The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus 13

Subject 1, in half- and whole-notes minims and semibreves , is not a variation of S , but rather an echo. Subject 2, rising and falling in curling eighths, again recalls both S and I. The fugue breaks off before Bach could add the last subject, presumably S , and then combine all the elements in totally invertible fashion, as his obituary said he had planned. Some great musical minds have made laudable attempts to complete it. Since it is the original subject that is missing - a subject that by now has been explored so exhaustively - it almost seems, on some level, that Bach is saying: I don't know if there's scientific evidence to support it, but when I listen to this music I feel my brain cells being re-aligned.

The fugues are complex yet so perfectly ordered, so respectful of the laws of physics that govern music and make it a universal language. Just hearing Bach's work, even without much concentration, is like having my musical windows cleaned - all other music around me becomes clearer and more understandable. Figuring out each fugue was like solving a mystery. The whole last fugue seems to be striving towards something ineffable, something beyond the reach of mortal man even as immortal a mortal as Bach.

The Art of Fugue: Notes on the Program

There is a sense throughout this cycle of Bach summing up a life's work, utilizing every ounce of technical mastery and stretching the boundaries of what the ear can perceive and the mind can grasp. His pushing himself to achieve a higher plane has an emotional impact and a spiritual resonance that cannot be described in words. It unlocks a yearning that all of us have, to be connected to "something bigger, something spiritual".

Bach was making music that would connect people to God. When I play any of these fugues, and especially when I play the whole cycle, I find that I become somewhat mesmerized. The complexity of what I am helping to reproduce is at once daunting and thrilling. There is definitely some kind of power that pulls me along in its wake. Or am I riding the crest of the wave?

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In my quasi-hypnotized state I feel a warmth and very human glow reflecting off the surface of these most perfect, intricate multi-jeweled fugue-machines. When it feels right, it just goes by itself. As a performer, you have to try to find the place where it feels right, where everything works. And you can get to that point.

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Maybe that relates to Bach's idea of heaven - where everything works like this. Site may not work as expected! Track List Johann Sebastian Bach - Version for String Quartet. Canon per Augmentationem in contrario motu. Eugene Drucker, David Finckel. Lawrence Dutton, David Finckel.

Canona alla Decima, in Contrapunto alla Terza.

Eugene Drucker, Lawrence Dutton. Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta. Philip Setzer, David Finckel. Fuga a 3 Soggetti. Total Playing Time 1: Not only do they desire a form a perfection, they attain it. And I'm not talking about the kind of empty, technical perfection laid accusingly at the door of many young musicians.

No, every note, every phrase, every movement has a purpose and a sense of its own standing within the given work as a whole. Fuga a 3 soggetti. Double and Triple Fugues: Fuga a 2 Clav.

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Rectus und Inversus getrennt zu spielen! In the autoghaph ed. Fuga a 3 soggetti [4? While working on this fugue, where the name B.

Mirror Fugues from the Art of Fugue

Sequences study version by Nausica Th. Classical Sheet music PDF available for subscribers! Cover [reproduction from the autograph by Dover ed. Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu. In , a previously unknown manuscript by Bach surfaced in a private collection in France, and it shook up the musicological world.

It was a single sheet of paper on which fourteen canons were sketched out as enigmatic puzzle-pieces. The first four canons were simply that bassline in canonic counterpoint with itself — right side up, upside down, backwards, and backwards and upside down. Subsequent canons invent new counterpoints to the bass line, also realized in canon, at various intervals of time, and in both diatonic and chromatic styles.

The penultimate canon is in six voices, and the final canon in four voices at three different levels of speed — something one hears developed further in The Art of Fugue. The performance tonight links them together in arbitrary fashion, but with a mind to proceeding from the most simple to the most complex — a habit Bach himself relished in many of his works.

These canons are the sort of thing that probably occupied Bach constantly. They represent his need and, no doubt, his delight in realizing all combinatorial possibilities of any given musical phrase. In that sense he was a conceptual genius. As one musicologist put it: Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms used counterpoint masterfully, but Bach thought in it. Perhaps no other work in all of Western music makes more out of virtually nothing. More precisely, no work creates such a grand, many-faceted, truly awesome musical edifice out of the simplest of building blocks.

That irreducible germ is simply the outline of a D minor triad, followed by a short, stepwise scale fragment. During the course of the fifteen fugues and four canons that make up The Art of Fugue, there are progressive changes to that short subject — changes in the internal musical intervals, rhythm, speed, implied inflection, etc. The gradual mutations in the subject unlock possibilities of harmonic excursions to remote key areas, which Bach makes bold use of, though he always returns home to D.