J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

indeed a complete counter-exposition. 16
A fugal exposition distinguishes itself in a number of obvious ways from
typical galant or Classical textures. Most striking is the fact that a fugal subject is
likely to be presented initially in its naked form, bare of all accompaniment. More
than anything else this contradicts the almost universal Classical (and Romantic)
dependence upon harmony as a textural sine qua non, and emphatically signalises the
presence of an alien style. As successive voices enter, the texture of course becomes
imitative: the voices equal in principle, by comparison with the stratified
melody/accompaniment textures of the time. This imitation, furthermore, takes place
at the interval of a fifth. The tonic-dominant alternation of orthodox answer
procedure, tonal or real, is fundamentally at odds with normal sonata tonal procedures
(see pp.27-31 below), and can therefore serve as a useful criterion for distinguishing
between mere free imitation—fugato—and a genuine fugal exposition. 17
But what happens then? One exposition does not make any except the shortest
fugue. What else needs to take place? And it is just at this point that most
commentators tend to become vague and evasive. As Prout put it: ‘The text-books
mostly give very precise, and often clear rules for [the exposition]; but beyond this the
learner is thrown very much upon his own resources.’ 18 The question of whether there
is a sense in which fugue is a form instead of just (as Tovey insisted 19 ) a texture has
exercised many scholars and pedagogues over the last century and a half.
We have already seen Gédalge’s prescription for a fugue d’école, a pattern that
derived ultimately from Cherubini’s Cours de contrepoint et de fugue of 1835.
16 As specified by Gédalge above. ‘...two additional entries of the subject, one each in Subject and
Answer form and each by a voice that stated the opposite form in the exposition.’ P. M. Walker,
‘Counter-exposition’ Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06688 (accessed 14 July 2008)
17 We should probably not be too doctrinaire about even this, however. It is not self-evident to me, for
example, that we should draw an absolute line between numbers 1 and 3–14 of J. S. Bach’s threepart
keyboard Sinfonias (which answer at the fifth) and numbers 2 and 15 (which answer at the
octave).
18 ‘Fugal structure’, 146.
19 Musical textures (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p.20–21.
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