#contrapunctus 14

[mikrokosmos]

J.S. Bach - Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080

On this day 274 years ago, J.S. Bach passed away and his death was treated as the official end of an entire era. It is cliche to crown him the Best Composer of All Time, but it's hard not to be intimidated in his shadow for how influential he would become in the grand narrative of European music. And maybe it's Fate which brought me back into listening to a lot of Bach lately. At least my ears had been itching to revisit his great organ fugues, and different performances of the Well Tempered Clavier. So I thought I would commemorate his death day anniversary with the "last piece he ever wrote" (citation needed). The Art of Fugue is a collection of fugal exercises based on one theme, each fugue showing different potentials inherent in the theme. Like the WTC, this piece is more of a pedagogical work, originally not scored for any specific instruments so possibly written to be studied more than performed. But there's no reason why even a music theory exercise by Bach shouldn't be played for an audience, or by a musician for their own personal enjoyment.

The beautiful moment here is the last fugue in the set, Contrapunctus 14, which starts as a fugue on a completely different subject than the main theme that ties the rest of the pieces together. Instead, a solemn and contemplative fugue develops from this first theme, and in the middle a new subject emerges with shorter note values and moves forward quickly, bringing back the first subject and then develops as a double fugue. Then, another new subject comes in... so in German notation, they refer to the pitch B as H, and the pitch Bb is called B instead. I don't know why this is, but conveniently it allows Bach to sign his name in notes. But the motif Bb-A-C-B is chromatic and so close together, it doesn't sound like something that would work well for a baroque style fugue (at least, the later B-A-C-H pieces [i'm thinking by Liszt and Reger for example] are much more fitting for Romantic angst and drama). But Bach surprises us with his genius in writing a coherent and harmonically "correct"/"functioning" fugue around this complicated subject. And after the BACH fugue develops, the other two subjects join in and the piece re-introduces itself as a triple fugue.

Or at least, it promises to, but Bach stopped writing at this very moment. It is assumed that had he finished the work, he would have finally brought back the main fugue theme from the other contrupunctus pieces in the set and end with a developed quadruple fugue. And as someone who has tried and constantly failed at writing a decent sounding basic fugue for one subject, the dream of what could have been boggles my mind. Why did Bach stop? The score notes at the very end "While working on this fugue, which introduces the name BACH in the countersubject, the composer died." in CPE Bach's handwriting (one of Bach's many musically gifted sons, nicknamed "the Berlin Bach") but historians believe the manuscript is from a year or two earlier, before his deteriorating vision kept him from finishing. It's also a Romantic notion to imagine that Bach intentionally stopped there, letting the BACH fugue be his personal farewell to life, to composition, to music...a way to wrap up his lifelong work of trying to use difficult and contrapuntally dense music to reflect the glory of God and the intangible heavenly kingdom.

Whether he meant to or not, it's impossible not to feel this profound sense of farewell listening to this work trail off with the last threads hanging loose, as if such anticipated perfection of the quadruple fugue can only be heard in the life beyond our lives on earth. I first heard this piece in high school, and despite being young and naive and stupid in a lot of ways, the final unfinished fugue immediately hit my soul in a way nothing else had at that point, and I listened to it over and over, on piano, on organ, on guitar, as it was written along with different completions by other musicians or musicologists...

and I remember some question on some old web forum asking users "if the world was ending, what's the last song you'd want to hear". Of course I choose this one, and because of the question, any time I listen to Contrapunctus 14, I imagine myself as an astronaut, the last human alive, somehow detached from the ship and floating off into the cold and infinite abyss of the universe, listening to this piece as my oxygen runs out and I lose consciousness looking at the glittering stars, following the remains of the music into oblivion.

[maximuswolf]

Bach - Art of Fugue Contrapunctus 14 completed [Baroque Contrapuntal]

Bach - Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus 14 completed [Baroque, Contrapuntal] https://youtu.be/QxzKooREmB4 Submitted October 06, 2024 at 03:03PM by claudi_meneghin https://ift.tt/W0GlpHb via /r/Music

[comprate--na--personalita]

Daniil Trifonov – Bach: Contrapunctus 14, BWV 1080

[666radio666]

