Fugues?

I was thinking of attempting to write a fugue, but don't really know where to begin. Has anyone got any tips?

What kind of fugue is it?

Baroque, Bach-style, clavier, 4/4, D major.

Do you have anything written as of yet?

Not as yet; I've tried writing fugues in the past, but I always get stuck after all four voices have played the subject.

I was thinking of attempting to write a fugue, but don't really know where to begin. Has anyone got any tips?

Here's a few that help me.

1. Map it out first. At what point will the subjects/answers enter? Where will your episodes be? What keys are you going to modulate to and for how long? How will you modulate back?

2. If you're going to do stretto or use other devices, see if the theme allows it to be done without harmonic gaffs. Otherwise you'll wind up changing theme intervals, which is "ok"..but the more you do this the less recognizable it becomes.

3. Analyse different ways a theme can be harmonised.

4. Read this: Fugue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

5. Read Lee's "crash course" in Advice and Techniques

6. Make sure you have a firm grasp of functional harmony. Which notes you can double, which you can't, voice crossing, how to handle the leading tone, watching for augmented intervals etc. This is likely to be your biggest hurdle, unless it's something you have spent considerable time studying.

Personally, as for #1 - I find that this is most helpful- fuges is just about all I have been doing lately, and without a map, or some sort of guideline, I wind up doing more corrections to make it coherant - vertically and horizontally. Sometimes unplanned left -to *blind* - right composing makes for some interesting music though.

Hope that helps.

Thanks a lot, that really helps! :(

In addition to my "crash course," if you'd like to practise a bit before writing a fugue on your own theme, there's the Fugue Challenge in Advice and Techniques featuring a masterful set of subjects by Brandon Homayouni that you can use as exercises to help you get started. They changed my life - no lie.

Those subjects are very good as well as the crash-course from Graham. I am learning about fugue as well. You have a nice base in those 2 things to get started. If you want to go more in-depth you can always find some textbooks which I would recommend anyway but if you're trying to get a notion first this crash-course is very nice. Bear in mind this is a kind of technical approach to writing fugues which you are seeing on this forum, something akin to the practice in the well-tempered clavier. Fugue writing need not be such a rigorous excercise. For instance some of Bach's fugues for organ can be a lot more loosely structured and toccata-like, with fewer instances of this tight fugal structure you will hear about. These kind of fugues were meant for performance. Same goes for Buxtehude who rarely wrote a wholly structured fugue in the formal sense, and likewise for other contemporaries. The definition of fugue is not necessarily limited to the model you hear on the well-tempered clavier. Also I suggest studying some harmony like PaulPoehler mentioned up there. It will shed light on a bunch of things.

Thank you all for the advice, I'll have a look at Graham's course.