"Subject Injection" Practice Session

 When I was young, fugues were my favorite things to listen to, whether they were embedded in larger works or existed as stand-alone pieces. This remains true to this day. I still love getting lost in the inner voices and the counterpoint.

  For somebody so interested in fugues, devoting the time to gain proficiency at improvising fugues was never an interest of mine, oddly enough. And that's still the case today. Instead, my interest over the years was primarily focused on learning how to extract the counterpoint I heard in fugues (and other non-fugue pieces) so that I could improvise using counterpoint.

  On rare occasions, however, I do enjoy stepping outside my comfort zone by attempting fugal (or near-fugal) improvisations in the privacy of my own space where nobody but I can experience all the fumbles and mistakes. During this particular practice session, I did just that. A video like this would normally end-up on the cutting room floor never to see the light of day, because it's unpolished, lacks variation, is repetitive and somewhat boring, and doesn't showcase my better improvisational side. In summary, it's practice and experimentation, not a performance. However, what I saw in this video was a teachable moment and I decided to save it from the trash bin primarily because it is practice and experimentation and not a performance.

  In a past blog post, I spoke about the need to "listen, experiment, and practice" when it came to learning to improvise in a musical style or form you're less familiar with. The video in today's blog post provides a good example of what that might look like in all its unfiltered glory. Mistakes and fumbles are a normal part of the learning process. Embrace them. Everybody has to start somewhere when practicing something they don't have a high degree of proficiency or comfort with.

  Listen, experiment, and practice.

  This session, like the others before it, is informal and unstructured. The musical subject I've created for myself is the following:

  Although the purpose of this video is not to teach you how to improvise fugues or improve your fugal improvisation skills, an unintended consequence of this practice session is the emergence of a new improvisational exercise I'm calling the "Subject Injection" Improvisational Exercise.

"Subject Injection" Improvisational Exercise

  This exercise works as follows:

1. Create a musical subject for yourself. The subject you create should expire at the end of the day. For every day that you work on this exercise, you should create a new subject. Do your best to avoid using subjects that you used previously.

2. Improvise a piece of music with an extended duration. How you start and end the improvisation doesn't matter. Throughout the course of your improvisation, inject the subject over and over again in different voices.

 

(improvised and recorded on November 29, 2025)