Bach's Art of Fugue came down to us without any clear indication of the performing forces desired. The fugue was primarily a keyboard genre, and this massive, almost mystically complex extraction of well over an hour's worth of contrapuntal treatments from a simple fugue subject is most often performed on a harpsichord or organ. But the work's abstract quality has invited performances on other instruments for decades. String quartet versions on recordings go back to a Roth Quartet version of the 1930s, in an arrangement to ...
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Bach's Art of Fugue came down to us without any clear indication of the performing forces desired. The fugue was primarily a keyboard genre, and this massive, almost mystically complex extraction of well over an hour's worth of contrapuntal treatments from a simple fugue subject is most often performed on a harpsichord or organ. But the work's abstract quality has invited performances on other instruments for decades. String quartet versions on recordings go back to a Roth Quartet version of the 1930s, in an arrangement to which Roy Harris contributed. But this is a risky way to go, riskier even than novelty arrangements for saxophones and the like that maintain and exploit a sharp contrast between music and medium. The string quartet was not part of Bach's compositional world, but its origins were temporally close enough to the Art of Fugue to make quartet performances sound just a little "off" from Bach's Baroque sound ideal. The liner notes of the Emerson Quartet's new recording of the work play up...
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Add this copy of Bach, J.S. : the Art of Fugue-Emerson String Quartet to cart. $24.57, new condition, Sold by Revaluation Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Exeter, DEVON, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2003 by DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON, MUSICA BAROCCA.