Rise Above - June 7, 2023

Black Flag - Rise Above, Damaged Blood Sucking Freaks - New Rose, Bottlesick The Damned - Melody Lee, Machine Gun Etiquete The Uglies - Pyramid, Planet Uglies The Neuros - orchids on a budget, 7" Price of Silence - Sight, Price of Silence RAW POWER - Start a Fight, Screams from the gutter Meat Puppets - split myself in 2, Meat Puppets II Jaguar God - down on the day, revenge and retruibution Luminous Green Snow - Mushrooms, Split cassette with Yogsothoth/Boiled Lollies & Puppy Dogs (Demo)/bonus track4:14 Pigasus - Hey Fucker, Days of Swine and Roses Killdozer - Take the Money and Run, for ladies only Skid City - Blue, Greetings from Skid City Otoboke Beaver - Anata Ga Fall in Love Shita No Ha Watashi Ga Kirai Na Onnanoko, Okoshiyasu!! Otoboke Beaver (Remastered 2018) Scratch Acid - Mary Had a Little Drug Problem, The Greatest Gift G.I.S.M. - Endless Blockade for the Pussyfooter, Detestation Flipper - Triple Mass, Love / Fight X - Nausea, Los Angeles Husker Du - I'll Never Forget You, Zen Arcade HAGOL - WDDP, Jin-Gong Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers - chinese rocks, L.A.M.F. Roo Shooter - The Corrupter of Me, People Gather Round for the Sound of Slaughter Aborted Tortoise - Primordial, A ALBUM Contrapunctus - plastic world, gone pop o pies - industrial rap, pop o pies anthology Hit The Jackpot - the football team, hit the jackpot Hardy Coxon - Pasquale, eniwetok atoll II Lost Sounds - Plastic skin, Black-Wave Hydromedusa - part one, long live Black Flag - Drinking and Driving, in my head Glen and the Peanut Butter Men - Not Me it's You, The Return of Glen and the Peanut Butter Men Replacements - Favorite Thing, Let it Be Nylex - Violent Action, Demo Bollard - Pain in the Life, Happy Never After Perdition - Crisis, OXYGEN (CD single from forthcoming album in 2022) All The Weathers - jobs for dogs, For The Worms Goon Wizarrd - Scectpterodacular, in the end, my girlfriend became my arch enemy, my arch enemy became my best friend, and my best friend became my girlfriend

[spotifyclassicalmusic]

A beautiful and fabulous piece by Bach. Enjoy!

Image credit: @secretie

Composer: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5aIqB5nVVvmFsvSdExz408?si=s1g-7o8HRoasSBqfrFQ-VQ&dl_branch=1

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Another astonishing recording of Bach’s magnum opus, The Art of the Fugue. In this work, Bach took a simple theme in D Minor and expanded it to supreme intellectual and even spiritual heights (listen to the mournful Contrapunctus 14). Even though CPE Bach brought some romanticism to the abrupt ending of this work (claiming Bach had died before he could complete the last fugue), we still get the sense of an aging, ill composer struggling to complete his life’s work, a testament of his method and musical thoughts for the generations to come. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields uses a variety of instruments, from the violin to the oboe, from the harpsichord to the organ, bringing this astonishing work to life. 

[panatmansam]

The Art of the Fugue

The “Art of the Fugue” is an unfinished masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach. Written late in the maestro's life it is perfect study music. It is also good for those times when you have a project going and need something to motivate you.

Wiki sez: “This work consists of 14 fugues and 4 canons in D minor, each using some variation of a single principal subject, and generally ordered to increase in complexity. "The governing idea of the work", as put by Bach specialist Christoph Wolff, "was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject."[1] The word "contrapunctus" is often used for each fugue.”

[bittersweetpangs]

“The aim and final end of all music,” Bach once said, “should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Whatever your metaphysical convictions, refreshment of the soul can be the aim of your work, like Bach’s. Bach finished each of his manuscripts with the words Soli Deo gloria—“Glory to God alone.” He failed, however, to write these words on his last manuscript, “Contrapunctus 14,” from The Art of Fugue, which abruptly stops mid-measure. His son C.P.E. added these words to the score: “Über dieser Fuge … ist der Verfasser gestorben” (“At this point in the fugue … the composer died”). Bach’s life and work merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. This is my aspiration.

