Episode: 1784
Title: HPR1784: Intro to the Fugue and the Open Well-Tempered Clavier
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1784/hpr1784.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:15:30

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This in HPR episode 1,784 entitled Intro to the Fugue and the Open Well Tempered Clavier,
it is hosted by John Kulp and in about 30 minutes long, the summer is, inspired by the release
of the Open Well Tempered Clavier, I try to explain the Fugue.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com.
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Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana with a very special episode today.
I was inspired to record this episode partly because of the ongoing request for music theory
topics, but more specifically because I recently found out about an excellent new project.
Well, it was new to me anyway and I don't think it has been out all that long.
It is a complete recording of JS Box Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 by Camico Ishizaka.
She did a crowdfunding campaign to finance the recording of the complete Well Tempered
Clavier Book 1 with the express purpose of releasing it for free to the world with
an open license with which anyone can download, share and cut up into little pieces like
I'm going to do on this episode.
So it's really, really a wonderful thing for those of us who love free culture.
And for me, because I love classical music, and you know, you occasionally get the odd
fugue or prelude here and there, but to have the entire Book 1, this is 48 separate
pieces that she recorded.
She's an excellent pianist and has recorded all these for free.
And you can download the scores also that were newly done in a new edition by using an
open source tool called Musecore.
So let's start off this episode by listening to an excerpt.
This is the prelude number three in C sharp major, BWV listing 848 performed here by
pianist Camico Ishizaka.
Alright, pianist Camico Ishizaka performing the prelude number three in C sharp major from
the Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 by J.S. Bach.
She was really getting after it there.
If you're like me and listen to these podcasts at one and a half times speed normally, then
you might not even have heard any individual notes there.
It's plenty fast at normal speed.
So that's from her project called the Open Well Tempered Clavier.
This is not the first open Bach project that she has done.
A few years ago, she did the Open Goldberg Variations, which at the time were, they claimed
that they were the very first fan-funded open source, completely free recording.
And what they're probably talking about here is within classical music.
And it's also excellent.
And I may use bumpers from that periodically.
And I will certainly have a link in the show notes for this episode so you can check out
the Open Goldberg Variations.
They're very, very well done.
Another recent project of hers was to record the 24 Preludes for piano by Frederick Chopin.
And I was actually a backer of that project.
And I believe at least one other HBR community member backed it.
And I will not say his name just for, because I don't have permission to, but those of
us who really like classical music and free culture were so stoked to see that she was
doing this.
That recording should be out very, very soon.
On that one, one of the cool things about it was that she was recording on an old piano,
an 1832 playelle piano.
And it was allegedly a piano that Frederick Chopin himself had played.
So that'll be kind of cool to hear.
Now, the Welton Brickolver is a book of 48 Preludes and Fugues.
And in order to kind of help people who aren't familiar with this music to understand what
that's all about, I thought I would talk about the fugue today.
Now the Prelude, I'll just do a little bit on the Prelude.
A Prelude is a piece that, by its name, you might surmise that it comes before something.
Normally a Prelude will come at the very beginning of something like a Baroque suite or some
other kind of suite or in many cases it comes before some rather, I don't know, academic
kind of piece.
The fugue is a very learned academic genre.
It's very strict and has all kinds of rules and clever things that you can do with it.
Whereas the Prelude is meant to be more free and improvisatory.
So the fugue is a Baroque and by Baroque here, I mean from the period of music history,
from around 1600 to 1750.
The prototypical late Baroque composer was Johann Sebastian Bach who lived from 1685 to
1750.
Other Baroque composers you may have heard of would include Antonio Vivaldi, George Friedrich
Handel, maybe some French guys like Jean-Philippe Ramon and so forth.
J.S. Bach wrote lots and lots of fugues and there are 24 of them on this new open Bach
Well-Temperic Levere recording.
The fugue is an imitative polyphonic genre and it's usually in three or more voices based
on a single theme that's called the subject.
Before I go any further, I want to introduce the notion of imitation.
Imitation is a really important concept in much of the late Baroque music.
The main idea is that certain melodic ideas, phrases, motives are imitated.
So one voice in the texture will play a theme or a motive or something like that and then
another voice in the texture will imitate it.
It could be imitation by playing exactly the same pitches only in a different octave or
if there are, say, three or four people singing something that's in imitative polyphony.
They could sing exactly the same pitches only at different times.
This is what happens in a round, for example.
