Fugue from geography
The fugue from geography for speaking choir is a spoken chant by Ernst Toch from 1930. The piece is the last movement of a suite with the title “Spoken Music”. She tries to achieve musical effects through language using various means; In particular, the musical form of the fugue is transferred from the melodic aspect to the spoken word.
The suite was premiered in 1930 during the Berlin Festival for Contemporary Music and recorded on record. However, this recording was lost, as was the original sheet music. The manuscript was preserved. John Cage prepared the score for publication in the Henry Cowell Journal New Music in 1935. Originally, the piece was genuinely designed to be played back at increased speed using a gramophone, so a real piece of modern “machine music”.
Toch uses various geographical terms in the theme of the fugue and adopts or alienates their rhythm. Since a spoken song has no actual melody, the musical effect of the piece is based only on rhythmic opposites and the contrasting sound of the spoken sounds.
Like every fugue, this one begins with its theme :
- “ Ratibor ! And the Mississippi River and the city of Honolulu and Lake Titicaca ; the Popocatépetl is not in Canada , but in Mexico , Mexico, Mexico. "
This fugue theme is performed by tenor , alto , soprano and finally bass . The following text also includes the city names Málaga , Rimini , Brindisi , Athens , Nagasaki and Yokohama .
The choir piece is also available in an English version.
The rights in the German-speaking area are held by Mills Musikverlag in Berlin.