Brief Fugue in A Minor

...Well, gracing it with an actual title may be a stretch. This is my first serious composition... it's short, about 90 seconds in length, and is written for oboe, English horn, and bassoon. Any advice regarding the composition would be appreciated... I'm not an expert at fugal form, counterpoint, modes, or any of that, but definitely wouldn't mind becoming one :]. Comments and criticism would be appreciated!

I love the instrumentation

The oboe is definitely not in range, but in fugues, that's easy to fix.

The lines sometimes seem longwinded. In baroque music, each should be playable individually as a melody and then fit in to the whole as well. Listen to each line seperately as soon as you input it.

It's all in all easy to listen to and very good work for a first composition

Though it got better at around 25 seconds, you need to breath more. Also, I don't know that I enjoyed many of your counterpoints, but that's more stylistic than anything, so whatever.

All in all a nice effort.

Thank you kindly for your comments.

In regards to breathing... heh, I kinda forgot that people had to be playing this :X. The wonders of computer technology blinded me to the physical limitations of instrumentalists. In regard to the oboe, well, I probably should have done more research involving the instruments range before I wrote for it. It was my mistake ><. I love the sound of the double reed instruments... I'm a trombonist myself, but double reeds just have a very earthy, natural sound that other instruments don't see to produce for me. I've had to play bassoon parts on my instrument before, and I'm always frustrated with how I cannot emulate the same thick sound bassoons are able to produce.

As far as the counterpoint goes, what specifically don't you like about it? Is it too similar to the subject, or just not pleasing to the ear?

Looking at the score, I don't think many would identify this composition as as fugue (or even as fugato, for that matter). The counterpoint is interesting, but ridden with errors, the most prominent of which are the copious parallel octaves.

I don't mean to sound horrible, but if you're confessing that you're 'not an expert at fugal form, counterpoint, modes, or any of that', it would probably make sense to start with something that's not so hugely demanding of all those. Fugue is the ultimate expression of contrapuntal ability, and it takes a great deal of skill to render them musical rather than mechanical (let alone to render them harmonically and motivically correct). It's rather hypocritical of me, because I learnt almost everything I know about counterpoint from studying fugues, but I wasn't able to write them even vaguely convincingly before I'd done a great deal of preliminary exploration.

Heh, I apologize... my ineptitude stems primarily from a lack of patience. I suppose I did try to run before I could crawl, per se, and realized shortly into the piece that it was significantly more difficult than I anticipated. Maybe in some time I will reuse the subject and write a real fugue out of it.... but until then, do you have any suggestions regarding improvement at contrapuntal technique?

Listen to lots of counterpoint, play lots of counterpoint, try to practise improvising counterpoint in real time, sing two-part counterpoint mentally whenever possible. Practise writing two-part counterpoint, and post the results here for peer-review. Two-part counterpoint is the basis for all contrapuntal writing.