AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about the art of the musical fugue:

Musically and rhetorically, fugue exerts the effect of enthralling the listener to participate in the imaginative equivalent of flight, pursuit, and redemption – or flight, pursuit, and transfiguration. As always when in speaking of music, the exegete resorts to metaphor. Yet the very name fugue affirms the metaphoric image, for it means to fly or to flee, as from danger, to take on the role of refugee, and to brave hazards in order to reach asylum; the name fugue also refers to the situation that motivates flight – the mayhem of an emergent crisis, the breakdown of prohibitions, and the scramble for resources suddenly scarce. Again fugal procedure seems to reflect basic human nature. Human beings, wrote Aristotle, are the most imitative (mimetic) of all animals. In a crisis, people imitate one another – heading for the same narrow doorway or crowding the same sinking lifeboat.

The basic gesture of fugue is imitation: the “voices” (the term appears in quotation-marks because fugue, as it develops historically, is quintessentially an instrumental genre) mimic one another by appropriating the theme in such a way that it comes into counterpoint with itself.

—- Comments —-

Jewel A. writes:

I discovered this at tumblr, where I find so many beautiful things. Here is Bach’s genius on display, rendered exquisitely simple. Is there a composer alive who could have done this?

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