Repertoire

Alan Belkin interview

Reinventing the prelude & fugue:

A teaching tool for the
twenty-first century
by Andrew Schartmann
he prelude and fugue is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

T Pianists are most familiar with J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, but many
composers of subsequent generations appropriated the genre for their own
expressive aims. In the twentieth century, for example, Dmitri Shostakovich
composed his own cycle of tw enty-four preludes and fugues, with one in each major
and minor key. In modern times, Canadian composer Alan Belkin has written a cycle
of twelve works, doing away with the major/minor distinction, and composing one
prelude and fugue in each available tonal center (C, C#, D, Eb, and so on).
Much like Bach’s famous set, Belkin’s work has a pedagogical aim to it, both in
terms of composition and keyboard technique. I sat down with Belkin to discuss how
the prelude and fugue, even today, forms an im portant part of a musician’s training.

We often read that Bach’s Weil-Tempered Ciavier was
written with a pedagogical aim in mind, yet authors
rarely speculate on the specifics o f that aim. In your
opinion, what exactly was Bach trying to accomplish for
students o f music?
Most of Bach's collections (e.g., the Goldberg
Variations, the forty-eight preludes and fugues) seem
to have a pedagogical goal above and beyond the
immediate circumstances of their composition. Given
the fact that the demarcation between performers
and composers in Bach’s time was much less clear
than it is today, it seems to me that they were meant
both as technical studies for the instrumentalist and
also as models of composition.
Sometimes one gets the sense that Bach was
aiming at something encyclopedic. The best exam­
ple of this is the A rt o f Fugue, which is a wonderful
treatise on fugue (and canon). I see all of these
collections as a kind of generosity, wherein a great
master offers comprehensive and sophisticated
models for other musicians.
These models were composed in the early-eighteenth
century. Keyboard technique and composition have
changed a lot since then. How is the genre still
relevant to composers?
In my opinion, even such a venerable form still allows
for exploration. As I say in my preface, “These twelve
preludes and fugues were written as a demonstra­
tion of what can be done, in a novel way, in a very
familiar form. Each fugue has something unusual
about its material and/or construction.”
This project was especially attractive to me since
I am both a composer and a teacher. It gave me
an opportunity to demonstrate how form emerges
from the musical idea(s). Once the composer has
a musical idea, his job is to find the form that will
push its expressive potential to the maximum. In my
fugues, each subject has a distinct character, which
determines many details of the fugue’s construction.
This principle needs to be reasserted from time to
time: form is not some abstract or extra-musical
scheme independent of the material.
A nd what about performers? How is the genre
relevant to them?
Polyphonic music (the fugues) challenges the per­
former in a particular way, because musical lines
and human hands are rarely congruent. As for the
preludes, they can be seen as etudes, since each
one uses a principal motive or pianistic texture, thus
allowing the pianist to work on a specific aspect of

42
C laviur C ompanion May/June 2015
 his technique. For example, my prelude in E-flat is in a various odd harmonic twists along the way. And at the
homophonic texture requiring careful voicing. end, it is passed back and forth in a small dialogue of
musical characters—one assertive, the other timid.
Let’s see these ideas in action in a recently composed
work o f yours: Prelude & Fugue in B-flat (see pp. The prelude, as you say, is grandiose. This character
44-46). Can you give us a brief summary o f your aside, it seems to pose some very specific challenges
compositional aims? to the pianist. Can you elaborate briefly on what these
challenges are and how they can be instructive to the
The prelude was written to contrast with the fugue: student?
since the fugue is light-hearted, the prelude is rather
grandiose. As for the fugue, its subject consists of just The prelude in B-flat is a study in planes of tone:
two notes, arguing with each other. Only the arrival there are three, each one with its own motive. The
of a third note settles the feud, but in a harmonically performer has to keep all three planes balanced and
surprising way. And since a fugue subject determines under control. It also requires constant shifting be­
the kind of fugue that will follow, both the argument tween extreme registers on the piano.
and the “wrong” note come back frequently in what I
hope are intriguing and, at times, comical ways. And the fugue?
For example, a two-note subject is very easy to work
into a stretto [overlapping entries of the subject in close The difficulty in the fugue resides in its articulation: the
succession], so I have a rather bombastic stretto as the performer often has to play staccato and legato with the
culmination of the piece. The “wrong note” leads to same hand. It's an etude in polyphonic playing.

