The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I

JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as Western European aristocratic tastes shifted toward singable melodies over block chords. The first published edition of The Art of Fugue only sold about thirty copies, and it wasn’t performed in its entirety until 1922.

Eventually the classical music audience did come to admire Bach’s final fugue collection, but it took almost 100 years after it was written. The fugues still aren’t the easiest listening experience. They were meant to be didactic, to be played and studied rather than to be listened to–though of course you are free to listen to and enjoy them. I’m finding that my own enjoyment is much enhanced by opening up the structure through visualization, so that’s what I’ve done with Angela Hewitt’s recording of Contrapunctus I using Ableton Live.

The main thing to listen (and watch) for here is the subject, the little melody that each voice plays as it enters. After the subject, the voices wander off to play other intertwining parts, occasionally returning to the subject as they go. In the subsequent Art of Fugue pieces, Bach does all kinds of twisting and warping of the subject, writing it upside down, backwards, twice as fast, half as fast, overlaid on top of itself, and so on. In Contrapunctus I, however, he doesn’t do any of these formal games. It sounds more like he’s just riffing around the subject. It’s almost casual, at least by his standards.

Here’s Glenn Gould playing Contrapunctus I on organ.

And here he is playing it live on piano toward the end of his life, with a lovely slow tempo.

Bach published The Art of Fugue in “open score,” meaning that each voice of the counterpoint is on its own line, rather than being grouped together in the usual two-staff notation that we’re used to. Here’s an excerpt of Contrapunctus VII in open score in Bach’s own handwriting, with some informational color-coding added by Guido Magnano:

Open score was already considered an old-fashioned way to write keyboard music in Bach’s time, and people stopped using it entirely soon afterward. Since the 19th century Bach revival, musicians have taken the open score format as an invitation to play The Art of Fugue on four separate instruments. For example, there have been lots of string quartet recordings. Here’s a good one:

Contrapunctus I also sounds cool on four viols (cousins of the viola and cello, but with frets like a guitar):

It sounds amazing on four saxophones:

And it has a nice organ-like quality on four recorders:

Joseph Kerman writes about Contrapunctus I in his book Art of Fugue:

[I]n order to set off the technical virtuosity that was the work’s raison d’être, Bach had the extraordinary idea of making its first number a fugue without contrapuntal devices. Contrapunctus 1 has neither strettos, diminutions, and so on, nor even countersubjects or recurring episodes. These devices will be introduced only in the succeeding contrapuncti, one by one. In Contrapunctus 1 invertible counterpoint itself is in very short supply. This elemental fugue never modulates beyond the obligatory dominant and subdominant keys.

In any case, this most basic of fugues is necessarily also one of Bach’s freest and must also be one of his smoothest… The contrapuntal lines, consisting mostly of quarter- and eighth-note patterns, move stepwise or by the smallest leaps, and the expectations of eighteenth-century harmony often go unfulfilled. Strong cadences are shunned. While such generalities only begin to explain the almost mesmeric fluency of Bach’s late style, they may help sensitize us to contrasts where it is abrogated, such as at those episodes featuring larger leaps [bars 29–30, 36–40, 49–53], and at the one really, decisively strong cadence [bar 74].

Eventually the surface does begin to ruffle, when in a new exposition the bass steps in on the heels of its predecessor and enters after three bars rather than four [bar 32]. This entry—it can be heard as a second stab at stretto, after a previous, premature effort in bars 29–30, what is sometimes called a false stretto—moves rather hastily from the dominant around to the subdominant, twisting and turning the subject oddly. Then the tenor entry, as though checked by the low As in the bass, hesitates, accumulating dissonances—sevenths, ninths, and pungent augmented intervals [bars 41, 42, 43].

These intervals are a lot less “pungent” in 12-tone equal temperament than they would have been in the uneven temperament of Bach’s era.

The soprano in this group of entries emerges as a sort of ethereal climax, led into by another false stretto. The bass drops out, allowing for heightened activity in the remaining voices, like a beating of wings [bars 48–54].

Past the exposition, then, the piece can be seen to grow increasingly complex, though the feeling seems to me not exactly of complexity but of complexities tested out and drifted past, ideas considered and shelved, in a constantly changing improvisational field of a unique kind. Endlessly fertile and quite unstoppable, Bach proceeds spontaneously, almost distractedly, until the piece pulls itself together with one grand gesture, the long dominant pedal in the bass from bar 63 to bar 73.

Literally, of course, the pitch A drops out at bar 66, but in the ear it lasts all the way, so the passage has the effect of a cadenza, an increasingly rhapsodic epilogue during which pitch rises and tension mounts until it is too much to bear—or so we must infer; the buildup is so smooth we had no inkling of impending crisis. This programmatically seamless music literally breaks off, stammers, and finally sinks—truly sinks—to rest.

Bach doesn’t sound much like jazz, but Kerman identifies qualities in Contrapunctus I that are the things I like about jazz: the not-so-rigid development of themes and interplay of voices, the “complexities tested out and drifted past.” The later fugues are full of complexities that are tested all the way out and then some. There are even a couple of palindrome-like mirror fugues. These are fascinating in that Gödel, Escher, Bach way, but also exhausting. Sometimes you want to just listen to music without doing a whole Rubik’s cube worth of combinatorial math.

My attention span for this music improves when I hear it quantized over a beat. Here’s Angela Hewitt’s recording over the beat from “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, inspired by an arrangement by Heather Fortune.

In spite of the jokey title, this remix is not meant to be ironic. (Well, not totally ironic.) The beat helps me stay focused and present, rather than having my mind drift into a, you know, fugue state. That’s what beats are for. This music is supposed to be didactic, right? I learn best when I’m learning to a groove. But I also just like the aesthetic effect, and the suggestion that anything has groove potential.