Michael Talbot – Fugue Forum

The pdf and midi files of this piece may be downloaded HERE

Writing strictly in three parts poses challenges, but also offers opportunities, that four-part writing (so familiar to anyone trained via the medium of Bach chorales!) does not possess. The challenge is to make the harmony sufficiently full: triads have only three notes, and the demands of melody and part-writing make it often impossible to sound more than two notes of the triad. However, the use of arpeggiated shapes often mitigates, and even sometimes disguises completely, this textural and harmonic thinness. On the positive side, in writing for solo keyboard the reduction to three parts allows the contrapuntal lines to flow more freely and range more widely.

In my “talkative” fugue (Fuga garrula) the subject harks back to a species common in Buxtehude, also found in Bach and continuing up to the present day. In this type of subject the “torso”, or middle part, of the subject is a moto perpetuo of quick notes formed into sequential patterns. This discursive type of subject lends itself badly to a fully fledged stretto and to contrapuntal artifice (except, perhaps, thematic inversion), but can produce an exciting, zestful type of fugue in a concertante spirit.

My choice of key, D flat major, recalls nineteenth-century music: this key is less bright than either C major or D major – it has a mellowness similar to A flat major – but is well suited to a “brilliant” style of writing.

The subject, which modulates to the dominant, A flat major, demands, and gets, a tonal answer. Tonal answers are, by definition, a “distortion” of the original subject, but not, one hopes, an ugly or unwelcome one – and a composer can try to be creative in exploiting the variant intervals thrown up by the process of tonal answer. There is a regular countersubject that mildly – but only mildly – contrasts rhythmically with the subject and emphasizes the mellifluous consonances of the sixth and third. There is even a second invertible countersubject, beginning in the upper voice in bar 10, although I use this less intensively than the first countersubject.

The first exposition runs from bar 1 to bar 17. The three entries of the subject are in a “top down” (SAT, or if one prefers, ATB) formation, and a short concluding section takes the music to a cadence in the home key. It would have been also possible to end the exposition in the dominant, which would have the advantage of making the first exposition necessarily different from the last (which, naturally, has to close in the tonic). The fact that I choose the tonic instead places an obligation on me to make the final exposition significantly different from the first in some respect other than tonal structure.

The shortish first episode occupies bars 18–25. It “plays” imitatively in light counterpoint with fragments of the subject and takes the music to F minor, the mediant minor. It would have been possible also to modulate to B flat minor, the relative minor, and this would have produced a more traditional tonal trajectory. However, the mediant minor is a perfectly valid option.

To end the very long codetta – almost an episode – following the first “middle” entry, in F minor, of the subject there is a wholly new idea (bars 33–36) that is almost Neapolitan (Scarlattian) in character. This is what Germans call an Einfall – a sudden idea that arrives as if from nowhere. I find the idea attractive in its almost opera buffa character arising from the use of ostinato, but, having introduced it, I have to validate its presence in the fugue by employing it at least once again, which I do in bars 44–47 (with inversion of the counterpoint). But before this, there are new middle entries in B flat minor (bar 37, truncated) and G flat major (bar 39).

Bars 48–53 form a second short episode, concerned mainly with dominant preparation for the return in the tonic of the subject.

How to form the final exposition, balancing the first, required thought. If I wished to make it more than a ritornello-like recapitulation of the first episode, I had to inject a new element. This I did by substituting a new, more dynamic (because aggressively syncopated) countersubject indirectly recalling the “Neapolitan” idea, which first enters in the top voice in bar 53. The idea is to revitalize the music in this closing phase. However, for the third entry (bar 63), the original countersubject is restored and the music calms itself in preparation for the end. In bars 69–72 there is a hesitant passage, with rests and harmonic stasis on the first beat of the bar, that is rather nineteenth-century in its rhetoric. This leads straight into the coda.

Theorists of fugue, beginning with Marburg, extol the virtues of placing one or more entries of the subject right at the end of the movement, as if to hammer home to the listener the “prime focus” of the composition. However, even Marpurg allows the alternative, which is to “dissolve” the fugue in a free coda, and many composers, including Bach, have made use of this option (good examples of this “symphonic” kind of fugue with an extended independent coda are the ones in Rossini’s Petite Messe Solenelle and Stabat Mater). In the present fugue, the closing bars 73–83 wind the music down with a free coda of this kind. The rather intense counterpoint of the main part of the fugue gives way to a playful homophony that culminates in simple octave-writing in the manner of a Mozart or Beethoven piano sonata.

The pdf and midi files of this piece may be downloaded HERE