Students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie

Canons and Fugues, Fugues and Canons

Counterpoint has many forms. It can exist as imitation, in which entering voices have a similar melodic fragment, as is often the case in Renaissance masses; it can exist as canon, in which voices are replicated in exact imitation and can be constructed to maddeningly repeat in perpetuity, an example being the famous round of “Frère Jacques”; and it can exist as fugue, a technique in which a musical theme (often called a subject) is introduced in one voice, then repeated in another voice at another pitch, and so on, with these musical themes reappearing throughout the work in some sort of exposition, development, and recapitulation.

Alfred Mann describes Bach, in rather omniscient terms, as “the beginning and end but also the perfection and imperfection of fugal art.” Bach’s last work, The Art of the Fugue, is certainly worthy of such a description. Conceived as a theoretical exercise with no specified instrumentation, it represents the zenith of combinatorial and contrapuntal virtuosity. In lieu of textual treatises on counterpoint (such as those written by Zarlino, Fux, or Beldemandis), Bach preferred to demonstrate his sophisticated applications of counterpoint in practice, a phenomenon Christoph Wolff calls “Bach the musical scholar.”

The earliest source of The Art of the Fugue is an autograph manuscript from around 1742. A revised edition was published in 1751 after Bach’s death. This revised edition contains a monumental double fugue on four themes, the Fuga a 3 Sogetti or Contrapunctus XIV, left unfinished. As musicologist Laurence Dreyfus describes it, this final fugue “embraced not only the audacious inclusion of Bach’s monogram (B–A–C–H, understood in German as B flat–A–C–B natural) but also elements of melodic inversion (counterfugue) and stretto (canon), a kind of extended fugal peroration to sum up the entire collection.”

With 14 fugues and four canons on a single subject in D minor, the work is a display of what is likely the single greatest contrapuntal mind of the common practice period (i.e., the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century). And despite its rather academic formulation, the work never tires on the listener, as Edward Said writes describing Bach’s counterpoint:

…the listener is aware of a remarkable complexity but never a laborious or academic one. Its authority is absolute. For both listener and performer, the result is an aesthetic pleasure based equally on immediate accessibility and the greatest technical prowess.

But fugues and canons are not only the domain of Bach. Giuseppe Verdi recollects that his lessons as a student with Vincenzo Lavigna, the maestro concertatore at La Scala, consisted of nothing but “canons and fugues, fugues and canons of all sorts.” Verdi uses these contrapuntal devices to great dramatic effect in his operas, constantly drawing on clever counterpoint to lace together multiple narratives on stage.

At a ripe 60 years of age, following the Italian premiere of Aida, Verdi attempted his first ever chamber work: the String Quartet in E minor. The piece requires great technical prowability, with multifarious lines of counterpoint threading the first and last movements, matched with intense octave doublings. It is clear that Verdi was inspired by the late Beethoven quartets in this music, especially in the final “Scherzo Fuga”, which recalls Said’s description of late Beethoven: “Intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.”

Verdi was slightly cagier, claiming that he wrote the quartet for “mere amusement” and that he “had never attached any importance to the piece.” He even banned public performances and publication of it until 1876, when he finally relented to have the score published by Giulio Ricordi.

Both Charles Ives and Béla Bartók sought to combine the highart tradition of classical music with popular and folk idiom. Ives’s Piano Trio, composed 1904–11, dispenses with the academic rigors of Bach’s 18th-century counterpoint. The first movement is a type of round canon, in which the same 27 measures are repeated three times, first as a cello and piano duet, then as a violin and cello duet, and finally as a trio. The second movement, entitled TSIAJ or “This Scherzo Is a Joke,” interweaves American folk songs with a texture of polytonality and quotation. Some examples of the wildly “misappropriated” folk songs: The Campbells Are Coming, Old Kentucky Home, Sailor’s Hornpipe, and Long, Long Ago. Again, in the final movement, Ives contrapuntally layers topical and highly personal musical quotations. This time he borrows material from a rejected composition he had written for the Yale Glee Club, which he turns into a somewhat sonorous canon between the cello and violin, and nostalgically paraphrases Rock of Ages, a popular hymn by 19th-century American composer Thomas Hastings, in the movement’s coda.

If the title of the second movement were not indication enough, Ives had something of a sense of humor. Unfortunately, unless one had attended Yale University at the turn of the 20th century, most of these references are probably lost on modern-day listeners.

Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 is especially concise and impactful, with Adorno noting, “what is decisive is the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original tectonics.” As he did in much of his music, Bartók contrapuntally interpolates original folk idiom into the middle of the piece amidst what can be called a counterpoint of color: “glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul tasto, sul ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating vibrato, strumming, and their combinations” all contribute to a highly evocative four-section composition—mimicking the standard four-movement quartet—compressed into a neat, single movement of about 17 minutes in length. Bartók obsessively collected folk songs—Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Wallachian, and Algerian—through exacting and fastidious transcription. His combination of folk music and high-brow modernism, as well as his efforts in comparative musicology, remind me of Edward Said. In a 1931 essay on “Peasant music” (an antiquated formulation, for sure), Bartók refers to music that “…connotes…all the tunes which endure among the peasant class of any nation, in a more-orless wide area and for a more-or-less long period and constitute a spontaneous expression of the musical feeling of that class.” Incredibly, this sentiment approaches Said’s own understanding of comparative literature, formulated some 60 years later in Culture and Imperialism:

For the trained scholar of comparative literature, a field whose origin and purpose is to move beyond insularity and provincialism and to see several cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally, there is an already considerable investment in precisely this kind of antidote to reductive nationalism and uncritical dogma: after all, the constitution and early aims of comparative literature were to get a perspective beyond one’s own nation, to see some sort of whole instead of the defensive little patch offered by one’s own culture, literature, and history.”

Both Said and Bartók looked outward to understand their own conditions. Both prioritized plurality while still championing the individual. Both were true contrapuntalists.

—Prof. Dr. Mena Mark Hanna