Fugue – an original fugue in e minor (perfect fifth up)

(I will do an original fugue in all 24 keys with the first interval in the melody being one of the 24 chromatic intervals either up or down within one octave(a little information for the music geeks))

I was no musical prodigy. I started lessons when I was seven, and though I never stopped I also really barely practiced. I hope none of my students throw that back at me.
This used to really bother me, just think what might have been if I took it more seriously from the start. I preferred however, to run around the woods with my dogs imagining all sorts of adventures hoping to catch a cold so I could stay home the next day and play Legos in my bedroom.
I have always hated school, from the beginning until the very end. Besides all of my wonderful and patient piano teachers, I have only one school teacher I look back at with any fondness. A nun if you can believe it, Sr. Lorraine. Otherwise I have a perfect disdain for being told what to do, doing trivial homework and taking poorly thought out tests. That is probably why I also never became a good classical pianist. Though I have always loved or at least enjoyed the years of lessons and hoped I was always on track to becoming a fine pianist I was never a particularly good or disciplined student. This didn’t really dawn on me until after I stopped taking lessons. I don’t even like my favorite composers telling me how to play their pieces, let alone teachers, traditions or universally accepted performance practices. It is why improvising has become such a wonderful and fascinating pursuit. I can do whatever I want at every moment, I can always at least say when questioned why I did something a particular way, simply because I felt like it.
Even though improvising in a fugal style is so incredibly difficult it is also so compelling for me because so few others are trying. Which fits so nicely with my tendency to not like doing things everyone else is doing.
It would be nice to be able to play all of my favorite classical pieces, but I also think it would be quite frustrating and boring to maintain a list of all the common pieces everyone else is playing. Probably no one really knows exactly how many thousands of incredibly capable classical pianists there are in the world now. How many of these wonderful pianists would love to be performing for at least local audiences craving for some musical beauty. These audiences however seem to be dwindling.
This is where running around the woods and playing Legos I now feel was a wonderful way to spend my childhood, as it instead fostered a vivid imagination and creativity. I no longer mourn the lost potential productivity of those years but instead celebrate the nurturing of a vivid imagination and creativity. Though this has brought no fame or fortune, I am immensely enjoying the feeling and process of creating something. Even if trying to master a lost art is at least a questionable way to spend ones precious free time. It however still feels completely worth the effort.

So carry on I must. 🙂

This melody was the first I wrote for this project of learning how to improvise in a fugal style, and shortly thereafter deciding to do a complete set of 24 in all the major and minor keys. I have thrown away many melodies, others I have struggled with as they slowly come alive, and some, like this one, have simply and effortlessly come to fruition. Though this one is simple, and maybe even mildly Baroque in nature, I still like it and feel it is rather pretty.