Fugue (“the Wedge”) BWV 548 J.S.Bach (1685-1750) [ORGAN]
Improvisation
Lent to me is a paradoxical season of the church year: on the one hand dealing with titanic issues like Suffering, Death, and Eternity. But on the other it’s a time of contemplation, of quietly turning inward. So for Lenten preludes I alternate between those two, starting off Lent with a titanic piece.
The ‘fugue’ is a rather curious form in the history of music. Fugues had their heyday in the baroque era, but composers still write them (including yours truly).
A fugue has two main features: 1) it’s ‘counterpoint’, meaning it has multiple independent, equally important voices. In most music, one player gets the cool main melody, and everyone else has to play a relatively boring supporting role. But in counterpoint, everyone gets an equally interesting part. Dixieland jazz is an excellent example of modern counterpoint. 2) Fugues are built around a main musical idea, called ‘the fugue subject’. And just to make sure you know what that is, the fugue starts with the subject all by itself, and when each additional voice comes in, the first thing it has to do is announce once again the fugue subject. Once all the independent voices have announced the fugue subject, the composer can pretty much do what they want, except that the fugue subject needs to dominate the piece.
Fugues are considered really hard to write, mostly because it’s hard to write good counterpoint — where all of the separate voices each have an interesting melodic part, but all those melodic parts fit together. If you think about the political/social tension between ‘each of us citizens has independent rights’, but “all of us also have to work together and fit together to make the community work as a whole” — melodious individually, and melodious together — I can’t think of a better musical metaphor for happy humanity than the fugue.
It’s so difficult a musical form to pull off that most fugues are at best on the stodgy side. Bach himself — considered the master of that form — wrote plenty of less than thrilling fugues. But from time to time he was able to make the fugue transcend itself.
For a moment we need to go back to Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a brilliant and eccentric Jesuit polymath who wrote about everything from volcanoes to Egyptian hieroglyphs. (He had himself lowered into a volcano so he could get a closer look!) He also wrote a massive tome about music (some 1100 pages long) called Musurgia Universalis — ‘The Universal Musical Art’. Amongst many other wonders, the Musurgia contains a round that can be sung by twelve million two hundred thousand voices! Kircher also articulated 8 basic types of music: sacred, canon (rounds), fantasy, madrigals, songs, dance, symphony, and dramatic (opera?). He described the fantasy (Latin: Stylus Phantasticus) as: “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonious subject.” Bach’s [in]famous ‘Toccata in D minor’ is an excellent example of the Stylus Phantasticus.
So if you imagine a music spectrum where on one end you have highly structured music — like fugues, and on the other end the freest of the wild and free — like fantasies… what if you composed a Musical Paradox that was BOTH? A structured fugue and a fantasy — IN THE SAME PIECE? You’d end up with this morning’s prelude. This fugue is nicknamed ‘the Wedge’ because the notes on the printed page form a wedge-like pattern.
Bach wrote this piece later in life, so it represents the culmination of many decades of effort mastering — and transcending the form. He easily wrote many hundreds of fugues — far beyond 10,000 hours — to get to the place where he could write this one. Just the idea of writing a musical paradox like this — and so magnificently pulling it off — boggles my mind.
In Dante’s famous Divine Comedy (1321), the entrance to Hell has a sign over it: “Abandon all hope all you who enter”. Any more that seems to be the sign over the six-o’clock news. Of course much of the media news deliberately caters to serving up the worst of humanity because that garners an audience. But an antidote, it seems to me, is to remind ourselves of the greatness that can be humanity. In the arts, in the sciences, in athletics, in political statesmanship, in charitable service, in every human endeavor — greatness walks among us still.