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I'm looking for a thorough, perhaps measure-by-measure, analysis of Bach's Art of the Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080). Is there a book, journal article, thesis, or dissertation which does this?

Dave
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Daniel Miller
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    http://store.doverpublications.com/048649764x.html, maybe. –  Nov 17 '15 at 20:09
  • What's to analyze? It's a fugue. – Ricky Nov 17 '15 at 21:29
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    @Ricky It's **considerably** more than one fugue... – Andy Nov 18 '15 at 07:58
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    Just for information: Apparently Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach"... has a lot to say about this piece. But it's not a conventional analysis as such, and goes into many other things apparently unconnected with music... – Andy Nov 18 '15 at 08:03
  • @Andy: Okay, it's a bunch of fugues. It's still just an exercise in contrapuntal composition. There's been some major developments in that area since then, especially in opera. Precedence isn't the same as excellence. – Ricky Nov 18 '15 at 08:05
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    Ah. Bach lacked excellence? I'm curious about those developments since, especially in opera. I'm fairly familiar with contrapuntal writing up to, say, Dallapiccola. I would have said that there was very little new in contrapuntal technique, and none of it any better handled than in Bach (although not necessarily handled worse), but I can stand to learn something new. –  Nov 18 '15 at 13:24

2 Answers2

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Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)

David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Peter Schleuning, Johann Sebastian Bachs Kunst der Fuge: Ideologie, Entstehung, Analyse (Munich: DTV, 1993)

Heinrich Adel, Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge: a living compendium of fugal procedures, with a motivic analysis of all the fugues (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993)

Göncz, Zoltán; Laki, Péter; Mészáros, Erzsébet, Bach's testament: On the philosophical and theological background of The art of fugue (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013)

For hundreds more citations, visit http://www.rilm.org, the international catalog of literature about music.

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    And don't forget Donald Tovey's Companion - he was very shrewd about how the counterpoint worked. –  Nov 18 '15 at 17:05
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if you are looking for something you can source, maybe https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~repercus/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/repercussions-Vol.-9-No.-1-Markham-Michael-The-Usefulness-of-Such-Artworks.pdf

a website that might be informative, http://www.flagmusic.com/aof.php?r=aof_c_ii

Caitlin
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