If you've ever sung that old children's song, row, row, row your boat, as a round,
you have engaged in imitative polyphony.
Now, for the sake of demonstration, I prepared a little example based on the HPR theme song.
And what I've done is I have a main, the part of the theme song that goes
da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and I have imitated it in a different octave and at a different interval.
So it starts on the pitch D here, and then when it's imitated in the bass, it starts
on G instead.
So this would be imitation at the fourth.
Let's listen.
And you hear that imitation.
Clearly, the other voice is doing essentially the same melody only it starts on a different
pitch, it's in a different octave.
It has imitated the first voice.
Now, imitation is the, it's part and parcel of a fugue.
It's based on a single theme called a subject.
The basic idea is that there's an alternation of sections where the subject appears and
where the subject does not appear.
The most identifiable part of a fugue is the beginning part, which is called the exposition.
It's distinctive because it starts with one voice all by itself and then one by one,
the other voices in the fugue enter imitating the voice that came before it.
The first voice presents the subject.
The second voice comes in imitating at the fifth, and that is called the answer.
Now, it has a different name.
It's called answer instead of subject, just I suppose because it's at a different interval.
That's just how the terminology is.
Then the third voice will be back in the tonic, which is like the home key playing the
subject again.
If there is a fourth voice, it will be imitating at the fifth with the answer again.
This keeps going until all of the voices in the fugue have entered.
Normally, there are three or four voices in a fugue, but there are examples where there
are as many as five or six voices.
Now, when the second voice enters the texture, the first voice doesn't just quit.
It keeps on going and the part that it presents as it keeps going is called the counter subject.
And so, the counter subject goes along with the subject, and there could be as many as
two or three of these counter subject as well.
And they typically will reappear later in the fugue along with the subject when it shows
up again.
After the exposition, it's a little less predictable.
The only thing that you know is that there are going to be sections where the fugue subject
is not present, and then there will be middle entries or restatements of the subject.
To get from the exposition to a restatement or to a middle entry, there are what are called
episodes.
Episodes are passages where the subject is not present in its complete form.
You might hear little bits of it, but you won't hear the whole thing.
And typically, these make use of a technique called sequential repetition, or simply sequences.
Now, a sequence is when there is a melodic fragment that is repeated at
successfully higher or lower pitch levels.
And I made another example from the HPR theme song to illustrate the concept of sequence.
So, the part of the melody that I've taken is the one that goes,
and specifically I've taken the part that goes,
da-da-da-da-da, and I've used that in sequence here.
Let's listen.
See if you can hear the repetition of that melodic fragment at successfully higher pitch levels.
First, we'll be that whole fragment, and then there will be a slight pause followed by
the little smaller fragment done in sequence.
Here comes the sequence.
You hear that?
So, there's the little part that goes, da-da-da-da-da-da,
I've done in sequence.
da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, keeps getting higher and higher.
And so, that's the kind of thing that a composer will typically do in an episode,
because it allows them to move to a new key area.
All right, so, after it has moderated, there will be restapments where there
might be some fun stuff happening.
if you're listening carefully, you'll see that a composer will often do interesting things
with the fugue subject, such as he might turn it upside down. So wherever the original
melody went up, the inversion would go down. He also might do the subject in retrograde
where the subject would start at the last node and go to the first. This is a little bit
less common. I can't really even think of any examples where it happens, but it does
happen occasionally. Augmentation is another little trick that might happen. That's where
the rhythmic values of the fugue subject are changed in a proportional way. So for example,
all of the quarter notes would become half notes, the eighth notes would become quarter notes,
and so forth. Demonution is exactly the opposite, where all of the rhythmic values will be
diminished by some proportional amount. Stretto is another technique, and that's probably
my favorite. And this is where you're going to hear overlapping presentations of the subject.
And I've got some examples here. Let's see what's first. So we're going to be looking at the fugue
number eight in D-sharp minor. This is BWV853 from Book One of Boxwell, Timber Clevver. And first,
I'm just going to play the subject, so you can kind of get it in your head. Here's the subject of
the fugue number eight in D-sharp minor. And right at the end there, you probably heard
another voice come in, and that would be the answer. Here's, I'm going to pick it up right at
that spot, and this will be the answer. Notice that the answer starts playing what you just heard
at a different pitch level, and the original voice keeps on going with the counter subject.
Okay, so there's the answer. Now let's listen to the entire exposition of this fugue. This is where
you'll hear each of the three voices come in doing first the subject, then the answer, and then
the subject again. Here we go.
