"Little" Fugue in G Minor
Digital Sheet Music

Concert Band - Intermediate - Digital Download

SKU: S0.107495

Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Arranged by Michel Rondeau, Kevin Nicholson. Baroque Period. Score,Set of Parts. 55 pages. Published by Kevin Nicholson (S0.107495).

Although Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)is today recognized as a master of baroque composition, he was little known outside of his native Thuringia region of Germany during his lifetime. He composed in all contemporary genres except opera, an omission in his oeuvre that was certainly a result of his twenty-seven year appointment as the music director for the major churches in Leipzig, Germany, and the tension between the church and the secular opera establishment. In his home region, however, Bach was well respected as a composer and organist and was often called upon to “test” new organs after their construction.One of Bach's best-known organ pieces is the Little Fugue in G Minor (composed about 1709), so called to differentiate it from another, longer fugue in G minor. Mastering the very strict compositional form of the fugue, based upon the earlier imitative vocal polyphony of the renaissance, was thought to be one of the highest achievements of a baroque composer. In this form a single melody, the subject, is the basis of all the following music in the composition. Bach’s command of this compositional genre was so great that he was called upon to improvise a fugue given to him in 1744 by Frederick the Great. Bach later based the composition of the Musical Offering , a virtual encyclopedia of polyphonic forms, on the royal theme. The investigation of musical construction dominated Bach’s last decade, during which his membership in the learned Society of Musical Sciences profoundly affected his thinking. As the alchemist sought the sorcerer’s stone, from which gold could be manufactured, Bach and his fellow composers sought the perfect polyphonic musical materials from which endless compositions could be wrought.