"Fugue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pleasure. Bach affected him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that the final reassuring and utterly ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... interpretations of music. One, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, is a singularly successful tour de force, if it is no more. Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in dealing with the fugue of his imaginary German composer, Browning finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration. The poem of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... from the workshop of a right skilful maker; more than that, it must fall into the hands of an accomplished player. But, my poor lad, granting your actress is a divine instrument of amorous music, I don't believe you capable of drawing from it one single note of passion's fugue.... Just consider. I don't spend my nights supping with ladies of the theatre; but we all know what an actress is. It is an animal generally agreeable to see and hear, always badly brought up, spoilt first by poverty and afterwards by luxury. Very ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... also beguile the way on their journeys with riding songs. These are sung in alternate strains, one being generally a clamorous recitative, and the other a kind of choral fugue, strange and romantic, and heard with pleasing effect in the mountains. Often when toiling at a foot-pace up the precipitous path of the torrent, or descending equally slow into the pass gloomy with ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... the lights in the kaleidoscopic windows, directed him towards that edifice. He rushed to the door: 'twas barred! He knocked: the beadles were deaf. He applied his inestimable relic to the lock, and—whiz! crash! clang! bang! whang!—the gate flew open! the organ went off in a fugue—the lights quivered over the tapers, and then went off towards the ceiling—the ghosts assembled rushed away with a skurry and a scream—the bride howled, and vanished—the fat bishop waddled back under his brass plate—the dean flounced down into his family vault—and the canon Schidnischmidt, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I saw her face but she listened as well as saw, and her expression changed as it changes when the pomp of a great orchestra breaks upon the silence. It flashed to the chords of blood-red and gold that was burning fire. It softened through the fugue of woven crimson gold and flame, to the melancholy minor of ashes-of-roses and paling green, and so through all the dying glories that faded slowly to a tranquil grey and left the world to the silver melody ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen music" does not enable us to understand either perpendicular Gothic or a fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines history in terms of philosophy, or a philosopher philosophy in terms of history, you may be on the lookout for sophistication. Your philosophical historian points his moral ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... vague ecstasies over Caruso, without being aware of who wrote the opera or what it is all about. Most of us know nothing of orchestration or even the names of the different instruments. We may not even be sure of what is meant by counterpoint or the difference between a fugue and an arpeggio. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... musician, the painter and the writer are essentially the same. In composing a fugue, after you have exposed your subject, which must not be too unwieldly, you introduce an episode or episodes which must arise out of your subject. The great thing is that all shall be new, and yet nothing new, at the same time; the details must minister to the main effect and not obscure ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... made melodious chime Was heard, of Harp and Organ; and who moovd Thir stops and chords was seen: his volant touch Instinct through all proportions low and high Fled and pursu'd transverse the resonant fugue. In other part stood one who at the Forge 560 Labouring, two massie clods of Iron and Brass Had melted (whether found where casual fire Had wasted woods on Mountain or in Vale, Down to the veins of Earth, thence gliding ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... it sprouts from the grass and blossoms from flower and tree! In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist, In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst, Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster, Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.— O music of Earth! O God, who the music inspired! Let me breathe of the life of thy breath! ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... much that I have said, but the texture of the world is a warp and woof of contradiction in terms; of continuity in discontinuity, and discontinuity in continuity; of unity in diversity, and of diversity in unity. As in the development of a fugue, where, when the subject and counter subject have been enounced, there must henceforth be nothing new, and yet all must be new, so throughout organic life— which is as a fugue developed to great length from a very simple subject—everything ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the scored brow and deep-set eyes of Master Hugues fixed on him, as he fancied, from the shade; and he now imagines he hears him say, "You have done justice to the notes of my piece, but you must grasp its meaning to understand where my merit lies;" so he plays the fugue again, listening for the meaning, and reading it as out of a book. From this literary or dramatic point of view, the impression received is as follows. Some one lays down a proposition, unimportant in itself, and not justly open to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... chapel festivities. There is a sameness about the work, and it suggests a weary feeling towards the close. The choruses are mostly rather weak chorale. Occasionally an evidently fugal subject is announced, which is never destined to form the subject for a fugue. However, the story is well put together, the music is quite easy, and many choirs, unable to conquer greater difficulties, will feel at home in ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... garment, the greeting of an acquaintance—are likely to become unbearable if often exactly repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this sense, and one of the arts of the newspaper-writer consists in presenting his views with that kind of repetition which, like the phrases of a fugue, constantly approaches, but never oversteps the limit of monotony. Advertisers again are now discovering that it pays to vary the monotony with which a poster appeals to the eye by printing in different colours ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... sat there all this time, taking it in and drinking with the others, but there was never a cloud on his brain nor a waver in his movements. The rest of them wandered from the motif; each was composing a fugue of his own, according to the mould of his nature. Scraps of their conversation floated in on him between songs—"Got him just below the knees—now!"—"and the difference between me and a tank is in the inferior receptivity—ain't that a peach?