4 Little Fugues for 4 Clarinets

History and Performance Notes

These four fugues are like a continuation of the other book (6 Little Fugues for 3 Clarinets), except they have four layers instead of three. Each one represents a certain gimmick I was playing around with. For example, #1 "Undulating" (these fugues all have adjectival names) is built up from the bottom, and #3 "Rambling" is based on a certain rhythmic pattern in one of JS Bach's "8 Little Preludes & Fugues for Organ", the one in G minor (I forget which number it is).

#4 "Flippant" was the very first one to be written, probably around 1982 when I was in early high school, and before I knew how to step back from the writing and see the overall picture. See, before I used a computer to score my music I used a pencil and paper, and my music penmanship is very good but I would lose track of what I was doing because it took so much time to write each note. That also explains why it's the shortest one of the four. The original title of #2 "Lovely" was "Another Lovely Fugue in D Minor", basically mocking myself because all I ever wrote were fugues, and here comes another lovely one. I found them easier to write than non-fugues (such as preludes) because if I ever got stuck I could always throw the subject in there somewhere (the subject is the fugue's main theme). So they basically wrote themselves in groups of eight bars.

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