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More on "keys" from GG himself
This may shed more light on this topic, which I recently addressed. There
is a film produced by the CBC in 1970 called "The Well-Tempered Listener."
It was, suprisingly, not documented in many of several books on GG.
In it, Curtis Davis, then director of cultural programming for NET, discusses
J.S. Bach's WTC, as the title implies, with GG making comments as well as
playing musical examples on both harpsichord and piano. (The film was shown
on my local PBS TV station about 10 years ago, and since VCR's were not as
commonplace then, I only made an audio cassette of it.)
When focusing on the sets of preludes and fugues designed to exploit the
new tempered tuning, Davis pointed out that Bach transposed a sketch
for a fugue written originally in C major to C sharp major because he
needed a piece in that key to make the set complete. The fugue was then
expanded in its new key. GG's response was one he commonly gave when the
matter of his playing Baroque music on the 20th Century piano arose. He
steadfastly held that Bach was not concerned about timbres, given that he
happily transcribed the same work for different instruments. Furthermore,
such transcriptions often involved transposition as well. Then, after
mentioning Chopin's, and particularly Scriabin's fixation on the
"characteristics" of different keys (some were "bright," some were
"lascivious," etc.), he added his own whimsical comment about the two
keys involved in Davis' example, saying that Bach would take a piece in C
major, "a pure, upstanding, solid citizen key," and transpose it to C
sharp major, "a slightly dirty-old-man key."
This should convey that GG is definitely referring to KEY, not any scale,
and that as an exponent of the Baroque era, key signature had no
"interpretation," and that his description of himself as "f minor" was a
spoof of those composers who did allude to keys as having significance
beyond their usually arbitrary selection (except, of course when
instrumental or vocal ranges dictated a practical key.)