Volume 1 : Issue 2
ISSN: 2454-9495
What is Fugue?
Unlike terms such as “sonata”, “rondo”, and “variation form”, “fugue” is rather difficult to define, despite the fact that there are many famous musical examples of them, above all the set of forty-eight that Johann Sebastian Bach composed in the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier (vol. 1, 1722; vol. 2, 1742), as well as the fact that a word such as “fugal,” derived from the original term, is often employed in musical analysis and even in other disciplines such as literature and architecture. In this essay, I confine myself to explicating the term only in the musical context. Furthermore, this essay is intended for non-specialists; hence, what I shall provide must necessarily be a somewhat simplified explanation of what is both a complex musical form and a compositional style.
Let me begin by introducing three terms pertaining to musical texture – monophonic, homophonic, and polyphonic. A monophonic texture is one in which you hear only one tune. The sound may be produced by one singer, instrumentalist, or a hundred of them, but as long as they are playing the same tune at the same time, starting at the same pitch (or singing/playing in octaves), the texture is called “monophonic.” An example of monophonic texture in Western music would be the following example of Gregorian Chant:
If, to a melodic line, one adds an accompaniment that has no melodic interest in itself – such as the strumming notes of a guitar or repeated chords on the piano – we have what is called “homophonic” texture. For an example, listen to Yehudi Menuhin playing Niccolo Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, and imagine whether the piano part can stand by itself :
If, however, the accompaniment is a melody in itself (or multiple melodies) that can combine harmonically with each other, then the texture is “polyphonic.” For examples, listen to Bach’s Invention in C major, BWV 772
For an analysis of its polyphonic texture, go to the video on the right side of the page.
Counterpoint (derived from the Latin punctus contra punctum, meaning “point against point”) is the craft of combining melodic lines to produce different kinds of polyphonic textures, which are broadly of two kinds, imitative and non-imitative. In non-imitative counterpoint, the melodies are different from each other. For example, in Alexander Borodin’s piece, From Central Asia, a “Russian” tune (0’00 – 1’05) and an “Oriental” tune (1’05 – 1’41) are successively repeated over changing harmonic and orchestral backgrounds before being contrapuntally combined, which is where the texture changes from homophonic to polyphonic, (4’28 – 5’20):
To take up another example, in this recording of Emmanuel Chabrier’s Habanera, between 3’00 and 3’14, the principal theme (or refrain) is played by the flutes while a solo cello plays a countermelody, creating for a short moment a non-imitative polyphonic texture before the orchestra comes back with a grand restatement of the main theme, thereby moving back to the piece’s overall homophonic texture:
In the case of imitative counterpoint, two or more “voices” (i.e. parts) enter at different times, and (especially) at the time of entry, repeats some version of the same melodic element. A good example is the French nursery song “Frère Jacques” or the beginning of the finale of César Franck’s Violin Sonata, both of which offer examples of imitative counterpoint known as canon.
In the 14th century, the word fugue (from the Latin fuga, related to both fugere, “to fly”, and fugare, “to chase”), as well as its vernacular equivalents chace and caccia (French and Italian, respectively, for “hunt”) were used to denote any work in the canonic style, and the term was used for designating both a genre and a compositional technique employing imitative counterpoint, with the latter sense predominating between 1400 and 1700. By the early 18th century, musicians came to use the term to indicate genre. There were a number of reasons for this shift in meaning. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, music emplying fugal techniques, like most kinds of other music, were meant to be sung. But the simultaneous singing (polyphony) of multiple voices made the words of the songs almost impossible to follow, even though the musical result was excellent, as can be seen from the anthem, “Sing Joyfully” by William Byrd, Shakespeare’s contemporary and arguably England’s greatest composer:
In the attempt to render the words in vocal music more audible, polyphonic textures in vocal music came to be simplified more and more over time, starting with the earliest operas by composers like Jacopo Peri of the Florentine Camerata (Dafne, 1597; Euridice, 1600). Instead, contrapuntal textures were employed increasingly in instrumental music, and 17th-century composers such as Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Jakob Froberger, Dietrich Buxtehude (whose keyboard and organ music strongly influenced Bach), and Johann Pachelbel wrote ricercars, capriccios, and fantasias, from which the instrumental fugue developed, most significantly in the hands of Bach. The term fugue, therefore, is now normally used to refer to works employing a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more “voices” (i.e. parts), built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation, and which recurs frequently in the course of a composition, and an answer, i.e. the statement of the subject in a second voice, usually on the dominant. Fugues may also have a countersubject (a second theme that accompanies the subject), episodes (sections where the subject is never stated in its entirety by any single voice), and strettos, where entries of the subject in different voices closely follow each other (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyvSrpQ2eWY). If you wish to find out how this works in actual practice, consider this analysis of a fugue of Bach by Pierre Couprie (the terms are in French, but they are close equivalents of the terms used in this article):
But what is the form of the fugue? There is considerable uncertainty regarding this matter, partly because Bach’s fugues, which are among the most important in the genre, do not follow a textbook model for fugue that started developing in the 17th century and was later most often associated with J. J. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, the single most important textbook work on counterpoint from the eighteenth century. As a result, one does not have a useful working definition of the formal features of a fugue, unlike, say, those for sonata form, variation form, or sectional forms such as the ternary and rondo forms. Fugue, therefore, is a term that represents a specific kind of compositional technique involving imitative counterpoint, as well as a musical genre whose formal features, unlike those of other musical genres, is somewhat difficult to define.
After Bach, fugues continued to be composed by 18th- and 19th-century composers, often as part of multi-movement instrumental works (Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, originally intended as the finale of his String Quartet no. 13, or the finale of Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet), operas and stage works (such as the entry of the Wilis in Act 2 of Adolphe Adam’s ballet Giselle, Verdi’s fugal setting of the closing chorus of his final opera, Falstaff, the fugue in Hector Berlioz’s opera Beatrice and Benedict, where it symbolizes musical pedantry, or the Quarrel of the Jewish Priests in Richard Strauss’s Salome), or as sections within a movement of a multi-movement work (such as the fugal sections in the finale of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica). Twentieth-century composers such as Bela Bartók (in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, for example), Maurice Ravel (in Le Tombeau de Couperin), and György Ligeti, too, have adapted the fugue to suit their own aesthetic visions, but the prelude-and-fugue format of Bach has generally been eschewed, with three notable exceptions – Anton Reicha (36 fugues, 1803), Paul Hindemith (Ludus Tonalis, 1942), and Shostakovich (24 Preludes and Fugues, 1952). Some of Shostakovich’s fugues, among the most remarkable composed by any composer since Bach, show none of the stiff academicism found in the fugues of many a 19th-century composers (e.g. No. 7 while the fugal second movement of Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical Symphony of Psalms (1930) combines a modernist sensibility with something of the religious spirit that informed fugal writing of the Renaissance; for the fugue, which evolved early in the history of Western music, has a feel of the past about it that most composers have found difficult, if not impossible, to exorcise.
Fugal Elements in Literature and Architecture:
Click for the articles
1. Santiniketan Architecture And Rabindranath Tagore
2. Paul Celan’s “Fugue of Death” and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist
The fugal in creative writing