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The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
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- diego_moita 1y agoWow! Each recording is better than the other! As a non-musician sometimes I have difficulty on following Bach's contrapunctus, particularly on orchestral and organ works. I like how most recordings here slow down the tempo, allowing us, the ignoramus, to follow the melodic lines. If you like this approach I highly recommend a few recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos with slower tempo made by an orchestra in St. Petersburg under a maestro called Alexander Titov.
- treetalker 1y agoFor the last week I've been listening to the recordings by The Academy of Ancient Music under Egarr, and by the Concerto Italiano under Alessandrini. The latter is fun and raw and jaunty — it feels much more alive than the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields / Sir Neville Mariner recordings. Will check out the St. Petersburg Opera Orchestra / Titov recordings today — thanks for the recommendation!
- tgv 1y agoYou can enjoy them either way: you can try to follow the individual voices, or listen to the overall texture, and you can switch too. It's all about enjoying the music as deeply as you can. Listen to it again, listen to other performances or re-arrangements, and see what you like best. There are people who don't like the organ, but many have been transcribed. Some organ pieces work even better on piano than organ. But it's not for everyone. I had a colleague who called the violin double concerto tedious and long-winding, whereas I think of it as a fantastic piece which by itself is enough to put Bach in the top tier.
- IggleSniggle 1y agoTo be quite frank, as a high-trained musician, I like almost all of Bach's works played slower. You can almost always slow them down more than whatever you think is too slow and find new things to appreciate. Paulstretch to the rescue!
- conorbergin 1y agoBach's fugues are amazing, they sound great on harpsichords and organs, whereas some piano music sounds very wrong when it is payed without all the volume modulation, the fugues are carried by the interactions between the melodies, the counterpoint.
- username223 1y agoBach in general is amazing in terms of surviving all sorts of transcription and mutilation. Compare the Little Organ Fugue as originally intended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4 to the a cappella version by the Swingle Singers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhU7euFPWwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhU7euFPWwo Some music is very much tied to a particular instrument, but Bach is more or less universal.
- niccl 1y agoI much prefer the art of fugue on strings. The Delme Quartet is the best rendition I've found. The two pauses in contrapunctus 1 are, in my opinion the two best pieces of silence in the whole musical canon. I always think of the chords that come after theme as 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped'. They can make me weep when I'm in the right mood. (sorry for the over-sharing...)
- leephillips 1y agoNothing to apologize for.
- dmansen 1y agoI fell in love with this piece hearing Michael Winograd play it on clarinet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI
- AriedK 1y agoAh yes, Vulfmon! Jack Stratton seems to love his Fugues. In case you haven't already: check out Vulfpeck /// Bach Vision Test; a really nice visualization of Contrapunctus IX a 4 alla duodecima. https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg?si=GF1mbszFHOky2QVd https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg?si=GF1mbszFHOky2QVd
- jll29 1y agoAmazing how Glenn Gould caresses that piano, in a performance that is almost a spiritual act. Apart from geek toys that often cause more hassle and annoyance than they're worth, the most appreciated material things that I purchased in the first half century of my life are: • The Art of Computer Programming (purchased the first volume aged 16, decades later I'm still waiting for volume 4 to be completed) • Encyclopedia Britannica • J. S. Bach: The complete organ Works on ten CDs. The Voyager space craft contains a disc with Bach's, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1 on it, and the joke among space folks goes, one day a radio telescope will receive a message deciphered as S-E-N-D M-O-R-E B-A-C-H! Don't waste your life striving to be fashionable, aspire eternal beauty and knowledge! PS: I like the visualization, thanks for this blog post and bringing the beauty of Bach that is almost out of this world into a bleak Tuesday afternoon [on which nasty people drop bombs on children and people too stupid for the power they carry keep quiet about it]. I would like to see another visualization, which shows the music scores smooth-scrolling from right to left with all tones currently being played highlighted in yellow, and below the scores I'd like to see the hands playing said tones on the organ, all in temporal alignment.
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- masswerk 1y agoAd Gould: The phrasing at around 2:40, where he has this voice stepping into the previously dominant legato voices, is tremendous!
