To The Last- Chromatic Fugue in G minor

This is something I made in response to a prelude my friend Tobias had written (It's here, if you're curious).

Chromatic Fugue in G minor

Although it still could benefit from some cleaning up (it seems sometimes as if voices don't have enough silent moments in parts), this is the most complete I've gotten to a finished fugue.

There are 5 expositions. I introduce the subject in the dominant. In the final exposition I use an entry in the pedals in augmentation, and a melodically inverted version of the subject during this.

Edit: ah... well, I'll just change the thread title to then if using the word 'baroque' generates too much negativity. At any rate, I'm still learning how to handle my counterpoint (though I hope I've been improving). Thank you for listening, GK. I appreciate it.

One thing that bothers me about this work still is how gratuitously thrown together parts of it still are (like the episode preceding the coda). I don't give my voices enough room to breathe sometimes (which sounds kind of disconcerting), and some of my phrases sound incomplete, or sound as if they were cut off before they were done speaking. These are the holes you are referring to, yes?

Exp 1- G minor, Exp 2- D minor, Exp 3- A minor, Exp 4- C Major, Exp 5- G minor

What differentiates a modern fugue from a baroque style one? The time period it was written or the styles and techniques being observed?

ToTheLast.mid

This work sounds like modern fugue only with some baroque influences. In some fragments, I think, it's not very much "strict" with "holes" in voices movement. As a modern fugue - maybe interesting, as a baroque - not so much...

It definitely has a hint, in fact more than that, of Baroque. Methinks Buxtehude in style. Yes, there are elements of modernism, and there are also elements of "randomness". What I mean by this is sections where nothing seems to happen apart "let's try and make this piece a little longer". A little blunt, I know, but true.

I personally thought you had started the fugue very well and then it became more of a prelude or fantasia than a fugue, but luckily the theme came back at the end to remind us that it was a fugue after all.

Someone was influenced by Bach, especially at the end with the long tonic pedal although Bach would have done a dominant one instead.

What distinguishes a modern fugue from a Baroque one? Well, if you are going to use the word fugue, then it's a style which became very popular in the Baroque era. So if you are going to write a modern fugue, then I personally think the principle must be adhered to. These include subject (entering at the dominant), a countersubject, episodes, development to relative minor/major, recapitulation at the end, use of dominant/tonic pedals and so on... but with a modern twist. I am reminded of the shark fugue by John Williams in Jaws. He sticks to the fugue style but makes it more modern in rhythms and pitch.

Finally, chromatic fugue? Not convinced. Yes, there was chromaticism, but Bach did write an organ fugue which contained far more chromaticism in the subject. Can I remember which one it is? Not a chance, but I know he wrote one!

I'm not quite sure how many organ ones there, but a lot of the keyboard ones I know of are some of the most chromatic pieces I know of (as far as Bach goes, at least).

The fugue for BWV 906, for instance (though they call it incomplete).

. The fugue starts at 4:07

. This one is hard to play, and as far as I can tell very chromatic. Yet it never breaks out of E minor, oddly enough. This is me (badly) playing the start of it. You can tell I'm still a novice player.

is also another good candidate for its use of chromatics.

These have been interesting to study. I haven't quite gotten the hang of how Bach sets up his melodic minor phrases. He mixes them in so well I can hardly tell (unless I'm playing them).

In regards to chromatic fugue organ pieces,

comes to mind (the Wedge fugue), BWV 534 in F minor (fugue starts at 3:33), and lastly BWV 540 in F Major.

As far as randomness in the piece goes I was mostly trying to get my different sections to flow into one another more convincingly, rather than gaining arbitrary song length or filler material. I can understand that one might get that impression, however.

Glad to see you are posting again :) I will listen as soon as possiblee