One of my favorite things about this project has been approaching composition as a quasi-improvisational process. I don't at all mean that I sat and improvised any of these fugues or that I'd be capable of such a thing (like that Bach guy who supposedly improvised a 3-part fugue for Frederick the Fantastic - on a subject much more difficult than Amazing Grace), but rather that my working process each week was pretty fluid and time-constrained. Things happened quickly enough that I've already forgotten a lot of the specifics of how each came to be, but I'm pretty sure Fugue #4 was one of those times when I ended Saturday night dinner by saying, "well, better go write that fugue."
The subject here comes from a wonderful old Lutheran hymn, Wer nur den lieben Gott, sung as If thou but trust in God to guide thee in our hymnal. The hymn is memorably featured, in a slightly different version, in the Oscar-winning Danish film, Babette's Feast. (OK, that's actually all I remember about that film other than a lot cooking.) It's also a tune that Bach showcased in his Cantata No. 93, and indeed there are lots of wonderful prelude settings of this tune from Bach and others, so I've never been at a loss finding music to pair with it on Sunday morning.
I think this fugue does sound more improvisational than the first three. There's no real countersubject and the first episode (starting around 0:23) relies on a very simple kind of sequential patterning, although I like the way that these 8th notes get passed around the three voices. Motivically, the descending 3rd (with short-long emphasis) that concludes the subject is featured a lot and the ending kind of just dissolves with memories of the final three notes of the subject, a descending minor triad. I use augmentation (stretching out the notes values of the subject) in many of these fugues, but I especially like the lengthened (note quite complete) presentation starting in the bass at 1:04 as a climactic feature, and I also like the general flow and sense of being at a loss through much of the fugue. This music is looking for someone to guide it.
If you think all of these fugues are starting to sound the same, be sure to return tomorrow...
Friday, August 17, 2018
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Fugue State: Day 3
If yesterday's Amazing Grace fugue featured one of the best-known hymns, today's fugue, written for the Sunday before July 4, is based on an even more famous tune. Identified in our hymnbook as America (Beethoven and others have referred to it as "God save the [Monarch]"), we didn't actually sing "My country, 'tis of thee" that morning, but I figured a fugue on the subject would still carry some meaning. And if we happened to have any visitors from across the pond, they could happily hum along without worrying about 1776.
Like our country, this fugue is a bit quirky. This is the first of the set to feature four voices, so I decided to do something a bit unusual with the entries. The normal procedure would be for the second entry (the "answer" to the subject) to begin in the dominant (the key a 5th above) or subdominant (4th above) with the third entry back in the tonic (repeat of subject) and fourth entry back in the key of the "answer." So, in an F Major fugue like this one with a subject beginning on F, the exposition entries would begin on: F, C, F, C. I decided to heighten the tension by having the third entry on G (supertonic), with the final voice returning (rather suddenly!) to F, so: F, C, G, F. It creates a bit more tonal drama right off the bat, for better or for worse.
I also chose to use only the first six notes (my coun - try tis of thee) of the tune which makes for a very simple subject that only includes three unique pitches - kind of the opposite of the problem with the rangy Amazing Grace. The dotted rhythm of "tis of thee" is thus the most prominent motif, and you'll hear that it's used again and again as gateway to various quick modulations. Some of these modulations are admittedly a bit jarring, but Americans are often in a hurry.
My favorite feature of this fugue is a kind of extreme stretto that happens around the 0:27 mark, with all four voices presenting the theme just one note apart from each other, starting at four different pitches. This results in some fun metrical disruption (only one of the voices starts on a downbeat) and is also enabled by my more freewheeling approach to voice-leading and dissonance. But I think the section really works, and maybe it even embodies a bit of the virtuous struggle to make a diverse country work.
It turns out that once again, for the third fugue in a row, I chose to reference the climactic part of the tune (otherwise not part of the subject) near the end at 0:48. I am pretty sure I backed away from this effect as the summer went on, but we'll see in the days ahead.
