Music has its own laws governing the sequence of sounds in time. Whether the system is modal, tonal, or atonal does not alter the fact that it lies outside the signifier/signified dyad. This is why music is asemantic. In this respect, it resonates with the real as understood by psychoanalysis, which lies outside meaning.
J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue, written in the last years of his life (1749-1750), is itself a great fugue, composed of 20 contrapuntal pieces. The main theme, or "subject," is striking in its simplicity. It possesses unpretentious beauty and strength, and perhaps for this very reason allows for such a wide range of interpretation. Following its exposition, the "subject" undergoes transformations throughout the development, reappearing as reduced, cut or amplified, reversed or inverted, in the different melodic lines that unfold and overlap under the principle of unity that links them. Each melody has no center but the necessity for an intrinsic becoming that drives it forward without guiding principles other than its own internal logic.
The audacity and refinement of Bach's contrapuntal technique immerses us in an expansion of sound without dispersion, in a coherence without rigidity, woven from the tensions and dissonances characteristic of the chromatic scale, which is resolved, in an unusual way, in codas without major cadential landmarks until it rests in the tonic key. In this work, the fugue is an art that moves forward in pursuit of the elusive; the ricercari imply not giving up on the incessant restart, and the resolute codas are only brief stages for a relaunch.
Contrapunto 3 in particular creates a sound atmosphere where the elements of atonality take shape and touch the body. The superimposition of the different voices in their trajectory veil and reveal splendid "dissonances," materializing a succession of points of convergence and divergence that do not become entangled. One could almost hear it: there is no sexual relation, but there are unique encounters.
Recommended listening:
The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 – Sato | Netherlands Bach Society. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sUlZa-IrU&list=RDN6sUlZa-IrU&start_radio=1&t=4678s
Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 (arr. B. Labadie): Contrapunctus III. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR3mSAKrRSM&list=PLC7balLGLvN4uzJyEAsxLEZIG624XunTC&index=4
