Fugue on the Final Countdown - Why?
Programme note from the performance given on June 7 2009 at Leeds College of Music (conductor Dan Keen, Leeds College of Music Community Symphony Orchestra).
The Fugue on the Final Countdown employs the famous theme by 1980s ‘hair metal’ band Europe as its subject. Those of a certain age will recall that it was impossible to escape this tune during the summer of 1986 (even the natives of the Solomon Islands were said to have learned it on the panpipes) and this piece constitutes my revenge.
It was composed in 2005 following a discussion of fugue subjects during a Harmony and Counterpoint class. I was thrown a gauntlet by the students: ‘submit one of pop’s finest anthemic moments to a rigorous contrapuntal treatment worthy of the great Baroque masters’ (or something like that). As it turns out Europe’s theme is actually rather Bachian in character, being reminiscent in particular of the subject used in Fugue No. 2 in C minor from the Well Tempered Clavier. Evenings poring over Oldroyd’s The Technique and Spirit of Fugue, which helpfully showed me the number of ways in which Bach broke his own rules, have probably paid off! The resulting composition for a standard orchestral line-up is for all intents and purposes a genuine fugue in that it utilizes a countersubject which works in invertible counterpoint, contains modulatory episodes which use material derived from the main theme and even culminates in a stretto-like finale.
One Response to “Fugue on the Final Countdown - Why?”
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Stace Constantinou Says:
There are certain things that our central European relations do very well: Team sports, engineering, military uniforms etc…Style and fashion, wit and pop music are not elements that belong in that category however. In fact Euro Pop is so uncompromisingly rank amateur and gaudy as to render it almost comical (providing the sound is on mute). I thought I had heard the last of this grim, “per excellence”, exemplar of that special something that epitomizes all that is, well quite simply wrong, about the Teutonic take on the pop song classic genre.
Drawn not by a sense of inspiration but a morbid sense of curiosity I have to ask: how do I get to hear this Fugal rendition?