"Bach" Fugue in Bb

This is a fugue I wrote on Bach's name, which in the German musical alphabet is "Bb, A, C, B". There are a couple pretentious quotations thrown in there, but what can you do.

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think! Should I add a prelude? Should I quit composing? I want to know

Hi

This is a little strange because in the tonality of Bb maj, How do you put in place a B natural? Or when in the dominant, the same with F and F#?

Is it usual, in this baroque-classical style, once all the voices are "in" the score that one of them appears or dissapears? I don't know, that's why I ask.

Anyway, the result is very pleasant. In some parts the counterpoint is less active and the feeling is not of a typical fugue, this is because two voices use the same figures: m. 12-13, m 26-29....

10 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

Hi

This is a little strange because in the tonality of Bb maj, How do you put in place a B natural? Or when in the dominant, the same with F and F#?

Is it usual, in this baroque-classical style, once all the voices are "in" the score that one of them appears or dissapears? I don't know, that's why I ask.

Anyway, the result is very pleasant. In some parts the counterpoint is less active and the feeling is not of a typical fugue, this is because two voices use the same figures: m. 12-13, m 26-29....

 

Hi, thanks for the comment! You're right that the subject is chromatic, and I think that's what made it fun to work with. I usually harmonized the raised tonic note in the subject as a secondary dominant for the supertonic, but not always. It is quite common in Baroque fugues for voices to leave and reenter usually with another statement of the subject, just to vary the texture a little bit. I'm glad you enjoyed it thanks for listening!

Apologies that this is so long overdue.

My first impressions are that you need to learn quite a bit more about counterpoint and harmony - even within the exposition itself there are recurring errors that point less to a slip of the pen than an unawareness on your part - and that you haven't got a firm grasp on how to structure a fugue just yet. Now, this doesn't seem to be your first attempt at writing a fugue, so what I'm about to say will be harsh and unmediated, but I earnestly think that you will need to finesse your basics before attempting something as ambitious as this.

***

Let's begin with the subject. As you imply, only the first four notes are 'given'; the rest is yours. Now, a tonal fugue subject usually begins on scale degrees 1 or 5, and occasionally on 3 (in very rare cases, such as the F# major fugue from Book II of the WTC and the 4th movement of Beethoven's op. 106, it 'begins' on scale degree #7, but as my dear teacher and friend would say, it's the exception that proves the rule: these trills take the upper note, i.e. scale degree 1). So that's fine in this case:the subject begins on scale degree 1, implying the harmony of the tonic most strongly. But where does the subject end? Usually, if it doesn't modulate, it would 'end', on a strong beat (or weak if supsended), on scale degree 1 or 3, or if it does, then on 5 or 7 (essentially, 1 and 3 of the dominant); if you doubt me, simply look at the 6 BACH fugues by Schumann or 'Bach's' 'eponymous' prelude and fugue, and you will see that they obey the rule I have observed, the sole exception (that proves the rule!) being Schumann's sixth, where you can see for yourself how the implied scale degree 1 on the downbeat, displaced by the initial suspension, is gradually brought forward until it is realised on the downbeat. But you seem to have chosen to end on G, or scale degree 6, on the fourth crotchet, given that that's the last note in common across the voices' entries in the exposition. I see why you did that (because there isn't a completely satisfactory way to retain all three bars in the answer and still have the subject come in on bar 7, but that should have alerted you that there's something off).

Indeed, your subject is very unusual. You basically have this:

(Note: I have used 'cut-time' as the time signature because that is the metre that the note values imply; you will see that even those fugues that are often taken at a slow tempo, such as the C-sharp minor fugue from WTC 1 and the E-flat major fugue from WTC 2, use this metre). The squiggly line is my notation software's approximation of a custos, which is Latin for guard; it was used in medieval times to warn the performer of the pitch that is about to come in the next line, but is used in the context of fugue pedagogy to mean the last fixed pitch of the subject - the rhythm can vary.)