[universomovie]

Daniil Trifonov – Bach: Contrapunctus 14, BWV 1080, 19 (Compl. by Trifonov)

Daniil Trifonov – Bach: Contrapunctus 14, BWV 1080, 19 (Compl. by Trifonov)

@Daniil Trifonov is intrigued by Bach’s attempts to base the work on the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, but observes that the result is “far more than a scientific experiment: as always with Bach, he managed to make music of indescribable beauty and emotion”. Trifonov’s imaginative interpretation captures the sense of the work as a cycle, treating it as a living, organic whole. This…

[hermanwatts]

Blood on the Moon

I have been reading some recent fantasy and it is time for a break. I remembered that I had an omnibus of three novels by James Ellroy, L.A. Noir. The omnibus contains three early novels featuring the detective Lloyd Hopkins. I picked this up used around 15 years ago. I remember seeing it at Barnes & Noble in the late 1990s around the time L.A. Confidential came out as a movie.

Ellroy is probably one of the most popular crime writers of the past 25, if not 30 years. I have read The Black Dahlia. I have an Ellroy collection, Crime Wave of which I remember almost nothing.

Ellroy’s introduction to L.A. Noir has the history of writing the Lloyd Hopkins novels. He plotted Blood on the Moon, his third novel, in 1980 (released in 1984):

“I wanted to write a contemporarily set, contrapunctually structured novel about a sex obsessed cop tacking down a sexually motivated killer. I was not familiar with the term ‘serial killer.’ Thomas Harris’ brillian and ground-breaking novel Red Dragon was yet to be published. I didn’t know that the mano-a-mano duels of cops and serial killers would soon become a big fat fucking cliché. Red Dragon– to my mind the greatest suspense novel ever written–spawned an entire sub-genre.”

Blood on the Moon starts out in a California high school in 1964 with two white trash students luring, humiliating, and performing an unmentionable act to smartest guy in the room called “the Poet.” Next chapter- Summer 1965. Lloyd Hopkins, about to enter the police academy, gets called up for the Watts race-riots. During the riots, he blows away his squad sergeant who is a psychopath. A few mistakes in this chapter with firearms. Sergeant Beller (the psychopath) is selling a modified M1911 .45 ACP pistol. It has a 20 round “elephant clip” and is fully automatic. I guess someone could have created a 20 round extended magazine. I have never heard of the M1911 converted to full-automatic firing setting. I seriously doubt the pistol could hold up to it not to mention it would be very inaccurate.  Second mistake- he has California National Guard carrying M-14 rifles. There weren’t that many M-14s made to begin with. National Guard was using M-1 rifles (the Garand) all the way up to the end of the 60s. The Ohio National Guard had M-1s at the Kent State U. protests. A search on the internet for pictures of the Watts Riot has National Guard all with M-1s, not an M-14 in sight.

The third chapter has a character, our serial killer, stalk and murder a victim. The novel introduces Lloyd Hopkins as a detective who finds a pattern of deaths looking through old files. Women of a certain type are getting offed on June 10th every year going back to the late 60s. Some are disguised as suicides.

The novel then goes back and forth with Hopkins and killer (Ted Verplanck) getting closer and closer. Verplanck was “the Poet” in the first chapter. The two guys who did the unmentionable to him become an L. A. Country Sheriff who shakes down the other, a gay male prostitute.

Verplanck is referred to a “mass murderer” in the novel as term “serial-killer” has not been invented yet. You see elements that Ellroy would expand upon in his later novels– good cops, incompetent cops, corrupt cops.

Blood on the Moon is a fast-moving novel. Ted Verplanck is a creepy serial-killer. Ellroy would write a novel, Killer on the Road after the Lloyd Hopkins novels told from the view of the serial-killer.

The earliest serial-killer novel that I can think of off-hand is Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place (1947). The next one is Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959). There are probably others from this period and then the deluge in the wake of Red Dragon.

Blood on the Moon published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[mikrokosmos]

What are some pieces you feel you have to set aside time for to listen to? Like, I have trouble listening to Mahler in the background cause they're so long, I have to set aside time

Yeah I see what you mean, especially Mahler is a good example of someone who can’t be background music. Of his symphonies, the ninth is the most dense, it’s hard to describe his style but basically he will introduce a melody, and it will never repeat the same way, there is always slight variations. The first movement is full of that, and has a lot of counterpoint. The second movement is lively and fun but also kind of dense, the third movement is a noisy orchestral fugue, and the finale movement is a bit of an unraveling work.

