A Series of Unfortunate Notes: The Bad Beginning
Way back in my undergraduate days, I wrote a fugue whose subject remains the most fugue-ready music I've ever written. Lately I've been thinking about rewriting the fugue, believing I could do its subject more justice. Here's the subject as I originally wrote it.
Oh, but those bumptious repetitions! They don't quite stand the test of time, do they.
In the last few days, I've made a few changes.
I think the new version has promise. However, it gets rather chromatic there toward the end. In a future post I'll show you more voices and we'll see if I keep the chromatic material under control. (Hint: no.) Meanwhile, let me take up a suggestion from a respected authority and see if this fugue is compatible with a certain text in the news lately.
Hmmm. I can't exactly express why, but I feel with my finely calibrated composer's intuition that this isn't the right direction. Don't despair, Alex, someone else may catch the inspiration.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
3 Comments:
You do not have nearly enough rhythmic variety for a subject of that length, and you are not being direct enough with the establisment of your pitch axes. To be blunt, it's a terrible fugue subject. Sorry. Just being honest with you.
See here: http://hucbald.blogspot.com/2005/07/composing-fugue-subjects-as-canons.html
Writing good fugue subjects is a knotty issue, to understate it. I wrote several before I came up with my first decent one, about a dozen before I got really good at it.
its ok, don't listen to him. He's a guitarist and owns a mac...
The declamation on "be turning" is off, I think--"be" should be on an Auftakt with the melodic stress on "turning," same place it falls in the spoken sentence. All the same, a good try at a worthy project...
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