly ambitious is design. I’ve begun this quest with a double fugue with a simultaneous exposition, with the first subject being a well-known one, used most famously in the finale of “Jupiter” and the second subject composed by me. More fancy fugues are on the way. Enjoy!