In general, the works that are more contrapuntally dense demand more attention. From Beethoven there are two late masterpieces that come to mind: first is the last movement of the Hammerklavier. It starts out with an intro, and is kind of “postmodernist” in that it sounds like the composer trying to decide what fugue to write. he starts with a major key serene sounding fugue, stops, then does a more dramatic one, both sounding like Bach…then he stops, and then plays us into the real fugue which is off of a very long and complicated subject, and it goes through the whirlwind. Second is the “Great Fugue” from his 13th string quartet which was hated at its premiere so Beethoven was urged to publish it separately and write a new finale for the quartet. The fugue is very dense and is kind of bonkers to listen to at first because it is based off of a very angular and harsh theme. He works through it a few ways and the transformation is gorgeous.

Then there is the most unusual piano work I love…Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica. He takes Bach’s unfinished contrapunctus 14, “completes” it [with modernist harmonies], and writes an extended fantasy out of it. It is in three parts, part 1 is an unrelated elegy he’d written earlier that is revised a little, setting the darkened and shadowy mood, part 2 is Bach’s fugue beefed up and completed, and part 3 is the fugal-fantasy based off of it. The music is so dense I really don’t know how I was able to force my ADHD ass to listen through it back in high school.

Speaking of Bach, he’s amazing in that his music is super complex and outstanding, but you don’t need to know music theory and stuff to fully enjoy it. That being said, the Contrapunctus 11 from his Art of Fugue is one of the more dense works by him that I know, and it’s kind of hard to follow along without watching the sheet music

Brahms has a few doozies, the first movement of the c minor piano trio kind of does my head in and I’ve listened to it several times just to catch the harmonies. A disciple of Brahms is Max Reger who pushed the “weird harmonic decisions” to the extreme [here’s his clarinet quintet for example], and then there’s Schoenberg who people dislike because of his unconventional tonal structures which do involve math and stuff, but he is the logical progression of German music if you are following Brahms’ footsteps, here is his third string quartet.

This is a good handful for now, and of course there are many more that are even more intense than the ones I mentioned. I don’t want this to make people feel like classical music like this is inaccessible, just know that a LOT is going on between the lines and it’s ok if you don’t like a piece the first time you hear it. Most of these are works that I didn’t like at first or couldn’t pay attention to, and it took me a while to warm up to them [especially Brahms, Reger, and Schoenberg].

[maximuswolf]

Bach - Art of Fugue Contrapunctus 14 [Contrapuntal]

Bach - Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus 14 [Contrapuntal] https://youtu.be/a7U81yq13WA Submitted August 10, 2024 at 10:31AM by claudi_meneghin https://ift.tt/zwuLlqX via /r/Music

[sonyclasica]

TAL & GROETHUYSEN

REINHARD FEBEL - J. S. BACH: 18 STUDIES ON THE ART OF FUGUE

El dúo de piano Tal & Groethuysen presenta Reinhard Febel - J. S. Bach: 18 Studies on The Art of Fugue. Con sus fugas y cánones derivados de la misma célula germinal temática, El arte de la fuga de Johann Sebastian Bach contiene una gran cantidad de variantes constructivas. 2CD a la venta el 28 de agosto.

En sus estudios, Reinhard Febel separó los elementos constitutivos del trabajo de Bach y los ensambló de formas completamente nueva, lo que le permite abarcar todo el teclado. Estos estudios producen una visión brillante y ocasionalmente incluso dramáticamente expresiva.

Bach presumiblemente estaba pensando en el mundo de sonido de un instrumento de teclado, aunque nunca lo especificó sin ambigüedades. Esto ha legitimado toda una gama de versiones dispares para diferentes combinaciones de instrumentos. El dúo formado por Yaara Tal y Andreas Groethuysen se sintió atraído por la idea de interpretar el trabajo como un dúo de piano, que grabaron en los Estudios de Febel para el lanzamiento mundial actual.

Yaara Tal y Andreas Groethuysen forman uno de los mejores dúos de piano del mundo y han sido artistas exclusivos de Sony Classical desde hace más de treinta años. Además de una homogeneidad y espontaneidad sin igual en su forma de tocar, el dúo muestra una gran creatividad que presenta tesoros musicales injustamente descuidados además del repertorio estándar.

