Epiphany Fugue 3/8

I set myself an interesting challenge for this week's Epiphany Fugue #3 (see previous post) by working with a Gregorian chant melody, the well-known Ubi caritas. (Our choir sang a simplified version of  Duruflé's beautiful setting during this morning's service.) It's a beautiful melody, but the part I used moves entirely by step without any strong rhythmic profile (to be expected with chant), so it makes for an odd fugue subject since there's not an obvious hook melodically or rhythmically. For several days I imagined in my head something...that I never quite found on paper.

I'm OK with the result, but I feel like I could change lots of things and not change it so much; it definitely tends towards the meandering. I was intentional about using some mixed meter to give the sense of a varied, chant-like flow, but the harmonic structure also leans a lot on modal freedom, so here we are. To be totally honest, this is the kind of feeling I often get listening to Gregorian chant. Perhaps not an ideal choice for the genre, but I'm still intrigued by the challenge and might return to this one to see if I can find what's in my head....but I said I'd write a fugue every week, so here's this one.

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