GG: Aural Camouflage

["Joseph Podlesnik" <veronese@jerseycape.com>]

Very interested in marrying the visual art idea of figure/ground to GG's
treatment of some of the Mozart piano sonatas.

In visual art, there is a concept known as figure/ground, which says simply
that in order for perception to take place, the "figure" (or object) that
one is focusing on must be sufficiently different from it's "ground" (or
its surroundings). Camouflage would be a case in which our perceptions of a
"figure" are intentionally (or unintentionally) confused with its
background. 

Listening to GG's Mozart Sonata recordings, you can hear that he -- against
all conventional wisdom (which, from what I understand, holds that the
basso continuo in Mozart sonotas should always be kept down) -- gave the
pieces a contrapuntal dynamism by alternately shifting our attention from
the right hand melody (figure) to the bass (ground), and vice versa. In
doing so, he created what I think of as a kind of "aural camouflage".
Perhaps all baroque contrapuntalism is a form of aural camouflage.
(Certainly, we hear this in the Solitude Trilogy.) Interesting, though,
(but perfectly natural?) that GG brought baroque contrapuntalism to the
Classical repertoire.  Could we even relate this to Freud? Could the "Id"
be the larger field (ground) against which the flailing "Ego" (figure)
contends?

Joseph