—of the receptacle"—"Now, the ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... by these systematic, imitative repetitions they had secured the first requisite of all music, coherence. This principle, once it was sanctioned by growing musical instinct, and approved by convention, was developed into such well-known types of polyphonic music as the Canon, the Invention and the Fugue; terms which will be fully explained later on. It is of more than passing interest to realize that these structural principles of music were worked out in the same locality—Northern France and the Netherlands, and by kindred intellects—as witnessed the growth of Gothic architecture; and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... heard yesterday Radziwill's Faust for the first time, and, I may add, with much satisfaction; for the old-fashioned things to be found in it (for instance, the utilisation of Mozart's C minor Quartet fugue as overture, the strictly polyphonous treatment of the choruses, &c.) are abundantly compensated for by numerous traits of genius, and by the thorough knowledge and the earnest intention with which the work is conceived and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... was like if all the actual music in the world at the present time were destroyed, and only certain scientific works such as that of Helmholtz on acoustics and a few theoretical treatises on harmony, form, counterpoint and fugue were saved. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... good cheer with clarion voice. The shepherds fall to worship, and suddenly round Gabriel there gathers a choir of angels, and a song of 'Gloria in Excelsis' to the sound of a deep organ is heard far off. From distant aisles it swells, and seems to come from heaven. Through a long resonant fugue the glory flies, and as it ceases with complex conclusion, the lights die out, the angels disappear, and Gabriel fades into the darkness. Still the shepherds kneel, rustically chanting a carol half in Latin, half in English, which begins 'In dulci Jubilo.' The people know it well, and when ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... their own music. And, like a set of modulated motifs, they combine to form a richer and more sonorous pattern. With its interrelation of figures and interweaving of themes, the Cabellian "Biography" assumes the solidity and shapeliness of a fugue, a composition in which all the voices speak with ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... like a lugubrious fugue through the first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... played the great fugue in A minor expressly for your entertainment: you used to work at Liszt's transcription of it. The organ is only occasionally my consoler. For the most part I am driven to it by habit and a certain itching in my fingers. Marian ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... from this period comprises the three songs of opus 11 ("Mein Liebchen,"[2] "Du liebst mich nicht," "Oben, wo die Sterne gluehen"); the two songs of op. 12 ("Nachtlied" and "Das Rosenband"); the Prelude and Fugue (op. 13); the second piano suite (op. 14)—begun in the days of his Darmstadt professorship; the "Serenade" (op. 16); the two "Fantasiestuecke" of op. 17: "Erzaehlung" and the much-played "Hexentanz"; the "Barcarolle" ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... The constant interchange of vault and vault, cupola and cupola, column and column, handing on their energies to one another; the springing up of new details gathered at once into the great general balance of lines and forces; all this seemed to find its natural voice in that fugue, to express, in that continuous revolution of theme chasing, enveloping theme, its own grave emotion of life everlasting: Being, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... some to the doctrine of heredity, and by others, to that of fate. Karma demands the full future fruition of every act done in the body; and many re-births, with intervals of keener suffering and bliss in numerous hells and heavens, are the countless steps in the doleful fugue of emancipation—a process which is enough to appall any but the patient, stolid soul of a Hindu. And yet this weary detail of a very long and sisyphean effort to shake off this mortal coil and to enter into rest is worthy of the missionary's attention, as it represents, perhaps, the ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... drinking, hearing, without hunger, thirst, or need, from sheer habitual gormandizing. Living like Strasburg geese. These people are sick from a diseased appetite. It matters little what you give them: Tristram or the Trompeter von Saekkingen, Beethoven or Mascagni, a fugue or a two-step, Adam, Bach, Puccini, Mozart, or Marschner: they do not know what they are eating: the great thing is to eat. They find no pleasure in it. Look at them at a concert. Talk of German gaiety! These people do not know what gaiety means: they are always gay! Their gaiety, like ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Chick, "what would your vast-horizoned friends say if they could hear you playing ragtime! I'm sure a lemon-coloured nocturne or a flaming fugue would be nearer ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... inversion, by means of which even the second is received into favor in the bosom of harmony. A musician once explained all these things to me, but that was later. And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, as the fugue, counterpoint, the canon for two and three voices, and so on—an entire heavenly structure, one part joined to the other without mortar and all held together by God's own hand. With a few exceptions, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no adagio. If one did attempt an adagio in a gallant style of composition the player first had to render it lively ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... was frightened into returning. He dreamt of disguising himself in one of his own theatrical wigs and escaping so, but the idea was too like some of those contrapuntal combinations which, as Cherubini says, may be employed in a study-fugue, but which in practical music, as in practical life, have to be weeded out ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Above it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator, with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a musical air of intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious fugue. No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable all at once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this rare closet had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides met; the one falling down, and ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... high windows in purple and crimson lights upon a veritable fugue of colour. Within the seats, crush upon crush of spring millinery; within the aisles erect lines of gold-braided, gold-buttoned military. Upon the altar, broad sweeps of golden robes, great dashes of crimson skirts, mitres and gleaming ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west, Love, Love alone can pore On thy dissolving score Of harsh half-phrasings, Blotted ere writ, And double erasings Of chords most fit. Yea, Love, sole music-master blest, May read ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier |
