Talk:Invention (musical composition)

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I'm confused; some of the two-part inventions written by Bach don't seem to follow this scheme! For example, invention 2 doesn't repeat the theme in the dominant key at any point; the same goes for invention 9.

Piotr

Not all pieces written in a style conform precisely to the musical form. Even very rigid forms such as the fugue show a great deal of variety and deviation from the ideal in the hands of master composers like Bach and Mozart. The invention is much more flexible in form since it is not as "serious" a piece of music as a fugue, so one would expect someone like Bach to take great liberties in their composition. The presentation of the structure of an invention in this article is just the "ideal" or "typical" form of an invention. Splat 01:35, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Inventions and fugues can both be described best as compositional procedures/techniques rather than as forms of their own. The fugue is a technique that involves the concept of imitation at various levels of transposition (as a more advanced form of canonic imitation). Also literally the word comes from the latin for "flight." The invention is probably best thought of as merely comprising the development/variation of a single subject or musical idea (see Berg's Wozzeck, Act III). Overall, this page does not accurately seem to inform the reader and should be rethought as well as incorporate more citations.

"In the exposition, a short motif is introduced by one voice in the tonic key. This is called the theme. The subject is then repeated in the second voice in the dominant key while the initial voice either plays a countersubject or plays in free counterpoint."

This is wrong: The theme, or dux, is repeated an octave above/below and in the tonic key. This repetition is called comes. The fugue modulates to the dominant by transposing the theme whereas the invension is tonally stable, thus making it a simpler form of counterpoint.

Other Composers

Who else composed inventions? The article only mentions Bach. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stephanwehner (talk • contribs) 14:32, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

References

This article need more quality references. Adamilo (talk) 20:46, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]