Bachs Fugue Style Creates Emotion Through Structure
“After watching the lecture on Bach, Bizet, and Bernstein and listening to Bach’s fugue, I gained a new appreciation for this style of music. At first, the fugue sounded very structured and almost mathematical because the same melody kept returning in different voices. However, the lecture helped me understand how those repeated themes create movement, tension, and emotion throughout the piece. One part I found especially interesting was how the presenter compared Bach’s fugue to later examples by Bizet and Bernstein. Even though they all used the same basic fugue technique, each composer created a completely different feeling. Bach’s fugue sounded orderly and intellectual, while Bernstein’s use of the fugue felt much more energetic and dramatic. The lecture showed how a musical form that seems strict can still be flexible enough to express different emotions and ideas. Listening to Bach’s fugue after hearing the analysis made it much easier to follow the different musical lines as they entered one by one. Instead of hearing a collection of notes, I could recognize the main subject moving between voices. The YouTube videos were very useful because they broke down complex musical concepts into a way that was easy to understand. Overall, I was surprised by how expressive and meaningful fugues can be, and the videos helped me listen to the music more carefully than I normally would.”
Summary
The Yale Open Courses lecture titled “Fugue: Bach, Bizet and Bernstein” does examine fugues by all three composers, using Bizet and Bernstein excerpts to illustrate how the same technique can produce different emotional effects. Bernstein’s treatment of the fugue is described as more energetic and dramatic than Bach’s orderly style, and scholarly studies confirm that fugues are capable of conveying a wide range of emotions.
Sources 60 searched
- Cueing musical emotions: An empirical analysis of 24-piece sets by Bach and Chopin documents parallels with emotional speech - PMC
On occasion we encountered notes with multiple stems. This occurred primarily when voices in the Bach Fugues crossed, and in those instances we used the note weight corresponding to the longer duration8. We also observed multiple stems in different contexts in the Preludes – such as Chopin’s Prelude No.
- Exploring emotions in Bach chorales: a multi-modal perceptual and data-driven study - PMC
The relationship between music and emotion has been addressed within several disciplines, from more historico-philosophical and anthropological ones, such as musicology and ethnomusicology, to others that are traditionally more empirical and ...
- MUSI 112 - Lecture 13 - Fugue: Bach, Bizet and Bernstein | Open Yale Courses
In this lecture, Professor Wright ... explanation of how fugues are put together in music. Though he uses excerpts by composers as disparate as Georges Bizet and Leonard Bernstein to illustrate his points, he draws his main musical examples from J.S. Bach....
- A Study of Musical Rhetoric in JS Bach's Organ Fugues
Bach’s approach to fugal composition. This document will investigate the German Baroque musica poetica tradition and the · musical-rhetorical connections in four selected fugues by Bach: BWV 546, 552.2, 577, and 582.
- How is a Fugue Like a Ferris Wheel? Bernstein on Classical Music [Video]
In this excerpt, introduced by Whoopi Goldberg, Bernstein discusses the Classical era of music, dominated by rules of beauty and exemplified by composers like Bach and Haydn. He compares a fugue from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.
- Fugue - Wikipedia
Interestingly, Leonard Bernstein quotes Beethoven's monumental Große Fuge and employs Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, all in the context of a jazz-infused Broadway show stopper.
- The Bach-Beethoven Connection - Carmel Bach Festival
Christian Gottiob Neefe, organist at the electoral court in Bonn, gave Beethoven his first lessons in composition and fired his young charge with his own enthusiasm for Bach. To appreciate the significance of his statement about young Beethoven, we need to realize that in 1782 the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier were considered very difficult fare.
- MUSI 112: Listening to Music (Fall 2008, Open Yale Courses): Lecture 13 - Fugue: Bach, Bizet and Bernstein
In this lecture, Professor Wright briefly explores the manifestations of the fugue form in poetry, painting, and other disciplines, and then gives a detailed explanation of how fugues are put together in music. Though he uses excerpts by composers as disparate as Georges Bizet and Leonard Bernstein to illustrate his points, he draws his main musical examples from J.S. Bach.
- Fuguing after Beethoven - The Boston Musical Intelligencer
A later treatise on fugue d’école is by Charles Koechlin (1933), who nevertheless happily and brilliantly parodied the whole fugal aesthetic in his “monkey scherzo” for orchestra, Les Bandar-log (1940), which contains a canon in five simultaneous different keys. One remembers also the English composer Ebenezer Prout, who wrote a large book, Fugue (1891), again with specific structural requirements; it was soon pointed out that not even one of the 48 fugues in Bach’s WTC conformed to those standards.
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