Anteater: Just as when you look at the magic bands, eh?
Achilles: Yes. I was just wondering ... does my description of these two
modes of fugue-listening brand me unmistakably as a naive, inexperi-
enced listener, who couldn't even begin to grasp the deeper modes of
perception which exist beyond his ken?
Tortoise: No, not at all, Achilles. I can only speak for myself, but I too find
myself shifting back and forth from one mode to the other without
exerting any conscious control over which mode should be dominant. I
don't know if our other companions here have also,experienced any-
thing similar.
Crab: Most definitely. It's quite a tantalizing phenomenon, since you feel
that the essence of the fugue is Hitting about you, and you can't quite
grasp all of it, because you can't quite make yourself function both
ways at once.
Anteater: Fugues have that interesting property, that each of their voices is
a piece of music in itself; and thus a fugue might be thought of as a
collection of several distinct pieces of music, all based on one single
theme, and all played simultaneously. And it is up to the listener (or his
subconscious) to decide whether it should be perceived as a unit, or as a
collection of independent parts, all of which harmonize.
Achilles: You say that the parts are "independent", yet that can't be liter-
ally true. There has to be some coordination between them, otherwise
when they were put together one would just have an unsystematic
clashing of tones-and that is as far from the truth as could be.
Anteater: A better way to state it might be this: if you listened to each voice
on its own, you would find that it seemed to make sense all by itself. It
could stand alone, and that is the sense in which I meant that it is
independent. But you are quite right in pointing out that each of these
individually meaningful lines fuses with the others in a highly nonran-
dom way, to make a graceful totality. The art of writing a beautiful
fugue lies precisely in this ability, to manufacture several different
lines, each one of which gives the illusion of having been written for its
own beauty, and yet which when taken together form a whole, which
does not feel forced in any way. Now, this dichotomy between hearing
a fugue as a whole, and hearing its component voices, is a particular
example of a very general dichotomy, which applies to many kinds of
structures built up from lower levels.
Achilles: Oh, really? You mean that my two "modes" may have some more
general type of applicability, in situations other than fugue-listening?
Anteater: Absolutely.
Achilles: I wonder how that could be. I guess it has to do with alternating
between perceiving something as a whole, and perceiving it as a collec-
tion of parts. But the only place I have ever run into that dichotomy is
in listening to fugues.
Tortoise: Oh, my, look at this! I just turned the page while following the
music, and came across this magnificent illustration facing the first
page of the fugue.Prelude ... 283