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

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ascending, descending (or both), stepwise or arpeggiated (Ex.4.14); this gives his<br />

counterpoint both flexibility and motivic coherence.<br />

The most impressive aspect of this fugue, however, lies in the way the structure<br />

as a whole has been carefully thought out. The exposition ascends in his usual manner<br />

from bass to soprano; each new voice enters on the same note or one note higher than<br />

the previous voice, forming a cumulative series of ascending fourths from c to e''.<br />

Once all the voices are present and the registeral space has been opened up, Mozart<br />

keeps a very successful balance between three different kinds of material: 1) the<br />

subject entries, mostly in stretto, four-part texture with freely developing counterpoint,<br />

2) episodes, usually lighter in texture and more regularly sequential (bb.57-59, 68-72,<br />

77-80, 91-95, 100-105, 134-137), and 3) a related texture which comes to have<br />

thematic significance in its own right, where the ‘turn’ figure, shared by two voices,<br />

decorates a slowly moving scalar progression in the other two voices (bb.53-55, 73-75,<br />

296

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