Re: GG: (Art of Fugue - Rosen)

["K. Berry" <kb@cs.umb.edu>]

    the whole work seems to be a progressive tutor in *playing the keyboard*.  

Interesting.  I guess I can see it in general (I haven't even attempted
most of the later pieces), but the first part of Cp. 13 seems pretty
straightforward -- except for a couple weird spots where it seems an
impossible (for my hands, anyway) jump is necessary.  Oh well.  And,
surprisingly, the last fugue does not seem technically very difficult to
me.  (I was utterly floored when I could play it at all when I finally
got up the courage to try.)  Emotionally, of course, it's a whole
different story.

    maybe also a cadenza toward the end of Contrapunctus I.  And there's also

A cadenza in Cp. 1?!  Not to expose my ignorance, but where?  Surely not
those long poignant rests ... ?

    the issue of what to do at the end of the last big fugue...

For friends or oneself, I like the idea of improvising a completion :-).
I think that's several lifetimes away for me :-).  In an academic
setting, I can imagine playing different completions for purposes of
comparison and discussing.  But for a recording or concert, I can't
imagine doing anything but breaking off -- perhaps partly because that's
how I first heard/saw it, in the Gould/Monsaingeon video.  It seems so
much stronger to me than anything else.  In a way I'm glad Bach's
completion (``Fragment X'' as Christian Wolff called it) was lost; how
can any concrete ending be as powerful as that abrupt termination?

    stop where Bach did in the print, or stop where Bach did in the
    earlier manuscript (farther than the print)

I thought it was pretty well accepted to stop where B-A-C-H comes in as
the countersubject?  No?  I'm not up on all the maneuverings.


BTW, Bradley, are any of your renditions available as recordings?  I
searched in a few places but couldn't find any.

Thanks,
K