My First Fugue

Hi. It's my first post here, and I would like to introduce myself by attaching the first of my works to this post and humbly asking for opinion.

Quite recently (not even some hours ago), I tried my hand at composing with MuseScore (for the first time), and finally finished a 3-voice fugue in G minor.

Hope it's up to the standards of this forum.

It sounds nice but it's very difficult to stay in actual rules of baroque counterpoint. That's why I don't see the point to write this kind of things, unless it's an exercise.

Hi, @Nloki, and welcome to the YC community!

Your fugue is well-crafted, especially for someone so new to composing (or maybe I'm assuming incorrectly)! You called it a 3-voice fugue, but unfortunately there are only 2 voices playing simultaneously for most of the piece until the very end. I wonder if you could "thicken" things up by adding more of the 3rd voice into the piece, especially in the middle.

I was impressed, and your fugue is absolutely up to the "standards" of this forum. Thanks for sharing your music with us!

Thank you very much for your answer and feedback, @Tónskáld and @Luis Hernández. I just realized my composition wasn't what I said it to be a day after posting it, but I couldn't edit my post any more times (I had done once earlier). In fact, hence I couldn't edit to add new "versions" of my composition as I developed them, the audio and the score are now a bit outdated.

I didn't add a third voice to that invention, but instead I started composing yesterday and finished today what, I think, could be an actual 3-voice fugue.

Hope you like it.

I'm too stupid to write a fugue, so hats off to you for writing one. I think you did a really god job, too.

In terms of the "rules" for the Baroque style writing of fugues, you're probably breaking a ton of them. For example, as I understand it, when you move in parallel 4ths or 5ths, it's considered a error. But, in free-form fugues, you can do whatever, and frankly, as long as you're sincerely happy with what you've written and feel confident in it, that's what really matters. Granted, it might help to know what the rules are so that you can purposefully break them, and you may find more satisfaction in what you write if you do that. But regardless, rules were made to be broken.

^_~

Thanks for sharing these pieces with us, I really liked listening to them! 😄

Nice job! It is definitely 3 voices, but, without analyzing the piece too carefully, it seemed that the voices weren't in technical canon. Sometimes the voices repeated the same or similar rhythm as the previous voice, but not necessarily using the same note intervals. Hey, that's perfectly okay—it's just not what folks would call a traditional fugue.

Also, as you get more experience composing, consider introducing some dissonance into your polyphonic writings. It increases the "interesting factor" of a work, as well as—if resolved properly—improves the emotionality.

To some extent I've been aware that my composing isn't quite subject to Baroque rules from the very moment I finished the first one. Having previously started browsing and reading on counterpoint and, more specifically, on fugues, I didn't aimed to fully follow... Bach's methods, to humbly name his example as whose music I'm used to the most, (as it would be almost impossible for someone new to composing unless having researched on Bach's techniques for... 30 years by the way I'm not even half of maybe?).

Even before reading the two previous post I renamed the C sharp minor invention as "Heterodox fugue", since after lots of corrections (harmony ones, not just realising that from the viewpoint of the Baroque style it's just a unconsciously made nonsensical piece of ****) the posted score and audio have ended up outdated again. I also started working on another two compositions, one of which had four voices and simply sounded awful, and previously left one unfinished, none of which I'm able to finish at the moment.

Anyway, thank you for your answers.

11 minutes ago, Nloki said:

To some extent I've been aware that my composing isn't quite subject to Baroque rules from the very moment I finished the first one. Having previously started browsing and reading on counterpoint and, more specifically, on fugues, I didn't aimed to fully follow... Bach's methods, to humbly name his example as whose music I'm used to the most, (as it would be almost impossible for someone new to composing unless having researched on Bach's techniques for... 30 years by the way I'm not even half of maybe?).

Even before reading the two previous post I renamed the C sharp minor invention as "Heterodox fugue", since after lots of corrections (harmony ones, not just realising that from the viewpoint of the Baroque style it's just a unconsciously made nonsensical piece of ****) the posted score and audio have ended up outdated again. I also started working on another two compositions, one of which had four voices and simply sounded awful, and previously left one unfinished, none of which I'm able to finish at the moment.

Anyway, thank you for your answers.

 

Oh, I didn't think either of your pieces were "nonsensical pieces of ****." Counterpoint is not easy (most modern musicians ignore it), and I think your examples are very well put-together! I apologize for coming across so harshly. In my opinion, you have a lot of talent, so please don't be discouraged! Make music that speaks to you—if it follows conventional forms, great. If not, also great!

On 9/2/2019 at 12:47 AM, Tónskáld said:

Oh, I didn't think either of your pieces were "nonsensical pieces of ****." Counterpoint is not easy (most modern musicians ignore it), and I think your examples are very well put-together! I apologize for coming across so harshly. In my opinion, you have a lot of talent, so please don't be discouraged! Make music that speaks to you—if it follows conventional forms, great. If not, also great!

 

It's me who should apologize. I don't know why did I say those things about my music and pretended to be offended (non-volitionally). Anyway, I could finish another "fugue" (from now on forth I'll write "fugue" with quotation marks for whichever 3-voice piece of mine) in A minor. Thank you all for advice.

You’re literally writing new pieces and posting them on this same thread 🤣 It’s funny. Some people need to be told, “stop spamming the forum with 30+ separate pieces at the same time.” I honestly really appreciate that you’re not doing that... however, if you want to make a separate post with a fugue you feel is an improvement over previous work, and want feedback based on that work, you have every right to do that! (Just don’t post 30 pieces on the same day, please.)