Memorizing Fugues

[steinwayguy]

How? Voices separately? Hands separately? 

[lostinidlewonder]

Always too-geth-herrrrr. The fugue is one body of sound not seperate voices so get use to all of it straight away, if you pick away at it you may start tempting yourself to give bais to one thing or the other. Rather maintain the volume of passages that are prone to be naturally weaker in sound.

If you must take it seperatly first that is ok, so long your aim is to get it together straight away and not consider the voices seperately. I feel it is a trap to think that fugues are melodies played on top of one another.

[aerlinndan]

Always too-geth-herrrrr. The fugue is one body of sound not seperate voices so get use to all of it straight away, if you pick away at it you may start tempting yourself to give bais to one thing or the other. Rather maintain the volume of passages that are prone to be naturally weaker in sound.

If you must take it seperatly first that is ok, so long your aim is to get it together straight away and not consider the voices seperately. I feel it is a trap to think that fugues are melodies played on top of one another.

I stand at the polar opposite end  from lostinidlewonder. A fugue IS made of separate voices. That's why at the beginning of all of Bach's fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier you will see a marking that indicates how many voices are in the fugue. Also, when you analyze a fugue and look for the subject and countersubject and other elements, you find them in individual voices. The exposition of the fugue consists of each of the voices coming in and playing the subject. The purpose of this is for each voice to announce its presence, let itself be known, and then contribute to the whole of the fugue.

You WANT to give bias to certain voices at different times. Gould did it. All the great pianists did it. When you have a fugue in four voices, they simply are not all equal - different voices will take precedence at different times, depending on their content and your musical concept of the piece. This is why it is indispensable to know each voice forwards and backwards. Play each voice alone. Sing it. (I solfege it.) Play combinations of two or three voices. This is the only way to truly fully explore the fugue. Practice of this sort leads to insights that one could never have practicing the fugue as one big locked-in body of sound.

[keys]

I agree. Practice the seperate voices. Besides it's already mentioned virtues, Bach went a little heavy on the tied notes, and they're really easy to mis-read if you learn it all together.

[nanabush]

I just learn them over time from playing them over and over again reading from the book.  I was so desperate for C minor Fugue that I actually did a measuer, then off by heart, did that for about a day and it nearly worked, I had it memorized not long later. 

[quantum]

It is important to remember that  pianist/organist/harpsichord or other keyboard performers  tend to think of the final performance of a fugue as a single pallete of sound - and thus a misleading sense of individual voicing.  While infact if each voice of the fugue were divided among different instruments, every performer of each voice would have to individually shape and colour it. 

[aerlinndan]

It is important to remember that  pianist/organist/harpsichord or other keyboard performers  tend to think of the final performance of a fugue as a single pallete of sound - and thus a misleading sense of individual voicing.  While infact if each voice of the fugue were divided among different instruments, every performer of each voice would have to individually shape and colour it. 

I think you're arguing against thinking of individual voices when learning a fugue, but I'm not exactly sure.

It's true that the individual voices go together to make one pallete, or mass, or block, or experience of sound. However, saying that it is a bad idea to listen to individual voices is like saying that you should not listen to individual instrumental sections and soloists in an orchestra because they are individuals and the composer would rather have you hear the piece as one "mass" of sound.

It's music, for crying out loud! And musicians are always trying to listen more deeply, more intently, more carefully, to perhaps here some minute detail that was not heard before. If you're not going to listen to individual voices in a fugue, you might as well say that the musical experience of a given piece is exactly the same for both an amateur and a professional ear.

[lostinidlewonder]

It is absolutely very impossible to listen to all the voices of a fugue individually while you are playing it. So to undergo a task to listen to every single voice seperately before you put them together is going to confuse you. What do you listen to? If you start listening to something then it becomes the melody and the rest becomes the support. Now this is fine for other music, but in a fugue it is a lot more than that. It is controlling all these simultaneous voices and finding out how all these voices WORK TOGETHER to create the sound of the fugue. It is a big trap to start thinking of them as individual voices, yes that is fine for orchestra, choirs etc, but piano you can't do that.

A lot of respected teachers of Bach will support this. The preface of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music edition of the 48 bach Preludes and Fugues warn against thinking of Fugues as seperate voices playing over one another.

Part Playing.
The nature of the polyphony has been obscured rather than illuminated by Ouseley's famous definition of counterpoint as "the art of combining melodies." Music "pianistic" fugue-playing has passed as "scholarly" when it even fails to realise that definition, inasmusch as it "brings out the subject" as if all the rest of the fugue were unfit for publication. This notion is peculiar to pianists. Organists, who perhaps play fugues more often than most people, do not find it necessary, whenever the subject enters in the inner parts, to pick it out with the thumb or another manual. They and their listeneres enjoy the polyphony because the inner parts can neither "stick out" nor fail to balance well in the harmony, so long as the notes are played at all. On the pianoforte constant care is needed to prevent failure of tone: and certainly the subject of a fugue should not be liable to such failure. But neither should the counterpoints; indeed, the less often a characteristic countersubject recurs the more important it may be that it should be heard clearly (e.g. the clinching third countersubject of the F minor Fugue in Book 1) Most of Bach's counterpoint actually sounds best when the parts are evenly balanced. It is never a mere combination of melodies, but always a mass of harmony stated in terms of a combination of melodies.
- Principles of interpretation pg12 (J.S BACH Fourty Eight Preludes and Fugues Tovey and Samuel) -

[holysentiment]

My method is...

1. Write all the Finger numbers..

2. Memorize Right Hand(1 bar at a time)
then Memorize Left Hand(1 bar at a time)
after memorize each hand in a bar,
Memorize with both hand
(with Analyzing harmony and intervals in all times)

3. Play 20 times without mistake, slowly, Fortissimo, both hands from memory 1 bar(or 1/2 bar) at a time from the beginning to the end.

then i separate the theme, sub-theme and non-themes..
think about touches and phrasing...
then..
Practice
Theme = FF
Sub-theme = mp
non-theme = pp

after doing this i find i can make(control) music much easier..