Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor Vs. Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
Introduction
The two musical pieces of artwork demonstrate some good illustration music elements doctrine by Roger Kamien in music appreciation. Kamien (2014) explains that pieces of musical arts are usually differentiated based on their pitch, dynamic, tone colour, performing media such as instruments and voice and rhythm. The Little Fugue in G Minor is organized into three sections like most of the fugues; exposition, development and return. Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is a group of instrumentation played together depicting the orchestra family. Therefore, this paper aims at comparing the two musical piece of artwork from the music appreciation perspective.
From the perspective of the dynamics, Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor is [mf] moderately loud (mezzo-forte), while Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra exhibit an accent dynamic. Dynamics relates to the loudness or quietness of a music instrument. The Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor begins with a tonic key exposition, after which a transpose or the related key emerges with the same tonal loudness. However, in Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, the moderato of variation c clarinet exhibits a vast and extensive dynamic ranges. The theme for Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra displays a rondeau; the beginning of the music is a full orchestra then varied sections of Orchestra such as brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion emerges later, and at the end, a full orchestra appears. Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor on contrary exhibits a large scale and pitch ranges with repetitive phrases. Conclusively, the pitch of Bash’s Little Fugue in G Minor can be described as conjunct while that of Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra as disjunct. The two pieces of musical work also differ in terms of their rhythm. Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor exhibits a 4/4 meter while Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra showing 2/4 meter with the first variation, flute and piccolo.
Although the musical pieces differ in many music elements, they also relate to a fugue. A fugue is contrapuntal that is several melodies working together. Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor has four voices interweaving a bit and cadence just from the exposition to the return where the original key is brought back to end with a big cadence of a G major chord. Similarly, each instrumentation in Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra depicts a subject in the same order of variation.
Conclusion
Conclusively, Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor differs from Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra with significant measures in respect to musical elements ranging from, pitch, dynamic, instrumentation, rhythm and tone colour. However, it is also evident that the two musical pieces also relate in their composition fugue style depicted at the end of every piece.
References
Kamien, R. (2014). Music: An Appreciation. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Britten: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra [Hd]. (2012). Britten: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra [HD]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vbvhU22uAM.
Bach, “Little” Fugue in G minor, Organ. (2013). Bach, “Little” Fugue in G minor, Organ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4.