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something i just thought of while drinking coffee and staring at the screen....
fugue form is really interesting to listen to, i think, because you can hear the main theme and its variations superimposed on the main theme again in another voice--then another---then another.
working out what is going on can be like a mental excersize.
i find it easier to listen to the form on an instrument with a thinner tone than a pipe organ---bach's partitas for solo violins and cello are both lovely, and have excellent examples of fugue---also the keyboard pieces above---goldberg variations and the well-tuned clavier.
the culmination of all the counterpoint forms is probably the musical offering. hofstader's "godel escher and bach" talks about these pieces at length. it is a fun book, and a good introduction.
beethoven used it---my brain is not firing at the moment fully, so i cant remember a good example---it also comes up often in newer classical stuff as well.
if you are doing your own music, counterpoint is interesting for other reasons as well--(fugue is a superimposition of different lines, each of which is varied using these rules--the lines have to obey the rules in relation both to themselves and to each other)
listening to it make you think about development, how to treat a phrase as something you can invert, turn upside-down, reverse-and-turn-upside-down. these can be useful moves to have in mind if your are improvising, for example. and you do not need to import the rules of 18th century counterpoint to use the ways of thinking about phrases.
for example:
i use this as a pretext to recommend anton webern--the complete works on sony, tagged to pierre boulez, is quite wonderful.
when i was learning theory, i had a tutor who introduced me to some of the bach stuff, messaien's "quartet for the end of time" and webern within a few weeks. of all of these, it was the webern that blew me out, and webern that i still listen to often as if it is the first time. just staggering.
my favorite is op.30 for piano. once you get used to the toanl arrangements, you can start to work out how it is organized---same set of techniques applied to a 12-tone framework with a beuatiful sense of how to use silence.
there is also an arrangement of a bach piece that webern did that can show you, in a few minutes, an enormous amount about how an active hearing of bach reconfigures the notes on paper, pulling out different elements, using different colors.
if you follow this tip, and have not heard this kind of music before doubtless i imagine you will at first react as i did at first:
what the fuck?
but be a little patient. you'll see.
ps. because i have figured out a way to talk about more recent stuff that i found mindblowing---maurizio pollini does schoenbergs piano music--it is on deutsche gramphon (spelling?) and is just ...well.....track down pollini, however---other pianists do this music well at times, but he is the best, to my mind.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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