12-tone Fugue for Piano

The Piece

The Score

You can find it here if you'd like to look at it more closely. While it would have been feasible to condense the piece to two staves instead of four, using four allowed me to better keep track of the voices during composition. I also use parentheses around a note to indicate the beginning of a tone row.

Also, please excuse the 19/4; it was the best way for me to keep track of things given how long the subject is.

Commentary

Most twelve-tone pieces are not the most accessible; they usually are dissonant to most listeners, unapproachable, more like noise than music. I wanted to try to write a twelve-tone piece that is as accessible as possible while still adhering to tone row rules. The first tone row that I came up with that satisfied that condition is what you hear in the first measure.

I also am low-key obsessed with fugues and other contrapuntal structures, and on a whim decided to write the piece as a fugue. There were immediate consequences to this decision; I needed to answer these questions:

How many voices?
How was I to handle the tonic-dominant relationship for the subject-countersubject?
Would each voice share the same note restrictions and observe a single tone row?—or would it be one tone row per voice?

For the first: I settled on four voices—that would allow for depth and complexity of harmony that might be difficult to approach with three notes alone, and it would give me a few more options with voice-leading. For the second: I decided to just move the subject/countersubjects up a fifth or down a fourth as appropriate.

The third question, when considered carefully, really only has one answer: one tone row per voice. To do this as even two voices (e.g., as an invention/courante/gigue/whatever) observing a single tone row would be impossible; to repeat the same subject at a different interval while introducing a second voice would necessitate interspersing a multitude of notes between each pitch to cover what's needed to keep the subject intact.

To put it another way: it would get way too complicated and unwieldy.

So that's how I arrived at what I did. Outside of that caveat, the voices follow normal tone row rules: repeating the same note multiple times is okay, but going back to a prior note without exhausting the pitches remaining of the twelve is not allowed.

I actually wrote the exposition and got stuck—a thing that happens sometimes when I leave a hyperfocused state and try to come back to something a day or two later. I couldn't come up with anything that felt like a smooth transition out of the exposition, and I would experiment with writing something that led into the development once every couple days, weeks, months—until eventually a few years had passed. I finally settled on finishing it and came up with something just barely good enough that I was willing to let it slide and finish the piece out.

The piece should be playable (I teased it all out mentally, keeping in mind hand-spreads and the like); what you hear in the video was made in Reaper with a lot of careful love and consideration for the dynamics for each note and a bit of pedaling. I think it turned out somewhat convincing. If I could get an actual recording of a performance, that would be amazing—but it's not exactly on my list of priorities at the moment.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it—I had a great time working on it, and I come back to it to listen once in a while because my memories of writing it were so nice. Thank you. :)