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May/Jutit* 2015 C lavier C ompanion
R e p e rto ire
Alan Belkin interview

Prelude and Fugue #11

44
C l a v ie r C o m p a n io n M a y /J u n e 2015
 Repertoire
Alan Belkin interview

Scherzando J=104

© A la n B e lk in , 2 0 1 5

U se d by p e rm is s io n

45
M ay/June 2015
C lavier C ompanion
Repertoire
Alan Belkin interview

46
Clavier Companion iMay/June 2015
 Let’s pretend that I’m your piano student. Walk me
through some of these challenges, starting with the
prelude.
If we look at the prelude, we see that it alternates reg­
ularly between high and low registers. This requires an
appropriate (and comfortable) body rhythm, swinging
back and forth. One consequence of this constant shift­
ing is that this prelude is easier to play by heart than with
the music: interrupting the rhythmic back-and-forth to
search the score easily disrupts the body rhythm.
We often see pianists swaying in performance, yet
many attribute that motion to artistic quirkiness. It
seems, however, that this movement serves a practical
purpose: moving the body provides a physical cor­
relate to memory. Is that what you mean?
Many pianists find th a t (appropriate) body rh y th m -
physical m ovem ent in phase w ith the m usic—makes
it easier to play well. The hard part is knowing which
movements are appropriate for which music! The pia­
nist's joints need to be supple, and these movements
have to direct energy where it is needed, when it is
needed. If the perform er feels the rhythm deeply in his
body, it helps both m em ory and physical ease, and it
augments the player’s control.
And how about the fugue? Is there a methodical way
in which a young pianist can approach this music?
At first, this fugue should be practiced one voice at a time.
Things get much harder when both legato and staccato
are present in the same hand at the same tim e—even more
so since the distribution of the middle voice between the
hands is always changing. I would then practice the outer
voices alone, as well as the various two-voice combina­
tions (e.g., bass + middle). Only after these steps should
all voices be played together. ----------------------------
To conclude, le t’s return to the rel­
evance o f the prelude & fugue in
the twenty-first century. It seems
obvious now how the genre can
help a pianist develop his tech­
nique. But what remains for the
composer? In other words, have
composers exhausted the prelude
& fugue, or is there more to be
done with it?
I’m uneasy w ith blanket statements
like “ exhausted the prelude and
M ay/June 2015
fugue.” Any form has certain conventions, that,
properly understood, provide coherence. Those
same conventions can also be played with. In my
second fugue, fo r example, I end w ith a “de-expo­
sition,” losing one voice at a tim e to come back to
a much simpler, less contrapuntal texture. I w a n t­
ed a rather poignant ending, and this fit the bill.
In the end, if a piece o f music reaches us on
an em otional level, and if it remains interesting
through m ultiple hearings, I really d on’t see why
starting from one convention or another is, in
itself, good or bad. As I often say to my students,
a fugue is first and forem ost a com position, and
it stands or falls like any other com position. Do
perform ers w ant to play it? Do listeners w ant to
hear it? That’s w hat m atters most. A
Alan Belkin received his D.M.A.
I from the Juilliard School, where
I if _ he studied under E lliott Carter
In ^ ^ and David Diamond. His ou tp u t
IttiiS ilH includes eight symphonies, a wide
variety o f cham ber music, and
1 several works fo r solo piano. Belkin
currently serves as a Professor o f Com position at
the Universite de Montreal. For more info, visit
www.AlanBelkinM usic.com .
Andrew Schartmann holds
degrees in music from Yale and
McGill University. He is the author
of Koji K ondo’s Super Mario Bros.
Soundtrack (Bloomsbury, 2015)
and writes extensively fo r Music
& Vision magazine. He currently
serves as the assistant e d itor o f DSCH Journal—a
publication devoted to Dm itri Shostakovich.
_47
C u v ie r Companion
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