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Fugue with a theme on a Name


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I like this!  There's some nice use of augmentation and diminution of the subject throughout!  Although I do take some exception to how the subject was derived from the name (I do understand that it had to be done selectively as not all the letters of the name could have a musical meaning) since La in A would be F# (the correct syllable for F in A minor is Le which occurs later in the name but you don't use it as such).  Also, you interpreted the S as So but you could also have interpreted it as Es which in European would mean Eb (although that's just an option - understandably there's many ways to interpret the name).

Nice exposition!  There's nothing wrong with it.  Nice job building your first episode out of the double diminution of the subject.  The episode is very clearly delineated from the rest of the fugue and effectively uses sequencing.  It just doesn't modulate to a closely related key which is almost the whole point of an episode (it develops - and developments are almost always expected to modulate and play around with various different keys).  Then after the first episode it's like you start another fugue out of the diminution of the subject (actually there's not really a problem there either - it's just a different way to develop a fugue - usually Bach would reserve the use of augmentation and diminution for the stretto entries of the subject in the middle of the fugue but this works too I guess).

The biggest nit-pick from me here is that this never modulates which is expected as the fugue is the ultimate developmental form/genre.  To get better at writing episodes that modulate you could take fragments of any given subject you might be working with and practice sequencing/transposing them to different pitch levels and see where it could take you in terms of modulating to other keys.  In this you're definitely on the right track but it seems like you were almost forcing yourself to stay in A minor and end the episode on an E7 chord in preparation for the second fugue you wrote on the diminution of the subject.  That episode could easily have led you to another key to have a middle entry of the subject in say, C major.

Anyway - i hope at least some of that is helpful in your future fugues - I'm looking forward to them and thanks for sharing!

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