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 esemplare for two voices, for keyboard added by Michael Talbot

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

Counter-intuitive as this may seem, two-voice fugues are the hardest to make convincing, even if, for obvious reasons, they are quite easy to write. It is significant that in the whole of the “48” Bach included just one (E minor in the first book). The problems are those of creating enough harmonic substance (there are fewer voices than there are notes in the triad) and – more acutely – of maintaining continuity satisfactorily. Every time that one inserts a breathing space for one of the voices, the texture reduces to a single, unsupported line, and this can be dangerous.

Another problem is that of creating length. Perforce, if the voices are only two, an exposition with one entry per part is over quickly. So one has to be enterprising about the number of keys visited and generous with codettas and episodes in order to write a reasonably long movement. Bach’s four Duetti in the third part of his Clavier-Übung are inimitable monuments to this kind of spinning-out.

Why this fugue is “exemplary” (to which I add the subtitle of Solfeggio – a contrapuntal exercise, usually for the purpose of vocal training) is that it is a little severe and didactic in tone, as if conceived as a demonstration piece for the schoolroom. It will remind players of Bach’s Inventions in two parts, particularly in its relentless pursuit of equality between the two voices, in which every scrap of significant thematic material in one voice (not only the subject and countersubject but also episodic motives) makes its way at some point into the other.

It is unnecessary to write an extended analytical commentary on this brief movement. The modulating subject has a tonal answer. The “middle entries” are appropriately in related major keys. The subdominant appears in the final exposition. Little snatches of canonic imitation occur. There are a few very short divagations to add interest and novelty. This is not a very clever or complex fugue, but what pleases me most about it most is that it keeps up its momentum to the end, aided by a liberal use of syncopation. In a two-part fugue, to sustain momentum has to be the prime goal to which all other considerations are secondary. I have always found syncopation a marvellous way of breathing life into even slowly moving music.

Let me take this opportunity, since the author himself – the creator and manager of this site – would be embarrassed to do this on his own behalf, to cite Andrea Bornstein’s three-volume study of the early (up to 1744) two-part “didactic duo”, entitled Two-Part Italian Didactic Music (Bologna, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2004). Here one can find the historical and musical background to this austere kind of fugue, which stretches back far beyond the beginnings of fugue proper in the seventeenth century. Let this little fugue also be a tribute to him and to that study.

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

15 October 2008

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