#bach fugue

[arbitrarygreay]

Honestly, I find that Bach is better in electronic form, stripped of varying instrumental timbre and varying musician interpretation/individuality, leaving only behind the genius in full clarity.

[mikrokosmos]

Bach - Passacaglia and Fugue in c minor, BWV 582

My blog is about to turn four years old and somehow [somehow!] I haven’t shared one of my favorite works of all time, one of the first pieces I ever heard that got me into Bach, into organ music, into classical music....there’s so much music out there I get caught up in what I happen to be listening to at the time and I ignore a lot of my personal favs. So here is Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue, a piece that we believe was written early in his career. After studying the works of other Baroque organ composers, namely Dieterich Buxtehude and André Raison, Bach built his passacaglia out of similar ostinatos found in the latter’s music. A passacaglia is a set of variations over a bass line, and the ostinato remains the same for the most part while variations are woven over it. The flow from one variation to the next is so natural, like waves, and I agree with Robert Schumann who said "intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed”. The music flows right into the double fugue, where the main passacaglia theme is cut in half and the two parts are played over each other. No surprise that Bach is able to create an awesome fugue out of such a complex subject in a way that sounds effortless. This performance is one that I saw on YouTube years ago that blew my mind. It was one of the first major pieces of classical music I heard and it made me want to explore more.

[mikrokosmos]

Bach/Webern – Ricercar a 6 [arr. orchestra]

I’ve shared the backstory to Bach’s Musical Offering before, but I’ll recap it here: One of J.S. Bach’s sons played in Frederick the Great’s court, and one day Bach came to the palace at Potsdam to visit him, and meet the king. Because Bach was a well-known musician with a knack for improvisation, King Frederick wanted to show him the recently invented fortepiano. He asked Bach to improvise a three-voiced fugue on a long and complicated subject [the second half of the melody is a walk down the chromatic scale, hard to keep a fugue harmonically sound per Baroque standards with that], and even with the obstacle of playing a difficult melody on a new instrument, Bach did put together a decent fugue on the spot. But King Frederick was notorious for poking fun at artists in his court, and to try and stump him, he asked Bach to improvise a fugue off the same melody but with SIX voices this time. Instead of trying, Bach smiled and said that was too much for him to do at the time, but he would work on the fugue and send it to the King later. Not only did Bach write the Ricercar a 6, but he also filled an entire book with canons and fugues on the theme, a fantastic display of contrapuntal virtuosity, along with a trio sonata with the flute [King Frederick was a flutist], all as one big F YOU to the court. Even when Bach is at his most playful and humorous, the music is compelling. This piece is heavy of course, but it is also a moving work that feels like it’s struggling with pain. In the 20th century, the serialist composer Anton Webern arranged the work for orchestra, and in doing so, showed his own philosophy toward orchestration. The orchestra never once plays in its entirety, only parts and snippets here and there, coming in and out. Webern focuses on the sound, color, and texture, by breaking the melodies along several lines, bouncing from one instrument group to the next. It’s an interesting way to listen to Bach, taking a very dense fugue and reimagining it as pointillism.

[mcmusiclessons]

[triboluminiscencia]

Gentle Giant.

I love 'em