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We're back today with Doctor David Runner at Muncey Memorial United
Methodist Church
and we're going to talk today about the fugue. As you know, we talk about Baroque
music and how Baroque music
is often polyphonic and the fugue is from the ultimate polyphonic texture.
So what happens in a fugue is very similar to what happens in a round like Row Row row
Your Boat, where you have
a theme that comes in again, and again, and again, and
it builds on itself and makes its own harmony. But a fugue is a bit more
sophisticated than Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
In fact, we don't even call them the themes when we talk about a fugue, we call it a
subject and we have a counter subject and we have lots of other fancy words that we
use in the middle.
But basically, what I'd like for you to be able to recognize when you hear a fugue,
is to listen for that opening theme, or that subject,
and it it tends to travel through different... what we would call different
voices, even though we're not singing.
It might start say in the soprano and then might go down to the
alto and then down to the tenor and it'll be the same every time it starts.
So you can listen for that
as a fugue is being played and that's a really good way to sort of find your
place in a fugue
because if you don't know to listen for that you'll just get completely lost
because there will be so many things happening
at some point that you won't know where you are, and that's kind of the beauty of the
fugue.
And usually at the end of a fugue there's sort of a... usually there's
just like a big pause because it's like you have all these lines going
and the only way to get them all to come together at the end is to just sort of
stop and then go...
a big ending! So, if you hear that kind of ending you might think you
have heard a fugue. So the organ is a great instrument for the fugue because you get
multiple keyboards
plus the feet. So you can really pass that fugue around.
So we're going to ask Dr. Runner again to play for us a bit of a fugue. This is by Bach,
I think, yes, a Bach fugue, and Bach is the master of the fugue. In fact, he wrote a whole
book about it so...
So now let's listen as he plays
a fugue for us.
(music playing)
I'd like to thank Doctor David runner for playing organ for us again today
and demonstrating the fugue for us. I hope you enjoyed his fancy footwork, that's my
favorite part of
any organ performance. I'm going to give you some examples of fugues to listen to so you can
practice listening for all the different entrances of the subject so you can
feel much more comfortable when you go to a concert and you hear a fugue play!