One of my pet peeves is the stereotypical Hollywood depiction of how authors begin writing a book: putting a sheet of blank paper into a typewriter (well, in older shows and movies anyhow; firing up the word processor in modern times) and then typing "Chapter 1" and waiting for the inspiration to strike. Almost no writers I know work that way, and the same for composers. It's normally more a process of collecting ideas and then refining and assembling them into a finished work. While it's possible to compose music starting at the top left hand corner and then just writing start to finish in the "Hollywood" stereotype fashion, fugues in particular benefit from doing some preparatory work up front. Since the whole piece will derive from a single theme called the "subject", it pays to spend time planning the subject and possibilities for its development before actually writing the initial measures. In this video post, I give a brief overview of what that process looked like for me in the creation of the fugue I wrote as a demonstration for my Practical Counterpoint course.

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