Every now & then, I'll post a challenge for finding creative ways of breaking free of what has been convention in movie and TV music for the past couple of decades--heavily influenced by that scourge of scoring, the temp track. This time, the exercise for any interested is to write a fugue.
Although I have few compositions to my name, one of them is a 2-minute fugue that I wrote fresh out of college: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-9B4jiADp8 (I hope someday a group of humans perform the piece. It requires two guitars, bass guitar and a drum kit, which I didn't get around to incorporating into this score.) It follows the standard fugue structure of exposition, development and recapitulation that is in common with classical sonata form. There is a melody, a counter melody and a tertiary theme in this three-part piece.The fugue has been an underutilized device in movie and TV scores, but it's a great way of accompanying a scene that builds to a huge climax. The most famous fugue that comes to my mind in movies is from "West Side Story" with the dance interlude in the song, "Cool": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wugWGhItaQA (It also features the most famous tone-row, making it a mixture of Bach, jazz and Schoenberg.)
If you've already written a fugue, by all means, post it. I'd love to hear it. To anyone else who has never written a fugue, it's a great exercise in developming musical lines and taking them places, like a hero on a journey.
