Fugue

A fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique built on a single principal theme, the subject, which is introduced alone and then imitated in turn by additional voices entering at different pitches, each continuing to develop the material contrapuntally against the others as the piece proceeds through further statements, episodes, and combinations of the subject. Brought to its most celebrated form by Johann Sebastian Bach in works including The Art of Fugue and The Well-Tempered Clavier, the fugue is not a single fixed musical form so much as a disciplined method of continuous contrapuntal development, and composers from the Baroque through the present have continued to study and write fugues as both an exercise and an expressive technique in its own right.