Like our country, this fugue is a bit quirky. This is the first of the set to feature four voices, so I decided to do something a bit unusual with the entries. The normal procedure would be for the second entry (the "answer" to the subject) to begin in the dominant (the key a 5th above) or subdominant (4th above) with the third entry back in the tonic (repeat of subject) and fourth entry back in the key of the "answer." So, in an F Major fugue like this one with a subject beginning on F, the exposition entries would begin on: F, C, F, C. I decided to heighten the tension by having the third entry on G (supertonic), with the final voice returning (rather suddenly!) to F, so: F, C, G, F. It creates a bit more tonal drama right off the bat, for better or for worse.
I also chose to use only the first six notes (my coun - try tis of thee) of the tune which makes for a very simple subject that only includes three unique pitches - kind of the opposite of the problem with the rangy Amazing Grace. The dotted rhythm of "tis of thee" is thus the most prominent motif, and you'll hear that it's used again and again as gateway to various quick modulations. Some of these modulations are admittedly a bit jarring, but Americans are often in a hurry.
My favorite feature of this fugue is a kind of extreme stretto that happens around the 0:27 mark, with all four voices presenting the theme just one note apart from each other, starting at four different pitches. This results in some fun metrical disruption (only one of the voices starts on a downbeat) and is also enabled by my more freewheeling approach to voice-leading and dissonance. But I think the section really works, and maybe it even embodies a bit of the virtuous struggle to make a diverse country work.
It turns out that once again, for the third fugue in a row, I chose to reference the climactic part of the tune (otherwise not part of the subject) near the end at 0:48. I am pretty sure I backed away from this effect as the summer went on, but we'll see in the days ahead.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Fugue State: Day 2
My second and third summer fugues (see previous post) feature the two best-known of the ten tunes I've taken on. Today's subject is
New Britain, a tune much better known by association with the words of Amazing Grace. Although I'm not sure I could say exactly what makes for a perfect fugue subject, this melody strikes me as less than ideal for the job; but facing challenges is part of what this project is about. The opening of the tune has a simple rocking quality, with mostly intervals that are larger than a step. (Stepwise motion is very useful in creating counterpoint.) The pentatonicism is an important part of its folksy charm, but this certainly doesn't sound like a Bach fugue subject.
I took all of this as license to let my folk fly, so I was even less worried about illegal parallel intervals than in yesterday's fugue. There's a wide-open-spaces parallel fifths moment going from m.5 into m.6, and there are plenty more violations, so it's definitely not Bach. As happens in several of the fugues to come, there's a sentimental Copland flavor at times, but I'm still happy with the result, even though it's always a surprise to me when something I write turns out sentimental.
Perhaps you'll notice that the little rocking 3rd motif in the countersubject is borrowed from notes 3-5 ("...-zi-ing grace...") of the subject. As with the fugue on Aberystwyth, though the fugue subject is based only on the opening of the tune, the climactic phrase of the hymn sneaks in towards the end (1:24). I think I stayed away from this technique in the fugues to come, but we'll see. Fugue #3 arrives tomorrow...
I took all of this as license to let my folk fly, so I was even less worried about illegal parallel intervals than in yesterday's fugue. There's a wide-open-spaces parallel fifths moment going from m.5 into m.6, and there are plenty more violations, so it's definitely not Bach. As happens in several of the fugues to come, there's a sentimental Copland flavor at times, but I'm still happy with the result, even though it's always a surprise to me when something I write turns out sentimental.
Perhaps you'll notice that the little rocking 3rd motif in the countersubject is borrowed from notes 3-5 ("...-zi-ing grace...") of the subject. As with the fugue on Aberystwyth, though the fugue subject is based only on the opening of the tune, the climactic phrase of the hymn sneaks in towards the end (1:24). I think I stayed away from this technique in the fugues to come, but we'll see. Fugue #3 arrives tomorrow...
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Fugue State: Day 1
Earlier this year, when I was having fun writing fugues and the blog was cruising, I'd had some thought about starting a podcast with the name "Fugue State." As you may know, fugue state actually refers to a psychiatric disorder, and though I don't want to make light of such things, a musical fugue can conjure up the feeling of hearing voices talking to each other. Maybe. Anyway, I have found that my mind enters an interesting state when writing fugues. I had thought of it as the title for a podcast because so many of my blogging/musical interests have to do with following an idea where it takes me and enjoying the collision/connection between differing ideas, musical or otherwise. A psychiatric fugue state is a kind of temporary amnesia, and experiencing a good fugue can certainly feel like being lost in thought. But that podcast hasn't happened, and I've since learned that the band Vulfpeck already gave one of their albums this title, so it seems less original now.
