Don't you fughetta 'bout me

In my last post I mentioned I was about to top one million views of my YouTube videos. On Saturday, according to one set of stats, I did indeed pass the threshold, as you can see below:

On the other hand, I've now realized that my public stats show I'm only just over 985,000 views. I think this is because I have a significant number of unlisted videos, mostly choir practice parts, which I suppose have been viewed a lot by singers in various choirs, though I doubt as many as 15,000 times. Who knows? Anyway, I was working on a "Thanks a million" post, but will now hold off on that until my public number hits seven digits. Perhaps that will happen by my 15th anniversary on February 24. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I have a fun new project for 2022 (inspired by a need to write something) which gives me something to write about here. Here's what I wrote about this on Facebook:

When I couldn't come up with a topic idea for the January column in our church newsletter, I decided to kick the can down the road by announcing that I'd be writing a new hymn-based fugue for each of the eight Sundays in Epiphany. That gave me something to write about. [and a lot of work to do in the new year!]

This is sort of a follow-up project to my "Summer of Fugues" from 2018 when I wrote eleven short, hymn-based fugues for Sunday morning services. Although fugues have a reputation as being formally rule-bound, I've come to think of writing them as a quasi-improvisational process. I work out a subject, and then follow where it leads...more or less. Each subject presents its own challenges, and some subjects lend themselves to more liberal use of counterpoint rules than others. The great virtue of these projects is that I find these new little pieces quite useful and have repeated most of them more than once. (I purposefully have chosen hymn tunes which we sing with relative frequency.)

And so, I'm already on my way with two new fugues for the new year, one on an early American hymn and one on a lovely modal tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

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For various reasons, it's not easy to produce ideal recordings yet, but these provide the basic idea. As with fugues I've posted in the past, I'm only including the opening of the score in the videos, though I'd be happy to share full scores on request.

I'm adding each new fugue to this playlist and to this little HYMN FUGUE ARCHIVE, which provides links to recordings of the original tunes. I also tracked down a few other little fugues I've written over the years (some are so short they really might better be called "fughetta") and have added them to the playlist. The notation/recording quality is pretty sketchy in some cases (one includes live crickets!). But the truth is, I'd almost forgotten about a couple of these, so this kind of archiving is a good way to keep track of what I've done.

It's also made me realize I'm only one fugue away from 20, and if I complete my planned Epiphany project, I'll top 25. (I also happen to have a couple of NON-hymn fugues out there, and I'm quite proud of each. This little fugue on the theme from Scheherazade is really beautiful, and it comes with a fun story. And this sports-inspired fugue on I'm Shipping up to Boston is just fun, and it comes with football highlights.)