Contrapuntal Tweets

Length: ca. 2’00”
Instrumentation: piano

I recently rediscovered fugues I wrote at Juilliard more than eight years ago. As traditionally done in music education, the idea of fugal writing consists of imitating Bach’s style as well as possible (a style that one can mimic but never imitate satisfactorily). I think my fugues were good, but in all of them I tried to do the same thing: emulate Bach’s style. I had never written a fugue of my “own,” with my musical language (if one can even dare to say something like that). All of this incited me to work on the following piece—a short two-voice fugue with a cheerful subject using my musical ideas. In this case, the soggieto is very much inspired by birdsong, hence the title.