Art of Fugue: The Main Theme
The main theme in The Art of Fugue is this melody in D minor:
The Main Theme of the Art of Fugue
source: Pfly
no copyright infringement intended
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kunst_der_Fuge_subject.svg)
Says Christoph Wolff, the governing idea of the Art of Fugue is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.
It is the main theme in the Art of Fugue, while also the missing theme in the last fugue of the cycle, the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, and scholars have tried to find an answer to this: was maybe Bach intending to come to the theme in D minor and, add it after the B A C H motif, to complete the last fugue?
To illustrate the theme in D minor, here is Contrapunctus I:
And here is Contrapunctus IX, a more complicated piece: a double fugue:
For the recording of this video two instruments were used, as the author explains: a piano and a sampled pipe organ (an Ahlborn-Galanti Silbermann Archiv). The piano has MIDI Out (from a Moog Piano Bar) which was recorded and played back to play the organ.
Here is how the author created the video: first he videotaped himself playing it, and recorded both the audio (from his Kimball grand piano) and MIDI (from a Moog Piano Bar attached to the piano). Then, he rerecorded the audio and MIDI for each of the four voices separately; he did this so that he could color-code the video based on voice and to get a performance that was a little cleaner (it also afforded him the opportunity to add a 16-foot stop to the bass line in a few places). The conventional score is from screenshots from the notation program Sibelius, and the bar-graph score was generated from the MIDI using his own custom software. All these things were assembled in Adobe Premiere and converted to Flash with the On2 Flix converter.
(The B A C H motif)
The Main Theme of the Art of Fuguesource: Pfly
no copyright infringement intended
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kunst_der_Fuge_subject.svg)
Says Christoph Wolff, the governing idea of the Art of Fugue is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.
(Wikipedia: Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Learned Musician, page 433, ISBN 0-393-04825-X)
It is the main theme in the Art of Fugue, while also the missing theme in the last fugue of the cycle, the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, and scholars have tried to find an answer to this: was maybe Bach intending to come to the theme in D minor and, add it after the B A C H motif, to complete the last fugue?
To illustrate the theme in D minor, here is Contrapunctus I:
And here is Contrapunctus IX, a more complicated piece: a double fugue:
For the recording of this video two instruments were used, as the author explains: a piano and a sampled pipe organ (an Ahlborn-Galanti Silbermann Archiv). The piano has MIDI Out (from a Moog Piano Bar) which was recorded and played back to play the organ.
Here is how the author created the video: first he videotaped himself playing it, and recorded both the audio (from his Kimball grand piano) and MIDI (from a Moog Piano Bar attached to the piano). Then, he rerecorded the audio and MIDI for each of the four voices separately; he did this so that he could color-code the video based on voice and to get a performance that was a little cleaner (it also afforded him the opportunity to add a 16-foot stop to the bass line in a few places). The conventional score is from screenshots from the notation program Sibelius, and the bar-graph score was generated from the MIDI using his own custom software. All these things were assembled in Adobe Premiere and converted to Flash with the On2 Flix converter.
(The B A C H motif)
Labels: Bach
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
5:52 AM
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