What is a fugue?

It is a type of counterpoint.

What is a counterpoint?

It is a musical composition technique that involves playing two or more musical lines simultaneously, while each line is harmonically correlated but independent in rhythm and melodic contour.

But why does counterpoint matter…?

It is the musical illustration that a conversation welcoming different ideas can sound good, really good. It is the proof that ideas that seem different, even opposed, when artfully confronted to each other, result in a bigger, better idea than the sum of its parts…

Johann Sebastian Bach was a teacher. His works published during his lifetime were teaching books. We know him as a composer only because decades after his death, his pupils’ pupils became famous as composers. Even later, their pupils, also famous composers, brought back to life the music that Johann Sebastian Bach had written as a church music director, and thus changed the public’s memory of Bach from “teacher” to “famous composer of sacred music”.

This short video about the Goldberg Variations illustrates how J.S. Bach was a teacher of the art of counterpoint:

The first two counterpoints (contrapuncti) from The Art of Fugue will be played by the UP CLOSE AND CLASSICAL string quartet on June 29th and 30th. Click for more information: