Fugue in Parts: Part 1

The two best courses I took at McGill were a graduate seminar on the symphonies of Shostakovich and the gnomically titled: "Fugue."

Pretty much everyone who has an interest in classical music knows about the symphonic form, and likely many know something about fugue, but what a fugue is and how it works are fairly obscure topics to even classical music lovers, though they certainly know what they sound like.

When I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology they required that I make up for not having taken an honours undergraduate degree by taking two graduate-level courses in music theory. The course called "Fugue" is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students and never has a very numerous enrollment.

Here is the first extraordinary thing to know about fugue. It is a type of musical composition that dates back to the Renaissance with roots in even older music and appears under various names like fantasia, ricercare, and in later years, fugue. One also finds fugal sections in many other forms such as the mass, oratorio, requiem and so on. So, one would expect that a course called "Fugue" would take a broadly historical approach. Not so. The first thing the professor said was "while many composers have written fugues over the last four hundred or so years, we are only going to look at pieces by J. S. Bach."

With the possible exception of Chopin and the mazurka, nothing like that could be said about any other music genre. Bach dominates the fugue like no other composer dominates any other form. Imagine a course in opera that only covered operas by Verdi.

So what I would like to do is a few posts on fugue that will take you inside the kinds of things that happen in fugues. Fugue isn't a form or genre or style--it has often been described as a texture, but you could also think of it as a process or collection of related techniques.

My main reference will be an excellent book by Joseph Kerman published in 2005 entitled The Art of Fugue.

The book comes with a CD of many of the pieces discussed. I'm going to follow Dr. Kerman in his choice of the first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier to begin with. The reason that fugue is not a form, genre or style is that each fugue differs in fundamental ways. There is no common rhythmic structure, phrase structure or even contrapuntal structure even though the fugue is typically referred to as a contrapuntal composition. Let's look at how the C major fugue from Book I of the WTC exemplifies these characteristics.

One of the techniques associated with fugue is the stretto. To explain what that is I have to back up a bit. A fugue, particularly a fugue by Bach, has a subject or theme which may consist of anything from four whole notes to a whole bunch of sixteenth notes. Because of their role, subjects often have a distinctive rhythmic character that enables them to stand out in the texture. Of course, Bach sometimes conceals this by just stating a fragment of the subject, known as a "false entry" to fool the listener. The subject is answered by another version of itself, usually at the fifth. When this answer begins, the subject often continues with  contrasting material called the "counter-subject" which may serve an important thematic function--or not! Stretto is the technique of coming in with another statement of the subject before the first is finished, a piling on effect which often results in an increased intensity.

This fugue is a stretto fugue par excellence because in its twenty-seven bars, the fairly extended subject appears no fewer than two dozen times. This fugue consists of almost nothing but strettos. Compare this with the next fugue, in C minor, that has absolutely no strettos! One begins to see why I say that fugue is not a form or genre or style, but rather a family of musical techniques and processes. Let's have a listen before we dig into the details.

As this is the first fugue in the WTC, Bach took the occasion to sign his name: B (2), A (1), C (3), H (8) = 14. The subject, ending on the E on the third beat of the second measure, has fourteen notes. We know this is not just a coincidence because Bach used number symbolism in a number of places in his music.

The fugue begins in methodical fashion by stating the subject four times, once in each voice. Here is an annotated score. I show each entry with a blue bracket. Each stretto, i.e. overlapping entry, I show with a red bracket. As you can see the strettos come spaced one beat later, two beats later and three beats later at a variety of intervals.

I hope you can see my blue and red brackets. Just click to enlarge.

UPDATE: The color wasn't coming through, so I redid the scans.