fugue means A contrapuntal piece of music wherein a particular melody is played in a number of voices, each voice introduced in turn by playing the melody. It carries an Arena rating of 1941, earned across 66 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, fugue ranks #46 of 42,762 for Qualifying, #499 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #686 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #897 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words.
fugue is pronounced /ˈfyɡ/.
Why “fugue” is a great word
A contrapuntal musical composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. From the French fugue, from the Italian fuga ('flight, ardor'), from the Latin fuga ('act of fleeing'), from fugere ('to flee'); first used in English c. 1590s. Unlike a canon, which repeats a melody with mechanical fidelity, or a rhapsody, which surges forward in unbridled spontaneity, the fugue is a disciplined pursuit: a structured flight. It is the sound of one violin fleeing into a forest of strings, each tree taking up the cry and reshaping it; it is the conversation of minds that cannot let each other go; it is the strange comfort of rules so strict that freedom becomes imaginable only through their absolute constraint. In its interwoven lines, one hears a solitary idea forever trying, and failing, to outrun its own echoes.
Etymology
Borrowed from French fugue, from Italian fuga (“flight, ardor”), from Latin fuga (“act of fleeing”), from fugiō (“to flee”); compare Ancient Greek φυγή (phugḗ). Apparently from the metaphor that the first part starts alone on its course, and is pursued by later parts. Doublet of fuga.
noun
- A contrapuntal piece of music wherein a particular melody is played in a number of voices, each voice introduced in turn by playing the melody.
- Anything in literature, poetry, film, painting, etc., that resembles a fugue in structure or in its elaborate complexity and formality.e.g.“Jacobsen's theory about the empty storehouse is still valid, for a myth never has one meaning only; a myth is a polyphonic fugue of many voices.” — 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 175:
- A fugue state.
verb
- To improvise, in singing, by introducing vocal ornamentation to fill gaps etc.
- To spend time in a dissociative fugue state.e.g.“And most of them women, and these only stayed in a fugue state for a relatively short time, like a couple of hours or a couple of days. As far as we know Malenov fugued for close to twenty years.” — 2014, Richard D. Dalrymple, Fugue, page 33:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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