And Now Here's Glenn: So You Want to Write a Fugue

Today's entry comes from Wikipedia and is our Canadian contribution to Bach through our own genius Glenn Gould.  So You Want to Write a Fugue? is a satirical composition for four voices and string quartet or four voices and piano accompaniment. It was composed by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and was a final piece for the television show The Anatomy of Fugue, which was broadcast on March 4, 1963 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The work is the result of Gould’s intense study of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, in particular Bach's late work The Art of Fugue, excerpts of which Gould had recorded in 1962. Structurally the piece is modeled on just such a Bach Fugue. The text, however, was written on the subject "So you want to write a fugue?" Both the text and the music are parodies of the rules and compositional techniques of the genre, as well as the relationship between intellectual methods and artistic intuition in the creative process (e.g., "Just forget the rules, and write one"). Lyrically, the 5-minute piece concludes tongue-in-cheek with the decision to "write a fugue right now!" The piece contains numerous quotes from various works of classical music, including the famous sequence of notes B-A-C-H, the Second Brandenburg Concerto by J. S. Bach, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, and Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (altered from major mode to minor). "So you want to write a fugue? You've got the urge to write a fugue You've got the nerve to write a fugue So go ahead and write a fugue that we can sing Pay no heed to what we've told you Give no mind to what we've told you Just forget all that we've told you And the theory that you've read For the only way to write one Is just to plunge right in and write one So just forget the rules and write one Have a try, yes, try to write a fugue So just ignore the rules and try And the fun of it will get you And the joy of it will fetch you It's a pleasure that is bound to satisfy So why not have a try? You'll decide that John Sebastian Must have been a very personable guy But never be clever for the sake of being clever For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation While a stretto diminution is an obvious solution Never be clever for the sake of being clever For the sake of showing off It's rather awesome, isn't it? And when you've finished writing it I think you'll find a great joy in it (hope so) Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, they say But still it is rather hard to start Well, let us try Right now? (yes, why not) We're going to write a fugue We're going to write a good one We're going to write a fugue right now! Here's the YouTube of Glenn Gould and the performance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4TKOaUZ7c We enjoy the preview of Spring in pictures today.

So You Want to Write a Fugue by Glenn Gould

This is Celebrate Bach Day on Google. Bach's final composition was missing its 'final' page.  Did it go missing?  Did he compose it it but had not written it down?  Did he deliberately leave it incomplete, by that meaning, is that what he intended? So are there 47 bars missing? How do we know this?  This number is the result of much analysis and thinking.  What is known is that in these bars, Bach would have combined the main theme of the entire work with the other three themes of his final fugue. There have been many written completions by others.   How many?  I haven't found that answer.  But there's a lot of time between 1750 when Bach died and the 19th century when the Bach Revival occurred. And even more time to our 21st century.  All the great composers have referenced Bach, so this unfinished fugue has received much attention. There was a period of decline in his popularity after his death in 1750.  The decline is easy to explain.  His work was so complex that few could perform it. He did not pursue publication of the majority of his work - only the final compositions.  Most of his work was created for teaching.  And the musical trend after him was towards simple, more homophonic sounds.  His music manuscripts were dispersed to students and inheritors, who did not actively preserve it.  What did persevere was the use of his music for teaching keyboarding and counterpoint. So a gap occurred between his death and 1781.  The Revival was supposedly sparked by Felix Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829.  Current thinking is that this performance was a major milestone along the way, rather than the beginning. His son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach left a large collection of his father's manuscripts to the German state library after his death in 1788. There they were made publicly available. His biography was published in 1802 and it is considered key to the Bach Revival.   Most mysterious at the last notes in the fugue is a note in the handwriting of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, stating:  "At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B♭–A–C–B♮] in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died."  How wonderfully dramatic, but it has been successfully questioned and disputed based on Bach's declining abilities before he died.   That question of "How many completions are there of the Unfinished Fugue?" still intrigues me.  But I found this in theepochtimes.com article.  And it seems so satisfying as the conclusive completion. "Fretwork musicians perform their own completion. There are many completions of Bach’s 15th counterpoint in “The Art of Fugue,” but Boothby’s is unique: “The parts of the fugue are proportionate to each other. The first section is 1.4 times the size of the second, and the second is 1.4 times the third, and so forth,” Boothby said. Taking that relationship to its logical conclusion, the fugue would have to be 47 bars, he explained. "