Fugal Science, Vol. 1, No. 3: Four Voice Fugue

Big month for me, as I have finished both the four- and five-part fugues for volume one of Fugal Science. This has been over twenty years in the making! So much has come into focus.

I have worked out the orchestration for both volumes (Volume 2 was completed last year), which will be; solo guitar for the two-part fugues, string trio for the three-part fugues, string choir minus contrabasses for the four-part fugues, and symphony orchestra for the five-part Grand Fugue of volume one, and also for the Ricercare of volume two.

The keys for both volumes will be A minor, G minor, F-sharp minor, and A minor.

These will be realized on the Synclavier, of course, and I have ordered a 64 voice FM/Additive system just for these projects (Fuga Electronica and Sonatae as well). Turns out that it is not practicable to link two 32 voice systems together to get 64 voices, because the Dynamic Voice Allocation makes it impossible to predict which of the two stereo pairs of outputs a voice will appear in. Because of the Synclavier's programmed-in compression effects, that makes level matching impossible. So I'll now have a single 64 voice FM/Additive system, which was always the ultimate dream setup for me, since the 80's. Plus, I'll be able to make one of the 32 voice systems a slave via MIDI Sync, which will give me a separate system dedicated to nothing but sound effects and percussion. Obviously, this will aid mixing.

Both of these volumes of four fugues each will be made into separate dissertations - or treatises, if you prefer - in addition to being made into albums. In this way, I'll finish up my doctoral studies simply for my own satisfaction. Nobody is qualified to award me a DMA or PhD anyway.

I was planning on presenting the piece today, but I did not get the audio recording done in time, so that will have to wait for next month.

I did get the JPG's done though, so here is the exposition.

The simple counter-answer, which has the came central body as the counter-subject, was the last piece of the puzzle to be revealed to me.

It is still in G minor, so I have to transpose it yet as well.