Bach Fuga BWV 539 For Woodwind Quintet
by Johann Sebastian Bach
Woodwind Quintet - Digital Sheet Music

Woodwind Ensemble,Woodwind Quintet - Level 5 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.889416

Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Arranged by Luis Anjos Teixeira. Baroque,Concert,Standards. 31 pages. Luis Anjos Teixeira #3485727. Published by Luis Anjos Teixeira (A0.889416).

"2018 Chamber Music Contest Entry"

As a violin player this was always one of my beloved pieces and it has accompanied all my Life. The G minor Fuga is the most compact of the three fugues in the volume for violin solo (and note that in this versions they are not in fact fugues in the proper sense of the word, but rather a kind of fugue/Baroque-concerto hybrid form). It was also transcribed for lute by Bach at some later time (BWV 1000).

My arrangement is based on a version of this piece for the organ made by Bach himself - BWV 539. I follow very intimately the organ version, not adding or letting out any of the original notes.

As an arrangement I transposed it to H-Minor and some of the notes where made through the interpretation symbols more or less shorter in order to accentuate the polyphonic, rhythmic and natural dynamic of the piece. I also added some legatos. Crescendos, or fortes and similar indications are left out like in the original, waiting for your own interpretation.

In the musical consciousness of Bach the polyphony and dialog between the voices were a projection of an ideal world for the Human Society and this should be in the first line of focus and in the mind of all the members in the group.

The power of this piece comes from within its structure and relays in its polyphonic dimension.

Allow yourself to focus on the Art of enhancing the beauty of this dialog, the bless of communicating with each other.

Bach is Love - Love each another

I really advise all performers to have a very humble and sensitive approach in the interpretation of this piece towards loudness because you will have to be listening to each other very carefully while performing.

Linear time, sound and silence are the basic of dynamic expression. Dynamic will than happen naturally and without much effort when bringing the „Art of playing the silence" and the Art of the „duration of the notes" to a state of consciousness within the whole piece itself.

Often in the old music notation the duration of the notes is longer written in the score then it should be played. Understandable because It takes a lot more time for a composer to write in detail the sound and the silence than to write only the raw length of the notes! Back in those times the performing artists were trained very well to read their raw parts and became very skilled in making their own thing out of the scores so the composers did not have to worry with so much detail like nowadays. In some scores we even find words like:-„please play this note simply as written and without embellishments"!

On the original score of the Fuga a sixth voice joins the group between bars sixty and sixty one and this voice can be heard very well in the sound file.

This „Ghost voice" is noted on the clarinet part as an extended possibility. To play it with just one clarinet is absolutely possible as well as arbitrary. Do at will some experiments and let than the group decide. In case of doubt play simply the bottom voice or let yourself get inspired with the sound file. One of my suggestions would be also to play the bottom line as long as the other one is silent, than jump to the upper voice as it comes in and go back again to your usual voice while the other voice „takes a break".

This work brought me a new insight into the consciousness and the universal nature of Bach`s music.

It requires high skilled and experienced artists to execute.

The score was written on Finale.

The sound file For the "2018 Chamber Music Contest Entry", was performed with samplers from Garritan and conceived as an audio support for the presentation of the score.

Thank you very much f.