At that moment, the exposition is over, and what you would look for is an episode that will take
you to a new key for another presentation of the subject. So here is what the first episode sounds like.
All right, so there was the first episode. Next up, there is, and the first middle entry is one
where the subject is presented in strato. Now I'm going to play just the two upper voices at first.
I used a lily pond file to isolate just the two upper voices, the ones that are going in strato.
It's modulated to a new key. This is the dominant minor. Let's see, it's D sharp minor. This
is an A sharp minor here. Listen how the two voices imitate each other in strato. In other words,
one voice overlaps the other. Here how one of the voices seems to be stepping all over the other
one's toes. It's kind of cool, isn't it? Now listen to the, let's listen to the real piano. Do it.
Pretty cool, isn't it? Now there's another interesting moment at measure 30 in the piece
where he does an inverted version of the subject. Now this, I've isolated only the voice that's
inverted so you can hear that at first. Let's listen. Here how all of the contours of the melody
have been reversed. The original fugue subject starts with a leap upward. This one starts with a
leap downward. Everything is inverted. Now let's listen in on the real piano. This is that same spot,
but it's a little bit harder to pick out. It's the top voice in the texture, though. This is
another middle entry. This time in F sharp major and this subject is in inversion in the highest voice.
Right. Bach is really getting after it in this example. He doesn't necessarily do all of these
tricks in every fugue, but in this one he's done quite a lot of them. Now in measure 62 there's
an example of augmentation of the fugue subject in the bass voice. Let's listen to this. And again
augmentation is when all of the rhythms of the subject have been changed proportionally. In this case
they've been doubled. Here how this subject has been increased in rhythmic value.
Let's listen to that one more time without my singing and maybe you'll enjoy it more. Here we go.
Okay, and then it goes into another episode. Now there are other interesting moments in there,
but I think now it's time simply to listen to the entire fugue from beginning to end and listen
for these things. Listen for the presence of the subject for those passages where the subject is
not there where it's modulating. Those are the episodes. And then for the middle entries where you
do hear the subject again. This is again Camico Iszacca performing the fugue number eight in D sharp
Minor from J.S. Box Well-Temper-Clevier. This is music from 1722.
We've been listening to music by J.S. Bach. That was the fugue
number eight in D sharp Minor from the Well-Temper-Clevier book one performed there by Camico Iszacca.
I always hear something different when I listen to this piece. There's so much there that in that
listening just now I heard another example of the fugue subject in augmentation in the highest
voice about probably 20 seconds from the end there. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that and I hope
you have enjoyed learning a bit about the fugue. If you would like more information go to Camico Iszacca's
website or the website of the Open Goldberg variations and the Open Well-Temper-Clevier. I will
have links for all of these things in the show notes and I bought this as a pay what you will
download. She does ask you to pay something but you can really make whatever amount you want. I
paid a certain amount that I thought was reasonable and not a cheap skate amount and for that I was
able to download the entire thing in one of several different formats including FLAC which is,
I mean, it's awesome to be able to download music in FLAC, isn't it? And I got the MP3 version
and of course the show notes are, I'm sorry, the liner notes are available as a PDF that you get
with it. You can also just listen to everything for free and since this is licensed freely,
people have used it on YouTube and done those kinds of things where I don't know if you'd not
or into classical music you may never have noticed these but you can listen to certain classical
pieces on YouTube while having the score flip in front of you as images and those are kind of cool.
Before we go I wanted to point a couple of other things out to you that you might find interesting.
If you are intrigued by this whole notion of the fugue then you owe it to yourself to check out
a couple of examples of fugues based on modern themes. There's this guy, I don't know what his name
is but his YouTube handle is something like Counterpoint Genius or something I forget exactly what
it was but anyway he has written fugues with the subjects coming from famous pop songs by contemporary
artists. His best known is the Lady Gaga Bad Romance fugue so he's taken the theme of a Lady Gaga
song and written a fugue on it in the style of J.S. Bach and man it is amazing. He does most of
these tricks here and does it very very much as if it sounds like J.S. Bach. He also has one on
Miley Cyrus' song Recking Ball and I will have links to both of these in the show notes. The videos
are up on YouTube and it's really fascinating. He does amazing things with these otherwise
to me kind of forgettable pop songs. Anyway I hope you've enjoyed that. This has been John Colp with
a little intro to the fugue. Bye-bye.
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