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\"Bach's Art of Fugue and Musical Offering is the first comprehensive study of two closely related masterworks of the late Baroque fugal style. The initial volume in a series of American Bach Society Guides produced in collaboration with Oxford University Press, it unpacks these famously cerebral collections as endlessly fascinating material for study and play. Intended for a general readership, this compact guide also summarizes for practitioners a considerable body of knowledge about these singular works. Bach scholar and keyboard player Matthew Dirst explains their idiosyncratic musical language in initial chapters while reviewing how both projects took shape during Bach's final decade, as he reoriented his creative energies around capstone works of various kinds. The most systematic of these, the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering reflect his lifelong fascination with learned counterpoint, as demonstrated in elaborate series of fugues and canons in both and in an unusually intricate trio sonata in the latter. Later chapters provide commentary on individual movements and groups of pieces and on the historical reception of this music, including its impact on other disciplines. Recurring themes include Bach's diligent exploration of contrapuntal types and techniques, his embrace of musical games of various sorts, and his creative assimilation of diverse musical styles.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Background To our knowledge, no detailed dissociative fugue cases have been reported from any Arab nation in the indexed literature, despite comprehensive searches across international databases and regional Arabic-language sources. Applied to the Arab world’s 492-million population, even conservative prevalence estimates suggest substantial numbers of undiagnosed cases, indicating systematic underrecognition rather than genuine rarity. Case presentation We report a 30-year-old North African woman in the United Arab Emirates who presented four months postpartum with recurrent dissociative fugue episodes characterised by 20–45-kilometre travel with complete amnesia and stereotyped reversion to her suppressed childhood identity. At age 8, following maternal death, she was forced to assume her deceased half-sister’s legal identity, creating a 10-year age discrepancy. Initial emergency assessment diagnosed postpartum psychosis based on cultural references to qareen (spiritual companion), interpreted as delusions. Comprehensive reassessment revealed no psychotic symptoms: ‘voices’ were ego-dystonic intrusive thoughts, and cultural references were idioms of distress rather than delusions. Structured assessment documented severe postpartum depression, dissociative amnesia with fugue (SCID-D severity 18/20), and three personality disorders. Brain magnetic resonance imaging was unremarkable. Treatment comprised escitalopram 10 mg daily for depression and suicidal ideation, quetiapine 25 mg and melatonin 3 mg nightly for sleep restoration, combined with comprehensive psychosocial interventions including psychoeducation for patient and husband, individual trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, couples therapy, and household stressor reduction. This multimodal approach produced complete cessation of fugue episodes sustained over five-month follow-up. Conclusion This case, the first detailed clinical case report from the Arab world to our knowledge, highlights systematic regional underdiagnosis and illustrates critical challenges in differentiating dissociative from psychotic presentations when cultural idioms are misinterpreted. Enhanced training, routine dissociative screening in trauma-exposed populations, and culturally adapted assessment tools represent urgent priorities.

The early 20th century witnessed growing interest in the Baroque polyphony genres: prelude and fugue in jazz. Preludes and fugues op. 82 (1997) by the Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin are particularly interesting. The way he integrates the expression of classical music and the specificity of jazz music is very original.

The unfinished final Contrapunctus from Bach’s posthumously-published Kunst der Fuge has received several dozen completions over the past century. Although the majority of these have been published and recorded, none has yet established themselves as the leading solution among performers, and this may have more to do with their perceived ‘Bach-ness’ than the undoubted contrapuntal skill and ingenuity that they each demonstrate. This study uses an established information-theoretical method drawn from mathematics to explore the extent to which it is possible to ‘measure’ the similarity of these reconstructions to the original, and so determine which are closest to the musical lines of Bach’s existing opening of Contrapunctus XIV.

