12 days of musical terminology, day 12 - fugue

This is the last post in this series, which seems to have gone down like a lead balloon - oh well. I'm hoping that maybe SOME people will find these posts useful and/or interesting, but that they just don't read blogs very often and will discover this later. (If there's anyone reading who HAS enjoyed any of this, please could you comment and let me know? It'd do wonders for my self-esteem!)

I planned all along that my last topic would be fugue. It comes up all the time in choir rehearsals - so much so that I'm sure most people have at least a vague idea what it is. But there are all sorts of related details that you might not know.

If you're a choral singer, I'm willing to bet that your main understanding of the word fugue is "the hard bit". Personally I tend to think of the fugue as "the clever bit". Any good fugue is definitely clever, but that unfortunately often results in a high level of difficulty!

The height of popularity for fugues was the baroque period - Bach, in particular, is renowned for (amongst other things) being the king of the fugue. No-one else even comes close. He was so good that he could compose fugues on the spot from any given theme - you'll understand how difficult this was when I've explained what a fugue involves. (Mozart could apparently do this too, but Bach did it first!) There's a famous book called Godel, Escher, Bach (by Douglas R Hofstadter) which is well worth a read. I have a copy which I must reread at some point - it's been years since I did - but what I remember of it is as follows: 1. It is totally fascinating. 2. Lots of it will make your head ache because you'll be thinking too much. 3. You will fully appreciate what an amazing musician Bach was. 4. You will know everything there is to know about fugues. It's a long book, but well worth the read.

Fugues have remained fairly popular ever since baroque times, though - I presume because composers like to show off! Mozart wrote lots of them (there are a couple in his Requiem); Mendelssohn had a couple in Lobgesang (and his other symphonies too); Brahms has some in his German Requiem; Haydn has some in The Creation; there are some in Beethoven 9; there are several in Verdi's Requiem.

Anyway, the obvious omission to my list of familiar fugues is Handel, who uses fugues all over the place, including several times in Messiah. That's because I'm going to use the Amen Fugue for my examples - but first, let me explain the technical terms. The Wikipedia article does this in great detail, so I'll try to give you a simpler version.

The fugue structure has several things in common with sonata form, although fugue is earlier and more complex. The main similarity is that both forms rely heavily on key contrasts. (If you've read yesterday's entry, you will spot the other similarities, so I won't bother pointing them out.) Anyway, a fugue is a contrapuntal composition for a particular number of parts. In a fugue, the parts are known as "voices" even if it's an instrumental piece. (Oh, and "contrapuntal" is the adjective that comes from "counterpoint", which is defined in my music dictionary as "the ability, unique to music, to say two things at once comprehensibly". Think of it as "two different tunes going on at the same time".) A fugue is kind of an advanced version of a canon - the difference is that in a canon, nothing happens that's not the original tune in the original key.

Here's the start of the Amen Fugue (I missed out the words etc. to save time - you can guess what they are!):



This section of the fugue is called the exposition. Each voice in turn (starting with the basses in this example) enters with a statement of the fugue subject (i.e. the main tune). Usually a fugue subject is fairly short - much shorter than a sonata form subject - because the longer the subject, the more difficult it is to write the fugue. The most common length is four bars - Handel is slightly wacky here by writing a five-bar subject!

The voices don't all sing the subject in the same key, though - they imitate each other without copying exactly. The most common way to do this is how Handel does it here: the basses sing their entry in D major (the tonic key), then the tenors do it in A major (the dominant - this is called the answer), then the altos come back in D major (an octave higher than the basses, but in the tonic key => subject) and the sopranos finish the exposition by entering in A major, an octave above the tenors (answer). Fugues from later periods stick to the imitative entry idea but tend to ignore the key relations a bit more. For example, Mozart (in his Requiem) does have at least one fugue with the traditional tonic/dominant pattern (Quam Olim Abrahe) but he also has several other patterns, e.g. Ne absorbeat eas Tartarus, which has the voices entering on G, C, A and D respectively.

Before we proceed to the next bit, notice what each voice does AFTER its first five bars, when it no longer has the subject. It doesn't just stop singing - it has various fragments that couldn't be considered as proper tunes, but fit together. These fragments do get repeated (in the relevant keys) across the different voices. In some fugues, rather than just fragments, there is a counter-subject, i.e. another proper tune that fits with the first one. (It's only called a counter-subject if it comes back when the subject does.)

After the exposition (i.e. when all the voices have performed the subject), there will usually be an episode, in which the composer develops the material from the exposition. (I have heard this referred to as "noodling".) This leads to another entry (or series of entries) of the subject, and so on until the end of the piece - entries and episodes alternate. One function of the episodes, other than to make the whole piece more interesting, is to modulate into different keys. (The tonic/dominant alternation of subject entries is not usually strictly maintained after the exposition - if the fugue has reached a particularly remote key, this would make things unnecessarily difficult.) By the final entry, though, the music must return to the tonic.

There are many, many other details and technical terms associated with fugues - I've only mentioned the main ones. (Read the Wikipedia article if you want to know the others.) However, I do want to mention stretto. This is the fugue's equivalent of hemiola - it speeds things up (figuratively) and adds excitement, and is therefore most often used towards the end of a piece. Stretto is when the voices enter one at a time with their subjects and answers, but they don't wait for each other to finish - they overlap, so that the answer starts while the subject is still in progress, etc. For example, this bit:



Sorry it's a bit blurry, but hopefully you get the idea. The voices enter in the order soprano/tenor/alto/bass, one beat apart. Each voice sings the first five notes of the subject exactly, in A major followed by E minor alternately. There are several other strettos (I suppose really it should be "stretti") in the Amen Fugue - see if you can find them! Once you're aware of them, they are fairly obvious.

My favourite fugue, though, has always been the one at the end of The Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra, although I admit that the bit I really like in that is the brass section entry near the end, which isn't part of the fugue at all! (The clip is less than three minutes long - I don't know why they've put two minutes of silence on the end...) Enjoy :-)