Though I haven't blogged yet this summer, I did undertake a fun fugue-writing project, and it's time now to mine that for blogging gold. At the beginning of the summer, I considered the annual problem of choosing lots of instrumental music for church when there is no choir around to sing the usual two anthems. In summer of 2017, as I wrote here, I featured a lot of "composer Sundays."
Although I tried to set myself various compositional challenges to avoid falling into the same tendencies over and over, I was a bit surprised at how many of the resulting fugues sound similar in many ways. Of course, there are some general principles of fugue writing that contributed to this, and I was also choosing to write in a mostly slow and contemplative style. My basic method is to write the kind of piece I wish I already had on hand, and even once I start writing, my process is pretty much: write a phrase, imagine what I hear next, try things out until something works, etc.
My plan here is to feature one fugue a day over the next week and a half. I'm not sure if they'll all be presented in the order I wrote them, but for Day 1 I begin with the first fugue from the project, based on a lovely Welsh tune with the lovely name Aberystwyth. Our summer hymn selections generally stick with tunes the congregation knows well, which means from a practical perspective that I've created a little repertoire of pieces I'll be able to use often. (All of these fugues are based on hymn tunes as they appear The Hymnal 1982.)
You can hear this tune here and you can see various uses of it in countless hymnals here. Although many of these fugues should work well on organ or piano, these recordings will all likely be made on my own not-perfectly-tuned piano because it's simply easier to do that way - especially since I'm something of a fake organist. Unlike past compositional experiments that I've featured on my Youtube page, I'm choosing to withhold the complete versions of these scores as I'm hoping I might get around to self-publishing them. However, for anyone interested, I'd likely be happy to send out complete scores. They are all fairly simple, and all still somewhat in draft form; but as a set, it's the kind of collection I wish I'd had on my shelf to begin with, so perhaps someone else will feel the same.
The most distinctive feature of this fugue is that the entire first phrase of the hymn tune is split so it serves both as subject and countersubject. In a fugue, the subject is the primary thematic idea which is treated contrapuntally among multiple voices. When the second voice enters with the subject, the original voice often continues with new material that functions as countersubject. In this case, the countersubject is simply the second half of the full opening phrase. This has the effect, especially for anyone who knows the tune, of making the second voice entry seem like it's coming in early - in fact, it does arrive earlier than is usual for a fugue since the second entry begins with the final note of the subject.
For contrapuntal purists, you might find that I don't shy away from parallel 5ths and octaves as much as I should, but I think this one is pretty tame in that regard. In fact, this is probably among the most conventional of the set. There are a few very quick modulations in the middle, though handled in a very standard sequential style. At about 1:13, the top voice clearly references the climactic phrase of the original tune, even though that's not part of the subject. (This is a technique I've used a lot in the past, for example at the 1:34 mark of this synthetically recorded Christmas fugue, but as the summer of '18 rolled along, I tried to avoid relying on this trick too often.)
I promise I won't write nearly so many words in the days head, but a new fugue will debut tomorrow, and hopefully that pattern will continue through mid-August.
Though I haven't blogged yet this summer, I did undertake a fun fugue-writing project, and it's time now to mine that for blogging gold. At the beginning of the summer, I considered the annual problem of choosing lots of instrumental music for church when there is no choir around to sing the usual two anthems. In summer of 2017, as I wrote here, I featured a lot of "composer Sundays."
"This past summer, with choir on hiatus, I had a pre-July 4th All-American prelude-offertory-communion-postlude lineup of Ives, Copland, Barber, and Beethoven's Variations onFor this summer, I decided to write at least one fugue for each Sunday based on hymns sung that day, and I now have a set of ten. Most of these were designed to serve as Offertory, which only requires about 90 seconds or so in summer, so I had a good excuse to write short fugues. For someone who's always been more of an occasional/accidental composer, it was a really good exercise to take on this challenge each week. It suited my procrastinating tendencies well since I generally submit work titles by Tuesday morning. This meant I could make myself commit to writing something that often didn't actually come into existence until Saturday night! (Ask my family...)God Save the KingMy country 'tis of thee. I also had Sundays of all-Bach, all-Mozart, all-Scarlatti, all-Ravel, and all-Shostakovich!"
