Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Music A contrapuntal musical composition whose basic structure consists of a theme or themes stated successively in different voices.
- noun Psychiatry A dissociative state, usually caused by trauma, marked by sudden travel or wandering away from home and an inability to remember one's past.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In music, a polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or even more themes, which are enunciated by the several voices or parts in turn, subjected to various kinds of contrapuntal treatment, and gradually built up into a complex form having somewhat distinct divisions or stages of development and a marked climax at the end.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Mus.) A polyphonic composition, developed from a given theme or themes, according to strict contrapuntal rules. The theme is first given out by one voice or part, and then, while that pursues its way, it is repeated by another at the interval of a fifth or fourth, and so on, until all the parts have answered one by one, continuing their several melodies and interweaving them in one complex progressive whole, in which the theme is often lost and reappears.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun music A
contrapuntal piece ofmusic wherein a particularmelody is played in a number ofvoices , each voice introduced in turn by playing the melody. - noun Anything in literature, poetry, film, painting, etc., that resembles a fugue in structure or in its elaborate complexity and formality.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun dissociative disorder in which a person forgets who they are and leaves home to creates a new life; during the fugue there is no memory of the former life; after recovering there is no memory for events during the dissociative state
- noun a musical form consisting of a theme repeated a fifth above or a fourth below its first statement
- noun a dreamlike state of altered consciousness that may last for hours or days
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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And the art of the literary fugue is "vain," that is, unapologetically aesthetic, without pretense to psychological enlightenment or social commentary (although the occasional image of a tank rolling through the streets of Bucharest does certainly evoke Communist-era realities).
Experimental Fiction 2010
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And knowing what a fugue is can make you fall in love with Bach.
Tunes For Thought SVGL 2009
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The reasons for his fugue are mysterious, and they need to stay that way for at least half of the novel.
Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » Creating the Care Factor 2008
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June 19th, 2006 at 1:25 am spiderpaws, a fugue is a musical structure based on permutations of a melody.
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The ground bass of the fugue is my progress as a musician, slow but steady like a pulse; the line above it is the more complex progress of the band and the interrelationships that both weld us together and threaten to separate us.
Broken Music, A Memoir Sting 2003
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But the patterns were clear, and by the end of the recording, which was not even a half-hour long, Christian had mastered the idea of fugue, and the sound of the harpsichord preyed on his mind.
Unaccompanied Sonata Card, Orson Scott 1980
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The fugue was a glorious, sturdy thing, like a great solid body inhabited by a big, noble, unquestioning soul -- a soul free from hesitations, that knew its way to God and would not be hindered from taking it.
In the Wilderness Robert Smythe Hichens 1907
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Its most Gothic form, the North German fugue, which is the instrumental descendant of the Netherlands church music, is the most closely organized of musical types.
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If not, we shall see each other again at Weymar, for you owe me a compensation for your last fugue, which is no more to my taste than Kuhmstedt's counterpoint.
Letters Liszt, Franz 1893
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The fugue was the creation of this epoch, and while based upon the general idea of canonic imitation, after the Netherlandish ideal, it differed from their productions in several highly significant respects.
A Popular History of the Art of Music From the Earliest Times Until the Present 1874
dain commented on the word fugue
The dialectic of music.
November 28, 2008
dimã©lion commented on the word fugue
i'll have to keep this in mind.
November 28, 2008
bilby commented on the word fugue
"What you are describing can be considered a fugue or flight reaction. During fugue states, the individual suddenly and unexpectedly leaves, traveling some distance away from home. A fugue state can last hours or even weeks. During the fugue state, you would have acted normally and would have interacted with others in a normal manner. Fugue states are almost always linked to the presence of severe stress at the time of the fugue experience. There are several causes for fugue reactions."
- Joseph Carver, 'Fugue: A Mental Urge To Leave Immediately', counsellingresource.com, 24 Oct 2008.
February 22, 2009