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hey guys,

im writing a paper on symbolism in the works of J.S Bach, and specifically the G minor organ fugue (BWV 578)

anyways, if you guys have any opinions to share or relevant sources/books/papers/dissertations etc. please let me know.

Thanks

Stephen

I know that a russian musicolog wrote that every prelude and fugue in well-tempered clavier has a bilble`s sujet. But now I can not remember the family of this musicolog, but he wrote a very good book about that.
About the organ`s fugue, I don´t know.

While not precisely on-topic, you should take a look at Eric Chafe's Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach (University of California Press, 1991). Some of his methodology might be applicable to organ music and there might be other suitable references cited in it. But this is a hard-core combination of musicology and analysis and is sometimes very tough reading. And often you have to convince yourself to hear the music as Chafe hears it, which is sometimes a struggle.

If you are really brave, you can try the number-symbolism route, in which notes are assigned numerical values and there by converted to text (shades of ASCII!) or various symbolic meanings are derived from mathematical manipulations and propositions. While this approach still has its supporters, I find the whole concept specious when applied to Bach and his musical contemporaries. In this regard you can check out Ruth Tatlow's Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge UP, 1991), which pretty much demolishes the validity of this methodology.

Then there is the somewhat famous Morimur recording on ECM which is based on Helga Thoene's proposition that the Chaconne from the 2nd Solo-Violin partita is a memorial to Bach's wife, complete with semi-hidden quotations from appropriate chorales.

As for the Little G-minor organ fugue, I think the only way you're going to extract any symbolic or allegorical meaning from it is to find out
1. where, when, why, and for whom the piece was written as well as the original performance context (which church, which organ equipped with which stops, what were the statues and paintings in the church etc.)
2. whether there are clear references to other music (such as chorales) that appear in the piece in a significant way (for example, not as an accidental similarity in a modulatory passage but as a subject or counter-subject)
3. whether any references you find add up to a consistent "storyline." Hints of random chorales, unless they can be linked either by liturgical context or theological meaning, will remain just that, hints of random chorales and nothing symbolic or allegorical. This also applies to symbolic meanings attached to common note configurations, such as the "cross" symbol, about which too much is usually made.

Some of the answers to 1. will probably be very hard to find out, since such facts are not well known for much of Bach's organ music. And the answers to 2 will depend on your abilities as an analyst and thorough searcher through possible quotation sources, also not an easy task. I wish you luck on your investigations. The Fugue you've chosen, while frequently performed, seems not to have attracted much attention in the Bach literature (unlike the Passacaglia in c, just a few BWV digits away). Let us know what you find.

--Sixtus