Although I tried to set myself various compositional challenges to avoid falling into the same tendencies over and over, I was a bit surprised at how many of the resulting fugues sound similar in many ways. Of course, there are some general principles of fugue writing that contributed to this, and I was also choosing to write in a mostly slow and contemplative style. My basic method is to write the kind of piece I wish I already had on hand, and even once I start writing, my process is pretty much: write a phrase, imagine what I hear next, try things out until something works, etc.
My plan here is to feature one fugue a day over the next week and a half. I'm not sure if they'll all be presented in the order I wrote them, but for Day 1 I begin with the first fugue from the project, based on a lovely Welsh tune with the lovely name Aberystwyth. Our summer hymn selections generally stick with tunes the congregation knows well, which means from a practical perspective that I've created a little repertoire of pieces I'll be able to use often. (All of these fugues are based on hymn tunes as they appear The Hymnal 1982.)
You can hear this tune here and you can see various uses of it in countless hymnals here. Although many of these fugues should work well on organ or piano, these recordings will all likely be made on my own not-perfectly-tuned piano because it's simply easier to do that way - especially since I'm something of a fake organist. Unlike past compositional experiments that I've featured on my Youtube page, I'm choosing to withhold the complete versions of these scores as I'm hoping I might get around to self-publishing them. However, for anyone interested, I'd likely be happy to send out complete scores. They are all fairly simple, and all still somewhat in draft form; but as a set, it's the kind of collection I wish I'd had on my shelf to begin with, so perhaps someone else will feel the same.
The most distinctive feature of this fugue is that the entire first phrase of the hymn tune is split so it serves both as subject and countersubject. In a fugue, the subject is the primary thematic idea which is treated contrapuntally among multiple voices. When the second voice enters with the subject, the original voice often continues with new material that functions as countersubject. In this case, the countersubject is simply the second half of the full opening phrase. This has the effect, especially for anyone who knows the tune, of making the second voice entry seem like it's coming in early - in fact, it does arrive earlier than is usual for a fugue since the second entry begins with the final note of the subject.
For contrapuntal purists, you might find that I don't shy away from parallel 5ths and octaves as much as I should, but I think this one is pretty tame in that regard. In fact, this is probably among the most conventional of the set. There are a few very quick modulations in the middle, though handled in a very standard sequential style. At about 1:13, the top voice clearly references the climactic phrase of the original tune, even though that's not part of the subject. (This is a technique I've used a lot in the past, for example at the 1:34 mark of this synthetically recorded Christmas fugue, but as the summer of '18 rolled along, I tried to avoid relying on this trick too often.)
I promise I won't write nearly so many words in the days head, but a new fugue will debut tomorrow, and hopefully that pattern will continue through mid-August.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Speaking of music
Strange. I was already planning to write a post about a light-hearted little speech-to-music thing I created - and then a speech-heavy work wins the Pulitzer Prize! I'm so cutting edge - though I don't have much more to say about this year's surprise prize. The Pulitzer has never really meant much to me anyway. Honestly, there are many previous winners whose music I don't know much better than I know Kendrick Lamar's work, though I know he's not the first to use speech in a musical way. For example, here's your 2013 Pulitzer winner.
(There are also iconic works by Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier and many others which incorporate speech.)
I became interested in the idea of speech becoming music when I first heard an excellent 2010 (?) RadioLab episode called Musical Language. The opening segment features a fun little story about an audio expert hearing her own speaking voice looped and thinking she's hearing singing. The looped words that behave so strangely are: sometimes behave so strangely.
You can hear the whole segment via the link above. I used to play it for classes learning about recitative as a way of thinking about the tonal and rhythmic characteristics of language. I've since returned to the idea of looping speech into music a couple of times, and also just remembered that I'd explored it many years before.