As it is, your subject is strange because it wants to modulate to F major, but it never quite gets there. More regular is this:

Even then, there is something strange about this version, because we never quite hear the modulation; if we do a Roman numeral analysis on the 'normative' implied harmony, we would get this:

In other words, this is an analytical representation of how one can't really hear the modulation in this modulating subject because of how unclear it is where the tonic ceases to function; contrast this with the subject of Schumann's fourth fugue, where the opening B-flat is clarified as being subsidiary to the dominant (i.e. F major) when the subject is harmonised. If, on the other hand, we have this:

we get the best of both worlds, since we can parse this in the tonic without any contortion, but yet we could re-harmonise the subject in a way that leans more towards the dominant, not to mention the neatness of having both the rectus and 'inversus' of the BACH figure (the retrograde and the inversion are congruent with this subject) in the subject. Bear in mind that you will need to adjust the answer like so:

However, we don't need to modulate at all:

It's your call as to which version (modulating vs non-modulating) you prefer.

***

Now let's move on to your countersubject. As a general rule of thumb, it should be easily separable from the subject, since there will be times when you'd want to introduce the countersubject in a voice that hasn't had the subject already, and it should start after the subject has begun in the other voice, so we can make them out distinctly (the converse, where the countersubject begins before the subject, is very rare). A countersubject should also be invertible (i.e., the counterpoint works whether it is above or below the subject). In your fugue, the countersubject starts at the A on the second crotchet of bar 4, but I can see a number of problems with it already:

If you need to take a breath to refresh your knowledge of or learn about invertible counterpoint:

• Invertibile counterpoint generally refers to invertibility at the octave, i.e. the counterpoint holds whether the countersubject is above or below the subject even when only these two parts are present, but there are other special forms of invertibility, such as invertibility at the tenth (transpose the countersubject up or down a tenth, depending on whether it is below or above thesubject in its initial presentation) and at the twelfth (similar). It is completely distinct from melodic inversion.
• In addition, there exist such things as triple invertible counterpoint (see Bach's 'Great' fugue in G minor) and quadruple invertible counterpoint (possibly quintuple and more? Haven't come across any in actual repertoire myself). Triple invertible counterpoint refers to a contrapuntal configuration that remains valid regardless of which theme is in the bass, and you can extrapolate that for quadruple invertible counterpoint. The latter is rarely used because of how same-y the texture tends to become as a result of this technique.
• If you have learned species counterpoint, you can imagine the intervallic rules for invertible counterpoint to hold in the first species (strict note-against-note): most dissonant intervals remain dissonant when inverted, save for the fourth, which becomes a fifth, and most consonant intervals do, save for the fifth, which becomes a fourth.
• That being said, the is no straightforward set of rules in practice; vertical fourths can be made sense of if it is part of a cadential V6/4, the fourth could be a passing dissonance etc. It is simply nugatory to list all the 'exceptions'; your intuition of what is absolutely forbidden and all that lies in between can only be improved with greater understanding of music theory and familiarity with the repertoire.

Returning to your countersubject: I see that you are treating the second seventh (between A and G) as some kind of seventh chord, but that doesn't work well as an unprepared dissonance unless it's part of a strongly goal-directed harmony, such as a dominant seventh or diminished seventh. However, the initial vertical seventh would still sound blunt even if you had B and C# in the quavers. I think it would be difficult to write a good countersubject to your original subject because of how awkward it is, so let's use one of mine for the purpose of this exercise:

Play: Fugue.mid

Here, I've changed the metre to 'common time' because of all the semiquaver motion, but it is possible to find a sufficiently pleasing solution with your larger note values. I found avoiding having two 'same-y' harmonies on the second and third minims of the subject and making the music flow across the second and third bars of the subject the principle challenges in harmonising theis subject. As you can see from bar 10 et seq., the counterpoint is invertible. I've also tried to make the countersubject distinct from the subject by using shorter note values and attention-grabbing leaps, and although I didn't really use any suspensions in the countersubject here, there is much opportunity to do so here, but remember (from fourth species counterpoint, if you've done it) that it's the countersubject that will be suspended, and that 2-3 suspensions (inverted into 7-6) are pretty much the only usable ones.