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- billfruit 1y agoHow did the Art of Computer Programming help you in those years?
- viccis 1y agoLooks damn good on the bookshelf lol (I say with 3 volumes of the second edition right behind me) I've used it to settle a few combinatorics arguments over the years too.
- mykowebhn 1y agoBeing able to compose fugues well is notoriously difficult. Mozart was never able to. Beethoven on the other hand... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Fuge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Fuge https://youtu.be/hUaziUz4jx0 https://youtu.be/hUaziUz4jx0
- baruchel 1y agoSo you want to write a fugue? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8sogUjiqg2c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8sogUjiqg2c
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- castillar76 1y agoA music history prof in college described this as "the ultimate raised middle-finger to the audience — Beethoven at his most I'm-writing-for-me-only."
- cynicalkane 1y agoMozart wrote several fugues considered very good, the most famous of which is the Kyrie from his Requiem, which is a double fugue to boot.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoCheck out John Mortensen's YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@cedarvillemusic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@cedarvillemusic/videos He can improvise fugues on the spot. A lot of earlier composers could do so as well because their training from the get-go was improvisation.
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- vixen99 1y agoI thought I would check out your comment against other opinions: " Mozart’s contact with the mastery of the German contrapuntal tradition opened a completely new musical horizon. He produced a number of stand-alone fugues, and this newly gained compositional skill helped to inform the creation of his final sublime orchestral masterpieces. Words simply can’t describe the jaw-dropping and breathtaking fugal display of quintuple invertible counterpoint in the final movement of the “Jupiter.” We should all listen to the Jupiter and decide for ourselves if 'Mozart was never able to'. https://interlude.hk/fugues-and-other-musical-charms-from-bach-to-shostakovich/ https://interlude.hk/fugues-and-other-musical-charms-from-ba...
- treetalker 1y agoFor the J.S. Bach fans, here's a fun site that organizes his cantatas calendrically: https://whichbachcantata.be/ https://whichbachcantata.be/
- throw0101a 1y agoBBC Radio 3 has show Record Review (aka Building a Library) where they go over various recordings of a particular work and recommend particular one(s): * https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06w2121/episodes/player https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06w2121/episodes/player
- throw0101a 1y agoThe Netherlands Bach Society is trying to record all the works of Bach and make them available: * https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/allofbach
- an1sotropy 1y agoTheir Art of the Fugue is a multi-instrumental joy. Here's where Contrapunctus I starts: https://youtu.be/N6sUlZa-IrU?t=7 https://youtu.be/N6sUlZa-IrU?t=7
- EpiMath 1y agowow. thank you.
- kkylin 1y agoSince no one else has done it, I'll plug the Canadian Brass recording -- it's one of my favorite recordings of the Art of the Fugue, and (among many other things) just shows how flexible and instrument-agnostic this music is.
- organman91 1y agoI adore the Canadian Brass' recording, and also the other Bach pieces they have transcribed. I'd also like to plug the album released by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, who did a double album of the Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering, and used a variety of different scorings for each movement.
- queuebert 1y agoThis and their Pachelbel's Canon were what ignited my love for classical music as a child.
- fortran77 1y agoExcept nobody would call "The Art of the Fugue" classical. It's baroque.
- artimaeis 1y agoFor what it’s worth: plenty of people would refer to it, broadly, as classical music. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music_(disambiguat... It’s not music from the classical period. Indeed, it’s from the baroque period. But in my decades of talking about and performing classical music, the term has never led to confusion.
- queuebert 1y agoThat comment is mind boggling. I've spent a large fraction of my life playing in classical orchestras and also never heard anyone get confused. Yes, classical music is a genre and a period. Bach is in the genre, but not the period. I hope the commenter learned something from their attempt at pedantry.
- yousif_123123 1y agoThe Emerson quartet version blew me away when I first heard it. I recommend it over the piano versions because I think you hear the full extent of the voices better (coming from someone that loves and play the piano).