Most recently, I was having a Facebook discussion with my composer friend Wesley. He said he'd been told that some scale passages he'd written into a work-in-progress were just noodling. I [wittily] suggested, "Make them octatonic scales....and then it'll be octatonic noodling." He replied: "They are octatonic."
At that moment, impressed by my obvious psychic insight, I heard unbidden the mellifluous lilt of Frasier's Daphne Moon saying, "I'm a bit psychic." The phrase came to me much as one might hear a musical theme conjured up by a memory. To be fair, this catchphrase, which really doesn't function as a catchphrase on the show, probably had taken on a thematic quality in my brain because of a podcast I'd been listening to about Frasier.
I can't really recommend the Talk Salad and Scrambled Eggs podcast, hosted by indie film director Kevin Smith and Matt Mira, unless you enjoy hearing two people spend 80% of their Frasier podcast talking crassly about Star Trek, The Terminator, Comic-Con, and just about anything else while laughing interminably at their own jokes. However, from early on, Smith took to imitating Daphne's Manchesterian "I'm a bit psychic" like so:
And thus, these distinctively delivered syllables had clearly come to function as a leitmotif which was awoken instantly the first time I felt a bit psychic! I quickly tossed together a little loop of the line as a message response to Wesley, then later toyed around with it a bit more until I'd come to this:
Turns out this is the second time on my blog in which I've turned an English actress's speech into song, though Emily Watson is so understated here that the syllables don't quite take flight. (The teacup percussion is awesome, though.)
Finally, just to be complete, I remembered while playing around with the psychic bit that I'd once done something similar with the plaintive words of my then 2-year old daughter back when she needed her beloved blanket. That 2-year old is now 18, so although I don't remember much about creating it, I must've found the bass loop in whatever cheap, turn-of-the-century music software I had at the time:
(There are also iconic works by Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier and many others which incorporate speech.)
I became interested in the idea of speech becoming music when I first heard an excellent 2010 (?) RadioLab episode called Musical Language. The opening segment features a fun little story about an audio expert hearing her own speaking voice looped and thinking she's hearing singing. The looped words that behave so strangely are: sometimes behave so strangely.
You can hear the whole segment via the link above. I used to play it for classes learning about recitative as a way of thinking about the tonal and rhythmic characteristics of language. I've since returned to the idea of looping speech into music a couple of times, and also just remembered that I'd explored it many years before.
Most recently, I was having a Facebook discussion with my composer friend Wesley. He said he'd been told that some scale passages he'd written into a work-in-progress were just noodling. I [wittily] suggested, "Make them octatonic scales....and then it'll be octatonic noodling." He replied: "They are octatonic."
At that moment, impressed by my obvious psychic insight, I heard unbidden the mellifluous lilt of Frasier's Daphne Moon saying, "I'm a bit psychic." The phrase came to me much as one might hear a musical theme conjured up by a memory. To be fair, this catchphrase, which really doesn't function as a catchphrase on the show, probably had taken on a thematic quality in my brain because of a podcast I'd been listening to about Frasier.
I can't really recommend the Talk Salad and Scrambled Eggs podcast, hosted by indie film director Kevin Smith and Matt Mira, unless you enjoy hearing two people spend 80% of their Frasier podcast talking crassly about Star Trek, The Terminator, Comic-Con, and just about anything else while laughing interminably at their own jokes. However, from early on, Smith took to imitating Daphne's Manchesterian "I'm a bit psychic" like so:
And thus, these distinctively delivered syllables had clearly come to function as a leitmotif which was awoken instantly the first time I felt a bit psychic! I quickly tossed together a little loop of the line as a message response to Wesley, then later toyed around with it a bit more until I'd come to this:
Turns out this is the second time on my blog in which I've turned an English actress's speech into song, though Emily Watson is so understated here that the syllables don't quite take flight. (The teacup percussion is awesome, though.)
Finally, just to be complete, I remembered while playing around with the psychic bit that I'd once done something similar with the plaintive words of my then 2-year old daughter back when she needed her beloved blanket. That 2-year old is now 18, so although I don't remember much about creating it, I must've found the bass loop in whatever cheap, turn-of-the-century music software I had at the time:
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