ACHILLES: That is intriguing. The thrill has remained dormant somewhere inside you, but by yourself, you aren’t able to fish it up out of your subconscious.
CRAB: Exactly. The potential of reliving the thrill is “coded,” in some unknown way, in the structure of my brain, but I don’t have the power to summon it up at will; I have to wait for chance circumstance to trigger it.
ACHILLES: I have a question about fugues which I feel a little embarrassed about asking, but as I am just a novice at fugue-listening, I was wondering if perhaps one of you seasoned fugue-listeners might help me in learning? …
TORTOISE: I’d certainly like to offer my own meager knowledge, if it might prove of some assistance.
ACHILLES: Oh, thank you. Let me come at the question from an angle. Are you familiar with the print called Cube with Magic Ribbons, by M. C. Escher?
TORTOISE: In which there are circular bands having bubblelike distortions which, as soon as you’ve decided that they are bumps, seem to turn into dents—and vice versa?
ACHILLES: Exactly.
CRAB: I remember that picture. Those little bubbles always seem to flip back and forth between being concave and convex, depending on the direction that you approach them from. There’s no way to see them simultaneously as concave and convex—somehow one’s brain doesn’t allow that. There are two mutually exclusive “modes” in which one can perceive the bubbles.
ACHILLES: Just so. Well, I seem to have discovered two somewhat analogous modes in which I can listen to a fugue. The modes are these: either to follow one individual voice at a time, or to listen to the total effect of all of them together, without trying to disentangle one from another. I have tried out both of these modes, and, much to my frustration, each one of them shuts out the other. It’s simply not in my power to follow the paths of individual voices and at the same time to hear the whole effect. I find that I flip back and forth between one mode and the other, more or less spontaneously and involuntarily.
Cube with Magic Ribbons (M. C. Escher, lithograph, 1957)
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 naïve, inexperienced 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 anything similar.
CRAB: Most definitely. It’s quite a tantalizing phenomenon, since you feel that the essence of the fugue is flitting 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 literally 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 nonrandom 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 collection 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.
CRAB: I have never seen that illustration before. Why don’t you pass it ’round?
(The Tortoise passes the book around. Each of the foursome looks at it in a characteristic way—this one from afar, that one from close up, everyone tipping his head this way and that in puzzlement. Finally it has made the rounds and returns to the Tortoise, who peers at it rather intently. )
ACHILLES: Well, I guess the prelude is just about over. I wonder if, as I listen to this fugue, I will gain any more insight into the question “What is the right way to listen to a fugue: as a whole, or as the sum of its parts?”
TORTOISE: Listen carefully, and you will!
(The prelude ends. There is a moment of silence; and …
[ATTACCA ]
…then, one by one, the four voices of the fugue chime in.)
ACHILLES: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “MU”!
CRAB: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “HOLISM”!
ACHILLES: Now hold on a minute. You must be seeing things. It’s plain as day that the message of this picture is “MU,” not “HOLISM”!
CRAB: I beg your pardon, but my eyesight is extremely good. Please look again, and then tell me if the picture doesn’t say what I said it says!
ANTEATER: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “REDUCTIONISM”!
CRAB: Now hold on a minute. You must be seeing things. It’s plain as day that the message of this picture is “HOLISM,” not “REDUCTIONISM”!