- vixen99 1y agoThe Art of Fugue itself was unfinished but if as the story goes, he died as he was penning the last bar of fugue 15, then he kind of signed himself out in the sense that the notes corresponding to the letters (in German) BACH are spelled as a motif as B flat, A, C and B natural in the 8th to the 5th bar before the final bar which is unfinished. I have no idea if this true. We do know that this unfinished fugue was the last piece he wrote.
- corey_moncure 1y agoThis is a tall tale told by one of his sons to pump up the mystique (=> market value) of the unpublished work at the time of his father's death. Common sense and technical analysis tell a different story. By all means,there's no way anyone, even the great Master himself, could have undertaken a project of 14 fugues with various subjects, with the final one (14, not 15) being a quadruple fugue that combines four of them together, without being certain of what the subjects were and that ultimately they could indeed be combined. Bach scholars have analyzed the paper and the device used to draw staff lines to show that a completed version likely existed, now lost.
- ethanhein 1y agoEvery once in a while I get a giant traffic bump on an old post, and it's because someone shared it here. It's always a nice surprise. Thanks for reading!
- xeonmc 1y agoThank you for the wonderful post. I was humming the Nomai leitmotif from Outer Wilds[0] when two earworms came up simlutaneously: this, and the Little Fugue, and for some reason they comingled in my mind that I couldn't remember which subject was which, so I went googling which was how I found your post. [0] https://youtu.be/zHm-GAuy8CI?si=8iSgsn_D5g0LFovt&t=72 https://youtu.be/zHm-GAuy8CI?si=8iSgsn_D5g0LFovt&t=72
- MomsAVoxell 1y agoExcellent article and great analysis of the state of the fugue - your insight has motivated me to dig out some Bach from the old piano bench and give things a bit of a bash. As a musician, stuck in a bit of a rut of late, this kind of thing really helps get the juice flowing again. I’ve spent 15 minutes churning through some fingering and activating old muscle memory I’d forgotten about completely since the piano lesson days, and tonight’s jam session with my band is going to have some new flavours to introduce. Good stuff, thank you!
- viccis 1y agoThe visualizations here remind me of the old Bach WTC analysis and commentary website that used David Korevaar's performance (and some others for the ones on organ or harpsichord) and Tim Smith's analysis. Problem was, they were all done using Flash. Some amazing person uploaded video versions to Youtube. I would highly recommend them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8TlcyHkrwbEsWMyP https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8Tlc... This one in particular is beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU
- codedokode 1y agoI can understand when there are 2 voices, but when there are 4 independent voices how on Earth does one follow them.
- gatlin 1y agoI prefer to simply be taken along.
- moritzwarhier 1y agoIt happens when you don't think about it. Practising Bach's music certainly helps. But yes, just letting it flow and paying attention without trying to learn or remember anything, is probably the best answer. It's like an orchestra (or the different sections of one), the melodies are written to fit together perfectly. There are many almost "poppy" feeling fugues in the Well-tempered clavier with four voices. In comparison, The Art of Fugue feels more academic and dry to me personally. I still like it, but don't feel as connected to it in as to many of his other works. Tangent ahead: even good pop songs require melodies that are more than just homophonic. Best example in rock, pop, disco for this are good bass lines I think. Incidentally, "bass lines" are also an important fixture in the history of baroque music. I'm not preaching here, I'm not good at music theory or playing music. But I think many pop songs also follow counterpoint rules, at least to a degree. There are also varying degrees of strictness regarding these rules in Bach's music. It doesn't need to be an academic puzzle as many make it out to be, I think the intent was to formalize how to write good music for multiple voices. All that said ... you are still right :D But it's even more impressive the way solo keyboard artists can articulate these voices. Not to mention the organists.
- RogerL 1y agoIt's a life endeavor that you will never master. start at age 4 playing minuet in G, at age of 90 you'll still be learning new things. The music is beyond us, yet ourselves, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. All we can do is enjoy the ride.
- devrandoom 1y agoFugues are still being written. Here's one from 2016, although a bit controversial: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxCAqCUgug https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxCAqCUgug
- leephillips 1y agoI don’t see anything controversial there.