Antonin Reicha (1770-1826) was a reputed Czech composer, theorist and teacher, who studied in Germany, and was naturalized French, who composed numerous musical works in different genres and wrote several treatises on different aspects of the sound art. An important place in Reichaʼs artistic heritage is occupied by the didactic cycles, which represent examples of works that happily combine instructional and artistic purposes, being developed as a support for the composerʼs didactic activity and at the same time as a supplement to his theoretical writings. The author emphasizes repeatedly that the theory must be justified by practice and that the student must know the principles of the contemporary composition and not just the old rules by which the predecessors were guided. This article examines Reichaʼs didactic cycles, among which we find collections of fugues, variations, duets and trios, as well as some collections of studies. Considering the large number of works named by Reicha he can rightly be considered one of the parents of this genre in French music. But in Reichaʼs case, the aim of the studies is not only to cultivate virtuosity itself, but rather complex exercises that involve both the “technological” processes of interpretation and the “spiritual” ones. In our opinion, the figure of this musician, his theoretical writings and compositional works eloquently illustrate the dialectical relationship between tradition and innovation on the one hand and the complex relationship between musical theory and practice on the other.

The great stylistic epochs of the past mostly had syntaxes and specific forms, escaping in the context of the application of polyphonic syntax to the tonal system. The twentieth century, characterized by a continuous mobility and search in the field of the musical language, does not intend to create new musical forms but takes preexisting patterns, which adapt to the creative contexts specific to the composers. Thus, despite the blurring of some of the fundamental elements, other factors of configuration and construction were maintained and amplified, as well as the particular phenomenon, the most significant phenomenon being the development of the thematic principle, which will have its particular manifestations in the fugue form, the diversity of its interpretations bearing the mark of some new directions.

Seizures can have varied presentations and may have different etiological factors. A multidisciplinary approach should be used to treat them. It becomes difficult to diagnose seizures if they have an atypical presentation, particularly so when they manifest as behavioral disturbances. This case series demonstrates four cases with different psychiatric and behavioral manifestations of seizures where the diagnosis had to be done in a multi-disciplinary approach. Two of the cases highlight the fact that in the light of normal investigations, paying attention to detailed history is of prime importance.

Franz Liszt shared his plans to compose a large piano sonata with a noted teacher in Eisenach, Friedrich Kühmstedt (a student of Rinck and Hummel), who then promptly wrote an extensive concert fugue on the B Minor Sonata’s theme (1850) that anticipated several compositional strategies of Liszt’s sonata (1853/54). While Liszt went on to integrate a fugue into the recapitulation of his sonata, Kühmstedt conceived of a fugue itself as a sonata, thus offering an answer to the question of how sonatas and fugues could be composed “after Beethoven.” This issue formed the basis of a compositional discussion around the middle of the nineteenth century which helps clarify the significance of the Weimar circle’s understanding of Liszt’s works.

Dissociative disorders are a common and frequently undiagnosed group of psychiatric disorders, characterized by disruptions in the normal integration of awareness, personality, emotion and behavior. The available evidence suggests that these disorders arise from an interaction between genetic vulnerability and stress, particularly traumatic stress, but the attention paid to the underlying genetic diatheses has been sparse. In this paper, the existing literature on the molecular genetics of dissociative disorders, as well as of clinically significant dissociative symptoms not reaching the threshold of a disorder, is reviewed comprehensively across clinical and non-clinical samples. Association studies suggest a link between dissociative symptoms and genes related to serotonergic, dopaminergic and peptidergic transmission, neural plasticity and cortisol receptor sensitivity, particularly following exposure to childhood trauma. Genome-wide association studies have identified loci of interest related to second messenger signaling and synaptic integration. Though these findings are inconsistent, they suggest biologically plausible mechanisms through which traumatic stress can lead to pathological dissociation. However, methodological concerns related to phenotype definition, study power, and correction for the confounding factors limit the value of these findings, and they require replication and extension in studies with better design.

This article addresses a common situation in music premised on the continual return of thematic content, in which a thematic statement passes through a cadence and continues into a subsequent phrase. With analyses of passages from two keyboard fugues by J. S. Bach, I demonstrate that fugue subjects disposed in this fashion may interact in complex ways with the tonal and durational structures of their surrounding phrases, assert pronounced “gestural” shapes across phrase boundaries, and resonate with global aspects of form and rhetoric.