Un-fuguettable

This week I witnessed a fugue. It was shattering, and I was like, what the fugue?

First, I was late to the concert. Feeling somewhat spent, I debated whether or not to go and then when I’d decided yes, I fell into some traffic. So had to stand in the hall to wait for the piece to finish and chatted with the college-age French horn player-usher while we watched the show on a hallway screen. We shared thoughts on the French horn, something I am always up for.

When the piece was finished I took my seat in the second row on the end. I love sitting on the end. It allows for an easy exit and a good angle for two things:

• Watching musicians. I can see their faces and fingers better at an angle.

• Watching the audience. When I’m affected I like to look back and see if anyone else is too. On this night, my theory was correct.

I don’t even know how to describe it, but I’m going to try.

First, I learned what a fugue actually is and found it consists of three basic rules::

1. Exposition. A subject and answer. Like a voice in a canyon that echoes back indefinitely.

2. Episode. It changes keys. Key changes are always so interesting to me. A lot of people make fun of them because maybe they are often used in a showtune-y way, making it a cliché. But no one can deny they don’t spice things up. Plus, I don’t know about you but hearing it in a different key can completely change a theme for me. I don’t know if it’s because it gives the theme a greater dimension or if it just sounds better tonally. I have a theory some themes work better in specific keys. This is why we favor some keys over others.

3. Development. The presence of a countersubject. Everyone knows anything good requires balance, opposition, resistance, something to work against or off of.

One of the musicians explained beforehand that instead of clear melodic, harmonic or bass lines and accompaniment, each line is its own standalone line of melody. Sometimes it can play as harmony to someone else but if you isolated it from other lines it would be able to stand on its own which made me sit up in my seat because I had been working on this very thing earlier in the day and it gave me a word, a name for a thing I have been searching for:

Contrapuntal. It means, “of or containing a counterpoint with more than one melodic line.”

I play the piano and I get so bored and frustrated by its use or misuse as merely an accompanying appendage in support of others. But also, I am often bored by pieces that feature only the piano. It needs a compliment and should act as a counterpoint with a prominent place in the piece and discussion.

The piece, labored over and unfinished by Bach, was almost twenty minutes long and I worked really hard to do my part while I listened.

What I discovered it to be was this complicated and layered web that might be the auditory equivalent of watching a loom weave something intricate, an image to be revealed as it goes. And then you’re left with this massive, ornate quilt that you can try to pore over before it—poof!— disappears, because that’s what music is— artwork that disappears, leaving a brief residue of whatever feeling is inside you.

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I glanced several times to the audience and moved down rows one by one, examining each face and finding the ones who were in the midst of something. One young person looked to be under a spell, the smile frozen as he sat transfixed, almost like he’d dissociated, in a fugue state of his own. It pleased me.

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I watched these four guys, probably in their 70’s, just mastering a viola, two violins (brothers), and a cello. I worked to extricate the individual lines, darting around them, trying to isolate the voices. That wasn’t so hard, but what was difficult was the fact that this piece they played was so complex, I wished I had spider eyes where I could focus on each one at once. It felt like a multi-dimensional matrix or interchange occurring at an impossible speed, each taking the baton for a moment only to pass it on and traverse another route. But there were fifty batons. My feeble brain tried so hard to track it all and I just couldn’t, forced to surrender to the effect.

Just as striking was the manner in which the musicians played. Their ability to read each other as well as the notes was riveting and indeed, I was shook. And I reminded myself this is why we see live music. With small groups, the dance is particularly pronounced. I was captivated, and I imagined what it must have been to develop this kind of language over their thirty years of performing together. The motion, the swaying, the synchrony, the mutual understanding and the important role of each. The call and response, the deep conversation they were engaged in, each coming with different ideas and viewpoints, the allowance and respect of what each had to say, with no filtering, no dumbing down, and no holding back. It was freedom, and it was freeing to watch it.

Honestly, it was like watching a really successful discourse, where each knows when to assert, retreat, or all engage at once but all the sides are needed to produce this beautiful exchanging of ideas and creation of something new when played together. I could feel it all, and saw it played out before me. It gave me hope for humanity. Like it might actually be possible to come together and find the contributive balance in one another, living with so much noise and turning it into music.

By the end of the piece, I was pretty satisfied and felt the need to let the experience marinate, so I left at intermission. My energy this day was dwindling and I had little left to give. But what I had was definitely worth a fugue.

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