- chasil 1y agoHere is a free recording of a piano performance of the Art of the Fugue by Kimiko Ishizaka: https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-of-the-fugue-kunst-der-fuge-bwv-1080 https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-o... This artist also has a free recording of her Goldberg Variations available: https://opengoldbergvariations.org/ https://opengoldbergvariations.org/ Her bandcamp page also has the Well-Tempered Clavier, and two of her own albums: https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/ https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/
- kkylin 1y agoThank you! Just listened to some of the Art of the Fugue & enjoyed it very much
- sambapa 1y agoAlso worth reading: https://listenlearnanddo.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/bach-badass-of-counterpoint/ https://listenlearnanddo.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/bach-badas...
- mike_ivanov 1y agoAlso, let us never forget what Laibach have done to it https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k0PDQPcIZG5_gJvP5ISN8iD1EiMmeEJqs https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k0PDQPcIZG5_gJ...
- motohagiography 1y agoSuch a pleasure to read. using beats seemed almost profane at first but it allows for chunking the complexity where it could really help someone get what's going on. I don't listen to the fugues much, and really mainly guitar arrangements of his work I'd like to be able to play one day (allegro assai, lute suite prelude, etc), but it's hard not to get mystical about it. jubilance is the word I'd use for his work. for me the music forms an imaginary navigable space when I hear it, and as everything that lives can hear and count, every piece seems like a meditation on what can be aligned, harmonious, and essentially, True in a universal sense- the awe of a creation for its creator. I'm an absolute amateur dilettante musician, but for someone just starting to hear his work, I'd suggest the skill is in being able to listen for separate voices and then follow them, and then to practice following them in simple pieces with enough dissonance in them to make you intellectually keep track of what's going on. the simplest possible polyphony someone can use to hone their attention that has analogues to early music may actually be Arvo Pärt's work, as once you can separate voices, the richness of Bach and other composers kind of explodes. great fan of hein's writing, a pleasure to be reminded of it and to get to comment.
- gerdesj 1y agoHow does an article like this on HN avoid having a comment referring to "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach (Yes!) (EDIT - formatting)
- athom 1y agoNo kidding! The FIRST thing that came to mind when I read that headline was Hofstadter's Contracrostapunctus in THAT book! Check it out! Read it! And if you DON'T find the WHOLE hidden message, read it again, because it's spelled out RIGHT in the dialog! Happy hunting!
- gerdesj 1y agoQuite right. An article referring to: {e ∈ GEB|HN: e := article referring to GEB} ... might be considered rather self referential (especially if I have got my rather dodgy notation right). Note how I leave out several important definitions and leave them to your imagination. I will resort to hand-waving as required. Hmmm: FIRST, THAT, DON'T, WHOLE, RIGHT. I speak en_GB you monster!
- ctchocula 1y ago"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine." I've always wanted to learn how to listen to counterpoint. Anyone have good tips on how to appreciate it and know what it means to perceive counterpoint?
- djtango 1y agoHa I've been learning the piano for over 30 years and I still feel the same as that quote and am not convinced I can hear so many voices at once so well, though admittedly I have improved a little recently because a lot of the music I have been playing has three or more voices and to play them you must hear them. So playing an instrument (usually keyboard) helps - JSBach's inventions and sinfonias were written to teach counterpoint IIRC. If playing is out of scope then I found listening to orchestral music can be helpful because you can latch onto different instruments and learn to interpret what they're doing individually (first) then how they are interacting with other voices after. Strong quartets will similarly allow you to listen to multi-voice music that may sound more distinct than just keyboard. The other piece of advice is to get very familiar with a particular musical work and listen to it repeatedly. Once the familiarity is there you'll start to pick up different things on repeated listens. If you then start changing the recording/performer you'll also notice how they choose to interpret passages differently and certain voices may sound more prominent which can be a hook for your ear to latch onto... Just some initial thoughts, hope that helps! EDIT - Pachelbel's Canon in D is probably one of the most accessible songs to practise listening to. Poor cellists always grumble about playing this one, see if you can hear why
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]