Choral Listening Series - Recording #10

Fugue in G minor - J.S. Bach, arr. Ward Swingle

I hope you had fun listening to it! I've performed this piece with a few different groups, and it's fun every time. The original is a famous organ fugue by J.S. Bach, composed between 1703 and 1707, and popularly dubbed The Little Fugue. 

Ward Swingle originally formed the Swingle Singers for the sole purpose of creating and recording jazzy versions of Bach keyboard works, except with a twist: making it sound like actual jazz. They added a bit more of a bass line at the beginning and some vocal swing percussion to enhance the feel. The rhythms are all "swung" (unequal lengths) rather than the notes being played evenly, as they would have been originally. The amazing thing is that it works! It sounds like real jazz, which is incredible, since jazz as we know it was invented in the early 1930's, over two hundred years later. We can now see that Bach was the original jazz master.
 
Notice that the texture is the opposite of the homorhythmic stuff we viewed last time. Instead, the four parts all sing at different times on their own lines. The lines tend to imitate one another and work together very cleverly, which is part of the structure of a fugue. This is called a polyphonic texture.