The Apprentice of Fugue, on piano

February 12, 2024

Some of you might already know that I released a new album on February 4, 2024 — a performance of The Apprentice of Fugue played on piano (a Steinway D concert grand). The music was written in 2022, and that year I had released a recording on organ under the original title of the work in German, Der Lehrling der Fuga.

To celebrate this release, my friend Stephen Malinowski made animation videos for Contrapunctus 11 and Contrapunctus 3. As many of you know, Stephen has an uncanny ability to match music to visual patterns. He also knows Bach's music very well, and has an excellent understanding of counterpoint and composition, so he had no trouble at all getting into the inner workings of these pieces. We corresponded over a period of several weeks, during which time Stephen tweaked the visuals again and again. I hope you'll take some time to appreciate the great attention to detail taken in these videos. In Contrapunctus 3, the chromatic lines are rendered with something that looks a bit like the eddies of a small fish swimming in clear water, which fits the feeling of the counterpoint perfectly.

In Contrapunctus 11, there are three subjects, which are the same three subjects used in (my) Contrapunctus 8, but inverted (turned upside-down). Whereas Contrapunctus 8 has three voices, Contrapunctus 11 has four; as in Bach's original, the fourth voice often verges on becoming a fourth subject – a stepwise line, usually chromatic. Bach used repeated notes in his third subject to give a feeling of insistence and urgency. One of my goals throughout this project was to avoid simply copying whatever Bach did. Rather, I wanted to to come up with my own way of doing something similar which might have a chance of being as successful (which I consider a healthy view of tonal composition in general). So I use the notes of his main theme, but (importantly!) I change the meter and rhythm. All other subjects (apart from the BACH subject in the closing fugue) must use different notes. For that reason, my third subject in Contrapunctus 11 doesn't use repeated notes — at least not directly. Instead, neighbour-tones are used. Stephen rendered this subject with spiralling thread-like patterns that fit the contour of the subject perfectly. Bach's second subject begins with a long note on the downbeat, and his third (repeated-note) subject begins with a weak-beat accented note that's often held over a barline (we can call this a "syncopation") — an exciting effect which produces expectation. I turned that around, using syncopation at the outset of my second subject, which allowed me to sometimes approach the third subject using syncopation, in such a way that the listener can't be sure which subject is going to follow that first note. That uncertainty lends an edge to the development. I discussed this with Stephen, and in the video you'll see that those syncopated notes are larger than the others, circled, and they rotate as a sort of "handoff" to what follows. It's these kinds of details that make these videos so much fun to watch!

If you like, you can also watch the corresponding "inversion" of the above triple-fugue in a video of Contrapunctus 8 Stephen made of the first recording of Der Lehrling der Fuga (played on organ, released in 2022).

Stephen also previously made a video of Contrapunctus 9 (which features double counterpoint at the 12th) …

… and Contrapunctus 1, which is among the least similar formally to any of Bach's original fugues, because (as you can read in the liner notes of the recording, or in the score) The Apprentice of Fugue also tells a story, which begins with PART 1 as follows:

"In order to make the masterpiece undoubtedly different, the apprentice looks for alternatives – including potentially clumsy combinations which the master had not used."

Needless to say, I would have never been able to write an Apprentice of Fugue were it not for Bach's Art of Fugue. Which touches on the reason I took on this project to begin with: to learn things I simply couldn't have otherwise learned. There's more to say about that, but I'll end here for now. In any case there will certainly be more episodes of Passages That Bother Me, so stay tuned!

Until then, I remain,
— AAH