By contrast, the way you consistently double the leading notes and fail to resolve suspensions in your exposition and occasionally show some weakness in harmony mars the impression of your fugue, despite the fact that much else is perfectly good! Bar 9 is especially nice, I thought, with the mini 9-8 suspension and strong harmonic direction. On the other hand, bar 6-8 is modal, but that's fine; I've talked about bar 5, and the alto in bar 12 should really be (quavers) F-E-D-F (crotches) F-E. Take a look at my exposition (it is by no means perfect) and see if gives you any inspiration on how to write more strongly-directed harmonic progressions and how to use rhythm and rests to individuate the voices.

***

Now that's just the 'easy' part: writing an entire fugue is much more difficult than just coming up with the exposition! The rest of the fugue was just too meandering; you keep inserting these counter-exposition-like sections in which most of the voices drop out, and that just ruins the momentum of the piece. To begin with, your subject is too short to support the early introduction of the inversion/retrograde and stretto just after the exposition, and this structural miscalculation is exacerbated by the inexplicable thinning of the texture that I mentioned previously. If you take a look at the A minor fugue from WTC I, you'll see that he has a counterexposition with the inversion right after the exposition, but the exposition is long enough (by virtue of a long subject) to support this, the voices don't drop dead like flies, and he reserves any stretti until after the counterexposition has finished, although he wittily hints at stretti with the consistent use of false entries. Therefore, although it works in that context, it just flattens any momentum that the piece has here. I would recommend that you take a look at the WTC 1 E-flat minor, WTC 2 C-sharp minor and WTC 2 B-flat minor fugues to get a better idea of the various possibilities for when to introduce the inversion.

Although I recognise that some of the counterexpositions are used to introduce new subjects (this is a triple fugue, I think - BACH, the last movement of Mozart's K. 551 and the neo-'Gregorian' Dies Irae sequence?), you have to dramatise these counterexpositions for these sudden textural evaporations to make sense. Look at Bach's St Anne Fugue, or the WTC 1 C-sharp minor and WTC 2 F-sharp minor fugues. In addition, the rhythms of these subjects are made very distinct, unlike your unadorned minims here. I appreciate the ambitiousness of your fugue, but it is good to recognise your shortcomings so you can improve on them.

Another problem I found is the use of keys. You make an early shift to the minor; fair enough, but this is unstylistic in Baroque terms, where the first 'third key' to appear is almost always the relative major/minor. This isn't borne out by the rest of the piece, however, which simply hovers around D minor for the most part before an half-arsed attempt to return to the tonic just right before the end. If you look at those pieces where Bach introduces a very remote key in a fugue, such as the organ fugue in A minor BWV 551 (C minor!), it is always dramatised and arises logically out of the musical arguments of the piece.

You also pretty much abandon your original subject of the piece. Do note that it is absurd to conceive the fugue subject as being just the four notes for the reasons I have discussed previously. I'm sure you realised that not much skill is involved in writing stretti with these four notes, but do note that I'm saying that you shouldn't do so - they'd be perfectly good in episodes. All I mean to say is you should not use the stretti of the four-note figure as the crux of your fugue's structure. You shouldn't be afraid to modify the subject if the music demands it (stretto for stretto's sake is rarely interesting in itself, even if it is very complicated), and if you recognise that there are no really good stretti to be found, you should just avoid using them altogether. In the case of my fugue, the only immediately obvious 'good' stretto is at the fifth above at the distance of a minim; there's no real reason to search for more possibilities because the subject just isn't built for that.

***

I hope this helps, and that you found it encouraging rather than the opposite. If you haven't already, you might find reading some introductory books to the subject helpful. Gedalge's book is on IMSLP, if you can read français or Deutsch, but it is outdated and gears you towards writing a very specific kind of academic fugue with the focus on stretti, and should probably not be consulted alone and without reference to the actual repertoire. There's Alfred Mann's book, which is newer but still old; Kerman and Ledbetter have written monographs on the Well-tempered Clavier; and Nalden wrote an entire book dedicated to the answer. I'm afraid I'm not on top of the literature for this topic, but I hope that would give you a start.