If music composition were a basketball game, Johann Sebastian Bach would be the Magic Johnson of the 18th century.
Johnson is regarded as the supreme master of his sport, having proven his abilities at everything from guard to center, playing outstanding offense and defense.
Bach was the master of every classical music form during the first half of the 18th century, except opera. He wrote brilliant keyboard pieces, engaging ensemble works, profound church music and learned technical items.
But just as Magic Johnson is best known for his offensive ability, a genius at shooting, passing and bringing the ball down the court, J.S. Bach has never been surpassed as a composer of fugues, winding themes around each other in an intricate musical puzzle.
Two characteristics make a fugue fugal. The first is the repeated entrance of a main tune according to a certain key scheme. The second is counterpoint, the simultaneous performance of several melodic strands.
Counterpoint sounds complicated, and it does have an intimidating reputation - it's supposedly intellectual, difficult, something only specialists can appreciate. After all, popular songs and classical symphonies have little to do with counterpoint; they consist mainly of one big tune at a time, accompanied discreetly by chords in the right key.
But understanding counterpoint isn't really too difficult. A simple example that everybody knows is ``Row, Row, Row Your Boat.'' One person starts the song, another joins in a few notes later, and a third pipes up later still.
``Row Your Boat'' is contrapuntal, but it isn't a fugue.
It's a round or canon, a type of counterpoint in which the melody in the first voice is imitated note for note by other voices that join later and overlap the first.
Now, counterpoint is not usually that easy. More often, contrapuntal music consists not of identical tunes started at different times, but of a set of quite different tunes that manage to sound natural together.
The trick is to make the various melodic strands weave neatly together, avoiding harshness or dissonance.
So how does a fugue work? The basic pattern isn't too hard to figure out. Just imagine a piece of music performed by, say, three participants - that is, music for three parts.
The opening melody is called the ``subject.'' The first part - that is, participant - presents the subject all the way through, and then starts playing something a little different called a ``countersubject.''
Just as the countersubject begins, the original subject starts in the second part. It's not an exact repetition, though; this time, the melody is transposed to a closely related key, and it's called the ``answer.''
Pretend ``Row Your Boat'' is the beginning of a fugue. Think of the words ``Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream'' as the subject. When the second participant starts answering with the ``rows,'' the first begins to sing ``Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream'' - that would be the countersubject.
All right. The second part has gotten through the melody, and now the third part begins its own version of the tune, now called the ``subject'' again. (The pattern is subject-answer-subject-answer and so on. Remember that subject and answer are pretty much the same material; it's the countersubject that's quite different.)
By the time the third part begins the subject, the second part is ready for the countersubject. The first part has by now finished its go at the countersubject and has run out of things to do. So it starts noodling around with counterpoint - notes that don't necessarily make a good tune on their own, but fit in with the other two parts.
Everything that's happened so far is lumped together as the ``exposition.'' Next comes a series of ``episodes,'' passages in which the counterpoint chugs along with new material or with fragments of the subject or countersubject.
At this point, an episode is often used to modulate to a new key, and one or more of the parts again enter the subject into the proceedings. Perhaps each part will bring in the subject, one part after another in rapid succession so that the subject overlaps itself and things become excitingly complicated. This technique is called ``stretto,''n Italian word meaning ``squeezed together.''
Bach employed many such tricks in his counterpoint. He was also fond of devices like diminution, in which the time values of all the melody's notes are shortened; or inversion, which basically turns the melody upside down.
After the composer has had his fun, it's time for the fugue's closing section. Here the subject returns one last time, and the whole thing ends with a big affirmation of the home key.
So, leaving out a lot of technical detail, that's what happens in a fugue. There's one more thing to keep in mind. Some fugues present two subjects simultaneously right at the beginning, and are called double fugues. If there are three subjects, the result is a triple fugue.
Bach wrote a great many kinds of music. But, especially toward the end of his life, he seemed obsessed with fugues.
He wrote 48 preludes and fugues for harpsichord, gathered into a two-part publication called ``The Well-Tempered Clavier'' (referring not to a keyboard in a good mood, but a keyboard that's been tuned a certain way; the collection contains two preludes and fugues in each of the 24 keys). This set Is revered by scholars, musicians and Bach lovers, but five hours of harpsichord fugues may be heavy going for beginners.
Easier to consume despite its comparative lack of musical variety is Bach's last work, ``The Art of Fugue.'' It's 90 minutes of virtuosic fugue writing, beginning with straight forward single-subject fugues and culminating in a massive, unfinished quadruple fugue. Each fugue is based on the same melody, and all are in the same key. Bach listening suggestions
Bach didn't specify what instrument should play ``The Art of Fugue,'' so there are several options on compact disc. Piano lovers might try Zoltan Kocsis on Philips. For harpsichord versions, there's Kenneth Gilbert on Archiv or Davitt Moroney on Harmonia Mundi. Organ aficionados should turn to Herbert Tachezi on Teldec. And for the most variety, there are a couple of good chamber ensemble versions: Musica Antiqua Koln on Archiv, and Jordi Savall's Hesperion XX on Astrée.
Probably Bach's most famous fugues were written for the organ. The most familiar of all organ works, in fact, is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (BWV is a catalog number; use it to discern this work from the so-called ``Dorian'' Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 538). Never mind that the fugue was possibly intended for strings, and the whole thing might not even be by Bach; for most people, this is the Bach fugue. It was orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski as the opening piece in the film ``Fantasia.''
For recordings, seek out Michel Chapuis on Valois, Peter Hurford on London, Ton Koopman on a number of labels, or, above all, Helmut Walcha on Deutsche Grammophon.
Stokowski's orchestrations are a bad way to learn Bach, because they have nothing to do with the styles, attitudes, instruments or aesthetics of Bach's time. But they are actually a painless way to learn how Bach's fugues work, because the instrumental variety makes it easy to follow the music's structure.
Stoky conducts a Bach collection on Angel, and Eugene Ormandy leads the Philadelphia Orchestra in a similar program on CBS/Sony; neither disc is devoted entirely to fugues.