Well, I'm halfway there. A fugue series which I imagined as a way to make myself do something to start the year has now resulted in four fugues which didn't exist a month ago.
Although all of these fugues are to be based on hymn tunes, today's tune, O Waly, Waly, is probably best known as a folk song. It happened that we had two soloists singing an anthem based on this tune today, so that's how I ended up choosing it as a subject. It's a beautiful melody, although it's possible that by shortening its long notes, I've take a bit of the longing out of the effect. The original melody is a good example of music in a major mode that still can sound sad (as is more often associated with minor mode). Benjamin Britten certainly leaned into that aspect.
As with all of these fugues, I haven't been overly scrupulous about traditional voice-leading rules. In this case, I realized soon that the countersubject I'd devised (I had in mind a sort of winding river idea) results in immediate parallel fifths (though the note in the countersubject is just a little lower neighbor).
But after trying other things, I decided I liked this version best, so that's how I'm rolling. I'm on a deadline!
Fugue #4:
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:
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:
This is perhaps an odd way to re-start the blog for 2022, but I recently noticed I'm within 300 of one million total views of my videos on YouTube.
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There are plenty of reasons that this is a fairly silly milestone, but I'm in too much of a hurry to worry about them. As it happens, I've recently been re-using a video I made a few years ago for teaching purposes. I'd never quite gotten it as smooth and polished as I'd like, but I realized this week both that it's still pretty useful as is and that I'm not likely to invest the time in working out all the kinks. I did do a little tweaking, but for now I'll just present this little video which features my own one-page (!) score of the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, with audio played as fast as I could reasonably imagine without losing too much sense. Your mileage my vary.
