Michael Talbot – Fugue Forum

Why I write fugues

As a teenager in the 1950s, if not earlier, I fancied myself as a composer. Since I was already keen on early music and as a pianist had studied one or two fugues, I composed one or two simple fugues for keyboard. I remember being engaged in writing one on a train journey while holidaying with my parents in Germany, much to the amazement of the ticket inspector. I have not kept these compositions and would not be proud of them today.

As a school, conservatoire and university student I learned more about the mechanisms of fugue. Later (from 1968), as a university teacher of music and musicology (the two tend to be taught and studied in association with one another in Britain). I had to teach about fugue and even, to a very few students, to give instruction in the writing of fugues. In my work as a musicologist studying in depth, for example, Albinoni and Vivaldi, I deepened my knowledge of the subject. But at this stage I composed no fugues, nor anything else worth mentioning.

The stimulus to begin writing fugues again, which very soon blossomed into an obsessive passion, was external. My good friend, the Italian recorder player and musical director (and many other thing besides) Federico Maria Sardelli, in latish 2005 sent me as a surprise a marvellous little fugue of his composition in Vivaldian style. I decided to respond in kind and discovered to my surprise that writing a fugue was for me both easy and satisfying. Like tennis players in a long rally sending the ball in both directions over the net (or – to choose perhaps rather too elevated a parallel – like Brahms and Joachim exchanging canons) our fugal dialogue continued, as it has right up to the present day. Later, we started to exchange compositions also in non-fugal forms – but that is another story, and some of its products can be viewed and heard in the main section of the flauto-dolce web site.

My interest in writing fugues, by the way, has also prompted me to work a little in the same area as a musicologist. My most recent book, entitled Vivaldi and Fugue, will be published in English by Olschki (Florence) in 2009, and I am currently toying with the idea of writing a Lexicon of Fugue.

There is little more to say, except that the more fugues I write (I have completed over 100 for keyboard alone), the greater the struggle becomes to express something new. But I do not think that I have reached an absolute saturation point just yet.

The style I employ in the fugues is eclectic: I do not set out merely to imitate a single composer of the past in any composition, even though strong traces of several of my favourite composers of the later baroque – Buxtehude, Purcell, J. S. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, D. Scarlatti, Leclair et al. – are evident, and the influence of Classical and Romantic composers is by no means absent. I do not hesitate to introduce any feature into a composition provided that it “works in context”, regardless of whether I can recall having seen or heard it before.

Finally, to make one thing absolutely clear: these compositions are not intended to “make a statement” about classical music of today. If I could write convincing fugues like those of Hindemith or Shostakovich or ones in an even more “modern” idiom, I would do so for preference. But I cannot, and so I write in a style that is familiar and attractive to me and which I find easy to handle. In the first instance, these pieces are for my private enjoyment, but I am glad to share them with anyone who can spare the time to listen to them, read them and (even) play them.

Michael Talbot
Liverpool, October 2008

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Fuga maestosa for four voices, for keyboard added by Michael Talbot

The pdf and midi files of this piece may be downloaded HERE

This is one of two fugues that I so far written that adopt the rhythm and relentless onward tread of a chaconne. The other belongs to a set of eight fugues I have written on subjects that expressly imitate baroque dance rhythms, but this one is only implicitly a chaconne. The ostentatiously non-contrapuntal bare octaves that characterize the subject on its last appearance are perhaps the clearest of the gestures I make towards the traditional chaconne form. There are some seventeenth-century allusions in this fugue, particularly to the style of Buxtehude, but they exist alongside other elements are almost nineteenth-century (take, for instance, the unexpected and rather ‘fruity’ ‘French’ Sixth introducing (improbably!) the return to the tonic of the subject in bar 74, an almost Brucknerian gesture. In a way, I think, the seventeenth century has more in common with the nineteenth than with the eighteenth, having a liking for passionate but disruptive expression. But I must not exaggerate: mostly, as usual, the early-to-mid eighteenth century is the temporal locus of the style and, most certainly, of the form, which is rather conventional – textbookish, even – in most ways.

One respect in which I conform to orthodoxy is in making the episodes fairly distinct in character from one another, although one could say, perhaps, that bars 94–101 revisit earlier territory in a slightly disguised way. I rarely use close imitation with displaced accents (per arsin et thesin, as those fond of latinized Greek used to say), but the canonic imitation at the distance of a minim beat in bars in bars 88–93 more or less works. It was not pre-planned: it simply occurred.

The episodes, mostly short, are concertante in spirit, even though they maintain the rhythmic stereotypes of the subject, with its frequent emphasis on the second beat. Bars 78–80 introduce the device of hemiola (accenting two bars of 3/2 metre like one of 3/1 metre) – but no more than is needed to offer a brief respite from the prevalent rhythm as well as a sense of acceleration.

As usual, I employ an invertible countersubject (which although contrasting with the subject shares with it the emphasis on the second beat), but am prepared to abandon it when it would get in the way of another idea, as in bars 102–106, which are my favourite passage in the piece (for even composers are allowed to like some parts of their own pieces more than others!).

The pdf and midi files of this piece may be downloaded HERE

15 October 2008

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