Kevin's Watch

As I mentioned in the "classical music recommendations" thread, my next stop is the Art of Fugue. Of you KW classical buffs out there, I'm wondering what version you'd recommend. I hear the fugue is one of the most complicated forms of music ever created--if not, the most. Can't wait to hear it!

The CD that I have was recorded by the Canadian Brass, and while I enjoy it greatly, I'm pretty sure that is not considered the "benchmark" recording.

Hey duchess, that's the recording I have too! And there is NO "benchmark" recording, so nothing to worry about. I would like to have a string quartet performance of it too.

In case anybody's wondering, Bach wrote it in "open score." Meaning he did not specify instruments at all. And Bach's style of writing can work perfectly well for all sorts of orchestrations.

First, let me give a VERY brief description of "fugue."
-A musical theme/melody is heard in one voice (meaning any instrument, or even an actual voice).
-A second voice begins the theme, but starting on a different note (as opposed to a "round" like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, where the melody starts on the same note for all voices), while the first note plays harmony.
-There can be 3, 4, 5, etc, voices, whatever the composer wants.
-After all the voices have made their initial statement of the theme, things get fun! The theme is put through all kinds of tortures. It might be heard upside down, backwards, played with half or twice the original time values (so it sounds twice or half as fast), and other things, as well as combinations of these things.

The theme itself can be a short melody of only a few notes (as in Art of Fugue), or many measures (as in Bach's "Little" Fugue in G-minor, and the insane final movement of Beethoven's Opus 59, #3 quartet), or anything in between.

There are also double fugues, where two themes - two fugues - are going on at once!

Bach's Art of Fugue is a REALLY big composition, based on a small melody. Each movement is a study of one of the various musical devices I mentioned above. Bach died before completing this composition, in the middle of one of its movements. I, personally, would not buy a recording where anyone "finished" it. It's very powerful to hear it going along, the voices dropping out, and the last voice left playing alone for several notes before suddenly stopping.

btw, that last movement was a quadruple fugue!!!!!!! Four themes being thrown around!! The last theme Bach introduced was his own name; the notes B-A-C-H. (There's no H in English. The German H is our B, and the German B is our B-flat. heh)

bump

Hey, I thought the language filter was supposed to catch that word!

Oh.....nevermind.

For that art, Cail, you might want to catch next month's Classical Club piece by Rachmaninoff.

For now, I just wanted to point out that fugues are not only used in classical music. For example, Dave Brubeck has an excellent jazz fugue, which he wrote in tribute to Bach, called The Brandenberg Gate on his great CD Jazz Impressions of Eurasia.