Geographical Fugue

The Geographical Fugue or Fuge aus der Geographie is the most famous piece for spoken chorus by Ernst Toch. Toch was a prominent composer in 1920s Berlin, and singlehandedly invented the idiom of the "Spoken Chorus".

The work was composed as the third and final movement in Toch's suite Gesprochene Musik (Spoken Music). The suite was designed to be recorded by a chorus on gramophone records at 78 rpm, then "performed" in concert by replaying the records at a much higher speed. As Toch wrote in his original program notes: "increasing the tempo, and the resulting pitch level ... created a type of instrumental music, which leads the listener to forget that it originated from speaking".[1]

The piece was first performed, in its original German, at the Neue Musik Berlin festival in June 1930. The performance, in front of an audience that included experimental composer John Cage, was a sensational success. When Toch arrived in the United States in 1935, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Cage sought him out and obtained permission for the Fugue to be published in English translation.[1] It remains Toch's most-performed work, although the composer himself dismissed it as an unimportant diversion.