The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
58 comments
·May 27, 2025ethanhein
MomsAVoxell
Excellent article and great analysis of the state of the fugue - your insight has motivated me to dig out some Bach from the old piano bench and give things a bit of a bash.
As a musician, stuck in a bit of a rut of late, this kind of thing really helps get the juice flowing again. I’ve spent 15 minutes churning through some fingering and activating old muscle memory I’d forgotten about completely since the piano lesson days, and tonight’s jam session with my band is going to have some new flavours to introduce.
Good stuff, thank you!
xeonmc
Thank you for the wonderful post. I was humming the Nomai leitmotif from Outer Wilds[0] when two earworms came up simlutaneously: this, and the Little Fugue, and for some reason they comingled in my mind that I couldn't remember which subject was which, so I went googling which was how I found your post.
throw0101a
The Netherlands Bach Society is trying to record all the works of Bach and make them available:
an1sotropy
Their Art of the Fugue is a multi-instrumental joy. Here's where Contrapunctus I starts: https://youtu.be/N6sUlZa-IrU?t=7
chasil
Here is a free recording of a piano performance of the Art of the Fugue by Kimiko Ishizaka:
https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-o...
This artist also has a free recording of her Goldberg Variations available:
https://opengoldbergvariations.org/
Her bandcamp page also has the Well-Tempered Clavier, and two of her own albums:
kkylin
Thank you! Just listened to some of the Art of the Fugue & enjoyed it very much
viccis
The visualizations here remind me of the old Bach WTC analysis and commentary website that used David Korevaar's performance (and some others for the ones on organ or harpsichord) and Tim Smith's analysis. Problem was, they were all done using Flash.
Some amazing person uploaded video versions to Youtube. I would highly recommend them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8Tlc...
This one in particular is beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU
devrandoom
Fugues are still being written. Here's one from 2016, although a bit controversial:
leephillips
I don’t see anything controversial there.
ctchocula
"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine."
I've always wanted to learn how to listen to counterpoint. Anyone have good tips on how to appreciate it and know what it means to perceive counterpoint?
djtango
Ha I've been learning the piano for over 30 years and I still feel the same as that quote and am not convinced I can hear so many voices at once so well, though admittedly I have improved a little recently because a lot of the music I have been playing has three or more voices and to play them you must hear them.
So playing an instrument (usually keyboard) helps - JSBach's inventions and sinfonias were written to teach counterpoint IIRC. If playing is out of scope then I found listening to orchestral music can be helpful because you can latch onto different instruments and learn to interpret what they're doing individually (first) then how they are interacting with other voices after. Strong quartets will similarly allow you to listen to multi-voice music that may sound more distinct than just keyboard.
The other piece of advice is to get very familiar with a particular musical work and listen to it repeatedly. Once the familiarity is there you'll start to pick up different things on repeated listens. If you then start changing the recording/performer you'll also notice how they choose to interpret passages differently and certain voices may sound more prominent which can be a hook for your ear to latch onto...
Just some initial thoughts, hope that helps!
EDIT - Pachelbel's Canon in D is probably one of the most accessible songs to practise listening to. Poor cellists always grumble about playing this one, see if you can hear why
kkylin
Since no one else has done it, I'll plug the Canadian Brass recording -- it's one of my favorite recordings of the Art of the Fugue, and (among many other things) just shows how flexible and instrument-agnostic this music is.
queuebert
This and their Pachelbel's Canon were what ignited my love for classical music as a child.
fortran77
Except nobody would call "The Art of the Fugue" classical. It's baroque.
artimaeis
For what it’s worth: plenty of people would refer to it, broadly, as classical music.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music_(disambiguat...
It’s not music from the classical period. Indeed, it’s from the baroque period. But in my decades of talking about and performing classical music, the term has never led to confusion.
organman91
I adore the Canadian Brass' recording, and also the other Bach pieces they have transcribed.
I'd also like to plug the album released by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, who did a double album of the Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering, and used a variety of different scorings for each movement.
conorbergin
Bach's fugues are amazing, they sound great on harpsichords and organs, whereas some piano music sounds very wrong when it is payed without all the volume modulation, the fugues are carried by the interactions between the melodies, the counterpoint.
niccl
I much prefer the art of fugue on strings. The Delme Quartet is the best rendition I've found.
The two pauses in contrapunctus 1 are, in my opinion the two best pieces of silence in the whole musical canon. I always think of the chords that come after theme as 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped'. They can make me weep when I'm in the right mood. (sorry for the over-sharing...)
leephillips
Nothing to apologize for.
username223
Bach in general is amazing in terms of surviving all sorts of transcription and mutilation. Compare the Little Organ Fugue as originally intended:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4
to the a cappella version by the Swingle Singers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhU7euFPWwo
Some music is very much tied to a particular instrument, but Bach is more or less universal.
dmansen
I fell in love with this piece hearing Michael Winograd play it on clarinet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTsQ-TbQReI
AriedK
Ah yes, Vulfmon! Jack Stratton seems to love his Fugues.
In case you haven't already: check out Vulfpeck /// Bach Vision Test; a really nice visualization of Contrapunctus IX a 4 alla duodecima.
gerdesj
How does an article like this on HN avoid having a comment referring to "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
(Yes!)
(EDIT - formatting)
treetalker
For the J.S. Bach fans, here's a fun site that organizes his cantatas calendrically: https://whichbachcantata.be/
jll29
Amazing how Glenn Gould caresses that piano, in a performance that is almost a spiritual act.
Apart from geek toys that often cause more hassle and annoyance than they're worth, the most appreciated material things that I purchased in the first half century of my life are:
• The Art of Computer Programming (purchased the first volume aged 16, decades later I'm still waiting for volume 4 to be completed)
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• J. S. Bach: The complete organ Works on ten CDs.
The Voyager space craft contains a disc with Bach's, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1 on it, and the joke among space folks goes, one day a radio telescope will receive a message deciphered as S-E-N-D M-O-R-E B-A-C-H!
Don't waste your life striving to be fashionable, aspire eternal beauty and knowledge!
PS: I like the visualization, thanks for this blog post and bringing the beauty of Bach that is almost out of this world into a bleak Tuesday afternoon [on which nasty people drop bombs on children and people too stupid for the power they carry keep quiet about it]. I would like to see another visualization, which shows the music scores smooth-scrolling from right to left with all tones currently being played highlighted in yellow, and below the scores I'd like to see the hands playing said tones on the organ, all in temporal alignment.
billfruit
How did the Art of Computer Programming help you in those years?
viccis
Looks damn good on the bookshelf lol (I say with 3 volumes of the second edition right behind me)
I've used it to settle a few combinatorics arguments over the years too.
masswerk
Ad Gould: The phrasing at around 2:40, where he has this voice stepping into the previously dominant legato voices, is tremendous!
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TacticalCoder
[dead]
Every once in a while I get a giant traffic bump on an old post, and it's because someone shared it here. It's always a nice surprise. Thanks for reading!