This post will be brief after a busy weekend, but I did meet my goal of writing eight new fugues for each Sunday of Epiphany. This is the last Sunday Alleluias are sung until Easter, so I had the tune Lasst uns erfreuen on my radar for a while as it is associated with multiple hymn texts ending in Alleluias. A few weeks back, I’d considered the Old 113th (known to Lutherans as O mensch, bewein) as a fugue subject, and it happens to begin with the same opening phrase as Lasst uns erfreuen. Thus, one could theoretically write a fugue which serves equally well for each tune, though I decided to allude to the latter’s Alleluias in the countersubject here.
(I also realized while working on a diminution of the subject that the opening phrase is the same as that of Simple Gifts minus its pickup notes.)
I wanted to end the series with a grand postlude style suitable for organ, so this achieves that, although it’s pretty short. I ran into that curious composer problem where I’d written a good bit of a fugue early in the week and tacked on a temporary ending. The temporary ending grew on me, I was short on time, so it became more or less the ending. (It's amazing how powerful repetition is as a means of making something sound 'right.')
Perhaps later I’ll come back and write more about this fugue set. One of the ongoing challenges was to deal with the tension of not wanting to write the same fugue every week while also wanting to develop some consistency of style. Among others things, I realized after a few weeks that I wanted to avoid always using the same opening formulas. This week, the fugue answer comes in at the Dominant (very normal), but in minor (not normal). The most common procedure would then be to have the next voice back in Tonic, but I have it enter in the Submediant (which is naturally in minor, meaning the two middle entries of this major key fugue are minor) so that the entry of the bass voice in tonic has a strong sense of arrival. Thus, the entries are in: D Major, A Minor, B Minor, D Major.
| THE HYMN FUGUE ARCHIVE |
| (25 total / 8 new in '22) |
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