Fuga IV, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (J. S. Bach)

Full Band

Story: one day -- must have been January 19th, 2002 -- I went with some friends to a nearly empty cheap theater to see The Man Who Wasn't There. I hung out with film people in high school (this was senior year). Anyway, the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 "Pathetique" played several times. I got home and immediately listened to it, as well as some piano music my girlfriend at the time had played for me before. Next day, I decided to learn to play this on the piano, and two weeks later I could play the piece moderately well. Well, it's an easy piece. I found all my sheet music on websites offering it for free, and since I'd read (some of) Godel, Escher, Bach, I figured Bach's music is probably pretty cool. I was right. I learned some of his 2-part and 3-part Inventions (some of each one, I mean -- like, the right hand of 2-part No. 12, both parts separately of No. 14, etc.), and also printed some of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I started playing those in order (skipping the C# major fugue), and when I got to the C# minor 5-part fugue, I really liked it. Problem was, as you've probably noticed, I'm not a very good pianist, so I could never play it very well. And I kept fantasizing about a wind ensemble playing it, like I fantasized about a wind ensemble playing, say, the Star Fox 64 ending theme. Well, about a week before going to college for sophomore year (September 2003), I decided that, hey, let's transcribe this thing NOW. So I got myself a music notation program and, over the course of that week, transcribed the fugue.

That's not exactly what you'll hear here, however -- I've edited it, in recognition that this was my first "composition" ever and therefore I'd made some mistakes in orchestration. The piece was played by my high school band that year along with Aleinu March, which will go up on the website after I finish revising it. Keep in mind that Kontakt doesn't like suspended cymbals (NOTE: it actually does, but I haven't rerecorded this piece to reflect that), and while the patches generally sound pretty good, they're sometimes very unbalanced. A timpani low A, for example, is much louder than a mid-staff D for some reason, and the tuba is MUCH louder than, say, the trombone. Also, this fugue is in C minor instead of C# minor because unlike the keyboard, the band isn't well-tempered and would lose its temper if it had to play in four sharps (seven for Eb instruments -- yeah).

Aside from non-pitched percussion, this transcription is a faithful one: no notes have been altered. Some have had their octaves changed or doubled, but this is OK: imagine Bach improvising on the organ. Here I treat the wind ensemble like an organ, with changing stops. The instruments I use are the stops Bach pulls, and as it was not unusual for stops to also sound at the 8ve and the 15me, or even to have a glockenspiel, I do the same. One cannot say that this transcription is not in the spirit of Bach, save for the non-pitched percussion and the key difference. But hey, Bach uses the same chorale three times in different keys (with different words) in his St. Matthew's Passion. So he'll just have to live -- or stay dead, I guess -- with the C minor.

Listen to Fuga IV from WTC1 (right-click to download)