Reflections

If you are seeking a nearly effortless indulgence in the rich delight of Bach's counterpoint, you could hardly do better that this fugue (along with its well matched prelude). Bright and animated, the music pours forth with a nearly perpetual flow of sixteenth notes, once multiple voices are active. A mere three voices sing away, delivering a remarkably multifaceted song. There is just about everything here you could want, enfolded by Bach's craftsmanship into a seamless experience: a beautiful subject, a prominent countersubject, clear subject inversion and stretto, free counterpoint and episodes that revel with trills, scales, extended sequences, counter posing runs up and down, in and out of major and minor tonality, a breathtaking romp seemingly throughout every musical possibility. To the blank page, Bach takes his fluid pen and fills all its space with the lovely script of elegant and joyous counterpoint. The final punctuation, the signature, the Baroque seal is yet another treasure making this trove complete if not overflowing: Bach concludes with a rich coda that crowns the fugue with a sparkling resolution overflowing with its own indulgent filigree.

The subject is a lovely piece of work all its own. Even you don't read music, please take the opportunity to merely notice its rough visual characteristics. It is not hard to see basic shapes and some wonderful properties of repetition, variation and simple up and down. If you listen as you look, you may be astonished at the vividness of these shapes, set to music as it were. This is what Eric Altschuler calls "the just looking method". It can be a really a rather entertaining and revealing game.

The subject quite clearly divides into three chunks. On either end is a chunk that uses sixteenth notes, those with the double black bars at the top or bottom (called flags). The chunk in the middle uses no sixteenth notes. It uniquely uses quarter notes, the notes with no flags at all. To effects of these details are at least three-fold: the notes in outer chunks move more quickly, they are more dense, and, being in a chunk on either side of the middle, create a lovely symmetry, like a sandwich. What's in the middle? A little dance of two measures which is, by contrast to the outer chunks, light, airy, relaxed, even floating.

If you look at the notation for its visual representation of up and down, you will notice some other interesting patterns. The first chunk moves slowly but ultimately upward. Notice that the notes are all very close to each other along the vertical axis. The last chunk moves unquestionably downward. Though the notes are close, they do not undulate up and down as much as the in the first chunk. They are more resolute in their motion, they cover more ground. The middle chunk differs from the outer chunks, with respect to up and down: it is the opposite of everything just examined. It moves down, then radically up. It moves down again, then even further up. Where the outer chunks are essentially "mono-directional", the middle is more "bidirectional". Where the outer chunks move in smooth, tight motion (close together on the vertical axis), the middle chunk uses several leaps down and up, each time skipping several lines and spaces in between. This is technically known as conjunct and disjunct motion respectively. All this talk about the movement and overall shape of a melody is about the contour of the line, a term which is a technical term in both the visual and musical arts which means essentially the same in both worlds. While the middle chunk provides some nice downward contrast, it also contains the highest note. The contour of the entire subject is essentially an arch where each chunk from left to right might be labelled: up, peak, down.

Finally, with only a sensitivity to visual qualities, you might notice that each of the three chunks of this subject further divide into two chunks apiece. Look at the two little chunks within any or all of the big chunks. The outer chunks are best visual examples because all of the notes of the little sub-chunks are connected together by a solid line across the top or bottom. The best word to describe a little self-contained cluster of notes such as these little sub-chunks is motive. Each of three big chunk breaks down into motives, two per chunk. Look even more closely at one of the big chunks. The left most, for example. It has two motives. Notice how the first motive is related to the second. Same number of notes, same values (eighth note with one flag, four sixteenth notes with two flags), same overall grouping and shape. The only difference is that the second motive is shifted up, as a whole: it starts in the space above the line where the first motive started. The whole chunk, both motives combined, is called a sequence: it is a sequence of two or more repetitions of the same motive where each repetition moves the motive up or down, usually by a very small amount. Zooming out to take in the big picture. This subject comprises three sequences in a row: it is a sequence sandwich.

Once you acquire a basic vocabulary of technical terms, you might compress all the foregoing verbiage into a description such as: this subject is symmetric triptych arch formed of three two-unit sequences, each using a distinct motive. This point is not to be abstruse but to be concise. The conscision, with its complexity of meaning and association embedded in each term, serves honorably to represent this beautiful subject for what it is: a well formed architectural structure that is the core mantra of this fugue. The subject is so pleasing and so memorable that it even works well, recognizably, when it is turned upside down. You can hear it (and see it). This is called the inversion of the subject (and the sequences and the motives).

But even this quest of accurate and eloquent words is not the point. As you ponder these terms, relating them to the printed notation and ultimately the aural effect in the music, your awareness of detailed aesthetic qualities in the mere non-verbal, non-visual sensations of music is sharpened. You feel the music more closely, more intimately. Spend some time looking and pondering and re-reading these words. Then reward yourself by listening again. See if you don't experience what I am saying.

Now, go back to listening. This fugue has two more wonderful and vivid aspects to ponder. Many of the episodes are based on plain old scale passages: running up and down the keyboard, running up and down the musical staff, visually, up and down in the notation. The subject presaged much of this pure quality of musical up and down, or, rather, Bach composed the episodes as wonderful, thematically related compliments to the subject. Sensitize yourself to scales with their unique vector of pure up and down and listen to the fugue again. You will notice that the fugue is literally filled with scales, up and down, running in contrary motion, in sequences and even a bit of canon. To notice all of this is to notice Bach's ingenuity and to deepen how you feel the movement of the music.

I almost forgot the other wonderful thing. This fugue has a prominent coda. The word coda comes from the Italian and means tail. Most simply put, a coda is an extra flourish of music, extraneous to the main musical structure which has already completed (either the last subject entry or a strong cadence). The coda is provided as an artful and emphatic statement of closure and finality. Not all fugues have formal or elaborate codas. In a gesture of utter thematic coherence, Bach fulls this coda with everything previously mentioned about the subject and the episodes: up, down, motive, sequence, scale. The aural effect is breathtaking: its is a final sparkling fountain, a crown, the luxuriant tail of ermine, a lavish coda for a royal fugue.