fugue

Martin’s character, veteran TV actor Charles-Haden Savage, plays a constable investigating the murder of the triplets’ mother — and one story thread in the season is whether he can get through the intricate song without going into a wild fugue state onstage.

That’s less true of its rendition of “The Fugue,” a classic Tharp piece from 1970.

In uniform, Mr. Merkel started experiencing strange fugue states, where he would be awake but barely responsive and would retain little memory afterward of what had happened.

In 1966 he wrote of overcoming his dissatisfaction with two takes of a fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one take he considered “rather pompous” and the other overly jubilant — and both “monotonous.”

He solved the problem by using the first for the fugue’s opening and conclusion, and splicing in the second for the midsection, producing a version “far superior to anything we could at the time have done in the studio.”