Thanks to my colleague, SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner, I got clued in to (or caught the virus of?) the “Lady Gaga Fugue” by Giovanni Dettori, whose subject is the theme from the Lady Gaga song “Bad Romance.” Cindy’s article has embedded the YouTube video of a performance by pianist Vincenzo Culotta, which nicely uses the video to follow the score. The YouTube page itself is responsible for providing the hyperlink I attached to “score,” which points to a PDF file. However, the Suggestions column also includes a link to a performance by wind quintet, whose description claims a previous arrangement for brass quintet. This is probably not the first time that a fugue has gone viral on the Internet; and, compared to other YouTube hits, the view count is rather modest. It is also far from the first time that a classical composition has used popular music as a point of departure; but it is amusing to see that a singer who made her mark, at least in part, through viral popularity, should have inspired a future that is experiencing the same effect.
More interesting, however, was the discovery in that Suggestions column of the emergence of “So You Want to Write a Fugue” in the world of YouTube. This was composed by Glenn Gould for the finale of The Anatomy of Fugue, a television program (programme?) that Gould prepared for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1963. It was scored for string quartet (originally the Julliard Quartet) and vocal quartet (soprano Elizabeth Benson-Guy, mezzo Anita Darian, tenor Charles Bressler, and baritone Donald Gramm); and a studio recording was released as a flexible film record inserted into an issue of Hi-Fi Stereo Review. (I was working at the MIT campus radio station in those days, back when it had the WTBS call letters; and we all had a lot of fun putting it on the air.) That recording was then included in the Columbia vinyl release of The Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album.
Musically, this piece began as an afterthought to Bach’s counterpoint; but it ventured into far more remote territory. It has found its way to YouTube as a soundtrack behind a rather imaginative photograph. Several comments offer fragments of the text being sung; but, fortunately, there is a Web page with the complete text and a nice account of the backstory. Much as I enjoy the opportunity to listen to that recording, however, my own video favorite (included in the column to the left) is of a concert performance that seems to have taken place in Russia. The vocalists are not as clear as those on the original recording (which is why the hyperlink to the text is useful); but the seriousness of the performance by the entire ensemble is perfectly delightful.
Astute listeners will quickly notice that Dettori’s “Gaga” fugue begins with the same gesture of a rising fifth that opens Gould’s fugue. This will not surprise anyone, given how many other fugues begin the same way. Indeed, there is a good chance that Gould’s point of departure was the subject for all of the fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue. Currently, the “soundtrack video” of the Gould fugue has received four times as many hits as Dettori; but Dettori’s video was uploaded last week, while the Gould video has been on YouTube since February 18, 2009! I wish Dettori well, but I also hope that those who explore his video will follow my own path back to Gould’s exercise.
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