since these pieces teach us to think and listen in lines. STRANDS SEPARATELY, NOT HANDS I'm a stickler for practising fugues one voice at a time, and in all possible combinations and permutations of voices, not just in the first stages but long after the piece has been mastered. It can take a bit of work deciphering the meanderings of the various different voices in a piano score printed on two staves, where all is a bit of a mess visually. Editors attempt to aid the eye by using stems that go up for the soprano in the treble stave and tenor in the bass stave, and stems that go down for the alto and bass, but the lines will still take a bit of disentangling. USEFUL RESOURCE It is extremely useful to have an edition of the fugues in open score, with each voice on its own stave. This is a helpful supplement to a standard score, and can be used for practice purposes, especially if fingering is written in. I suggest writing in more fingering than might be necessary in the standard treble/bass score, since when we practise each voice alone -- and then the voices in combinations -- we need to make absolutely sure we stick to the fingering we are actually going to use when we play the whole thing together. I can't stress the importance of this enough. Here is an extract of the C minor fugue from Book 1 in conventional treble and bass