How to Use fugue in a Sentence

fugue

noun
  • Flavin Judd, the artist’s son, has compared it to a Bach fugue.
    — Roberta Smith, New York Times, 26 Mar. 2020
  • Knauss is a master of the organ — the baroque pipes, the swelling fugue soaring in a church nave.
    — Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, 29 May 2017
  • Even typing out the name Hadrian just now set a sort of fugue in motion.
    — Geddy Lee, Rolling Stone, 14 Nov. 2023
  • The chorus, in the old musical forms of canon and fugue, demands light.
    — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2023
  • For a stretch, without losing its pulse, the song became a string-quartet fugue.
    — Larry Blumenfeld, WSJ, 1 Feb. 2023
  • So there are four different iterations where things in that piece split off and fugue.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 14 Oct. 2025
  • The fugue of religion and superstition sounds over these mise en scènes.
    — Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2019
  • Maybe a show like Mulaney’s will be different enough to shake voters out of their fugue state.
    — Joe Reid, Vulture, 18 May 2024
  • The brassy, flashy American auteur has made a movie in a fugue state about the world's current state.
    — Steven Zeitchik, latimes.com, 13 Sep. 2017
  • Only in the concluding fugue did the piece lose some of its lucidity.
    — Rick Schultz, Los Angeles Times, 14 Aug. 2019
  • The mutes, the dropouts, the sense that an idea had sprung from the artist’s chest, been scrambled into code, then reassembled in a fugue.
    — Paul A. Thompson, Pitchfork, 8 Dec. 2025
  • Maybe some of her employees had come back upstairs, seen their boss passed out in a sugar fugue and decided to mess with her.
    — Charlotte Phillipp, PEOPLE, 14 Nov. 2025
  • The effect of microbetting, if not its intent, is to induce a fugue state that keeps users in action.
    — Paul Solotaroff, Rolling Stone, 12 Oct. 2025
  • And maybe all of this will lead to stopping Bob and waking Cooper up from his Dougie fugue state.
    — Matt Miller, Esquire, 10 July 2017
  • Sit in the sun somewhere and think about what’s happening without rushing to your laptop to read stroller reviews in a fugue state.
    — Meaghan O'Connell, The Cut, 21 June 2017
  • Sri spent the next days in a knotted fugue of grief, grappling with the paradox that Mama was everywhere and nowhere.
    — Noy Thrupkaew, Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2021
  • This is theater as a fugue state where your vision is dominated by a huge half cube whirling above the stage, lit by dreamy projections.
    — Karen D'souza, The Mercury News, 12 Apr. 2017
  • The twists and turns make for a fantastic read, but there is also the underlying fugue of displacement.
    — Karin Slaughter, chicagotribune.com, 23 May 2018
  • The filmmaker makes deft use of visual and auditory cues to evoke this fugue-like sense of estrangement.
    — Jon Frosch, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Yet investors didn’t show the same anxiety once trading started, sending the indices into a sort of fugue state.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Boston Herald, 3 Apr. 2026
  • The Simpsons, Snoopy and the Smurfs are all here, floating through a fugue state that refuses to lift.
    — New York Times, 24 Feb. 2021
  • His fugues are a draftsman’s rendering of heavenly splendor.
    — Classical Music Critic, Los Angeles Times, 25 Feb. 2026
  • For Bartók, the universe is a structural masterpiece to be represented in the fugue and dance.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Feb. 2022
  • Its rapturous central fugue, its searing sonority and plunging depths were all brought to gleaming life.
    — Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post, 24 Sep. 2023
  • Harrison still evokes painterly fugues of light and pungent smells, but they’re offset by a growing bleakness, and there’s less humor.
    — Literary Hub, 11 June 2026
  • Years earlier, Elena fell into a possible fugue state and has no memory of six months of her life.
    — Washington Post, 11 Mar. 2021
  • Especially when there appears to be no cure for the patient in her charge, the wife of a plantation owner, who’s in a trance-like fugue state.
    — Wilson Chapman, IndieWire, 17 Sep. 2024
  • The first play is built around a Bach fugue, which DeBoard described as melodic and cohesive in style.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 25 Mar. 2022
  • Ben and Jennifer are driving around in a fugue state, unwilling to accept that their own love story will also bring about the end of the world.
    — Scott Meslow, Vulture, 8 Aug. 2024
  • In March, Melnikov will perform the complete preludes and fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich in one gulp.
    — Patrick Neas, kansascity, 2 June 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fugue.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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