accordance with well-known forms of cadence. Such was the first stage.
At the second stage, each of the elements of the fugue was considered
separately by means of selective audition. Pending the playing of the
complete work, the listeners endeavoured to concentrate their atten-
tion on: (a) the subject of the fugue, its melodic structure, its shortened
form which is introduced with the second development, and the tone-
levels at which it appears; (b) the counterpoint (or counterpoints)
accompanying the subject and serving as a melodic and harmonic
‘commentary’ to it; (c) the divertimentos, their themes, notation,
aesthetic function in the fugue as a whole, etc.
Each audition (which always took place as a whole, uninterrupted)
was followed by a silence of between 30 and 60 seconds, so that the
listeners could meditate as thoroughly as possible on what they had
just ‘apperceived’ by selective audition.
Then the third stage was begun. First of all, the audience concen-
trated on two combined elements, such as melodic and harmonic pro-
gressions, subject and countersubject (or counterpoint), or sequence
of thematic parts with the divertimentos.
Next, and finally, the listeners were invited to try to arrive at total
apperception of the fugue, by combining in their minds all the elements
that, at the second stage, had been dissociated.
An hour and a half, which soon elapsed, was spent in this way. It
was a period of intense spiritual and musical effort. The listeners’
reactions were conclusive and encouraging. They said they had suc-
ceeded in grasping a style of music which they had previously either
known nothing of, misunderstood, or, at best respected without being
able to appreciate it fuully.
Subsequently, we carried out this experiment on a larger scale. After
listeners had been given two further integral, ‘synthetic’ hearings of
the Fugue in C minor, and after I had explained to them the expres-
siveness and contrapuntal ‘dynamism’ of J. S. Bach‘s Great Chromatic
Fugue, I embarked upon a comparison between the simplest fugue
and a highly complex one. This process involved transferring, mental-
ly, the general laws of the fugue idiom from a small to a much larger
plane, in order to facilitate the listeners’ introduction to an infinitely
more complicated work. After these explanations, the audience heard
a rendering of this chromatic fugue and were able to employ the
method of selective audition from the outset i.e. to combine, more or
less, the first two stages in musical understanding.
[Trudated from fhe French]