CONTENIDO:

Reinhard Febel (*1952)

18 Studies for Two Pianos based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” (2013/2014)

CD 1 46:16

1. Study 1 Nicht zu langsam (Contrapunctus 1)

2. Study 2 Sehr schnell (Contrapunctus 2)

3. Study 3 Leicht schwebend, nicht zu langsam (Contrapunctus 3)

4. Study 4 Nicht zu langsam (Contrapunctus 4)

5. Study 5 Langsam (Contrapunctus 5)

6. Study 6 Langsam (Contrapunctus 6 per Diminutionem in Stylo Francese)

7. Study 7 Nicht zu schnell (Contrapunctus 7 per Augmentationem et Diminutionem)

8. Study 8 Nicht zu langsam (Contrapunctus 8)

9. Study 9 Sehr schnell (Contrapunctus 9 alla Duodecima)

10. Study 10 Schnell (Contrapunctus 10 alla Decima)

11. Study 11 Prestissimo possibile (Contrapunctus 11)

CD 2 47:04

1. Study 12 Langsam (Contrapunctus 12 Rectus+Inversus)

2. Study 12a Nicht zu langsam (Contrapunctus 12 Rectus+Inversus)

3. Study 13 Prestissimo possibile (Contrapunctus 13 Rectus+Inversus)

4. Study 13a Schnell (Contrapunctus 13 Rectus+Inversus)

5. Study 14 Nicht zu langsam (Canon in Hypodiatesseron per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu)

6. Study 15 Schnell (Canon in Hypodiapason - Canon alla Ottava)

7. Study 16 Nicht zu schnell (Canon alla Decima. Contrapunto alla Terza)

8. Study 17 Presto feroce (Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta)

9. Study 18 Maestoso, ma molto calmo (Fuga a 3 (4) Soggetti)

Duo Tal & Groethuysen  www.tal-groethuysen.de

[thierrymechler]

LE BACH DU CONFINEMENT J-5 Contrapunctus 14 https://youtu.be/nQH_mhsgJpM Véritable sommet cette fugue titanesque inachevée s’interrompt brutalement à la 239ème mesure, bouleversante ou providentielle symbolique des nombres 2+3+9=14, c’est à dire B.A.C.H. Vous pouvez également découvrir ma version au piano sur SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/thierry-mechler/sets/die-kunst-der-fuge , la fin y est différente…#thierrymechler #orgelmusik #orgel #orgue #pipeorgan #organist #jsbach #musiqueclassique #culture #artwork #mountains #photooftheday #confinement #confinementcreatif #kunstderfuge #artdelafugue https://www.instagram.com/p/B_1g-_kAWrT/?igshid=1r4g32hmmnfb6

[rekapitulacija]

Day 1: Rdeči molk/Red Silence

Day 2: 2525

Day 3: Jezero/Der See, Valjhun/Waldung, Delak

Dar 4: Eat Liver!

Day 5: Dokumenti/Dokuemente/Documents

Day 6: Tanz mit Laibach

Day 7: Trans-National

Day 8: Just Say No!

Day 9: Država/Der Staat/The State

Day 10: Jelengar

Day 11: Vojna poema

Day 12: Achtung!

Day 13: Jesus Christ Superstar (The original is a 70’s song.)

Day 14: The Parade

Day 15: B-Mashina

Day 16: Contrapunctus 1 (their version of the Bach’s piece)

Day 17: Krst pod Triglavom (a.k.a. Apologija Laibach) - the one with Hostnik’s last poem

Day 18: Kingdom of God

Day 19: Leben-Tod

Day 20: Perspektive/Perspectiven/Perspecives

Day 21: Tito-Tito

Day 22: Walk with Me

Day 23: Die Liebe (a.k.a. Die grösste Kraft)

Day 24: Venite Lucifer (by the side-project Peter)

Day 25: Brat moj (sung by Hostnik)

Day 26: Die Liebe (a.k.a. Grösste Kraft) - the one with the female vocalist

Day 27: Under the Iron Sky

Day 28: No History

Day 29: Leben heißt Leben

Day 30: Die Zeit

[alanlaidlaw]

Bach finished each of his manuscripts with the words Soli Deo gloria—“Glory to God alone.” He failed, however, to write these words on his last manuscript, “Contrapunctus 14,” from The Art of Fugue, which abruptly stops mid-measure. His son C.P.E. added these words to the score: “Über dieser Fuge … ist der Verfasser gestorben” (“At this point in the fugue … the composer died”). Bach’s life and work merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. This is my aspiration.

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think