The first realized live-project of Klangspiegel is Bach‘s »Art of Fugue« his last unfinished composition.

Since it’s date of origin around 1750 this collection of 16 fugues and 4 canons comes along with myths: as mathematics with tones it was not present after Bach’s death. In the first years of the 20th century this composition was rediscovered in several forms of appearance: as a solo-work played on organ or piano and as transcriptions for different instrumental-ensembles.

[the electronic art of fugue]
is a new instrumentation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s »Art of Fugue« for abstract and concrete electronic sounds. The transformation in this contemporary soundscape refreshes the historic piece of music and illustrates the complex musical structure by using significant sounds for the polyphonic texture. For the first time a consequent four-channel sound projection is used in live-performances.

Excerpt from Glenn Gould »The Well-Tempered Listener«

»I would like to try … a recording […], presented in four-corner stereo, a speaker in each corner of the room; it would be a totally unreal performance and one would not in any sense be confronted with the spectacle or the sense of the awareness of somebody up there on the podium playing at you. You would be in the centre of the problem, so to speak, and I think that’s really what the listener should try to do and the way in which performance experiment with Bach must continue. […] I’m sure it would change the listener’s whole notion of what Bach was, what the Baroque represented, what that whole incredibly involved experience of Baroque counterpoint really meant.«
(On February 18, 1970, CBC-TV broadcast an interview that Gould had recorded the previous year with Curtis Davis, the director of cultural programming for National Educational Television, »The Well-Tempered Listener«.)

Titel of the single parts

Titel [the electronic art of fugue] – »Art of Fugue« (synopsis)