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Cobralingus: Metafugue

By mike In

Cobralingus: Metafugue is an experiment in transformation processes, and owes a great debt to Cobralingus, a collection by Jeff Noon in which he takes pre-existing texts (such as a passage from Shakespeare, or a poem by Emily Dickinson) and remixes them, drawing from a palette of potential transformations that guide the intuition.

The Metafugue was constructed very simply – I took the C Major fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, and for every note substituted a part of the fugue subject of that major key. For example, every C is replaced with part of the C Major subject, every D is replaced with part of the D Major subject, and so on. The length of the replaced note is directly proportional to how much of the corresponding fugue subject is utilized.

[INLET 1: BWV 846/2]

SEARCH AND REPLACE:

C                     with BWV 846/2

C#/Db          with BWV 848/2

D                     with BWV 850/2

D#/Eb          with BWV 852/2

E                     with BWV 854/2

F                     with BWV 856/2

F#/Gb          with BWV 858/2

G                     with BWV 860/2

G#/Ab          with BWV 862/2

A                     with BWV 864/2

A#/Bb          with BWV 866/2

B                     with BWV 846/2