Re: GG: Piano Action, etc.

[jerry and judy <jerbidoc@zianet.com>]

>Burkhardt Ingersoll Wilke wrote:
>
>> you might be surprised :)  the piano in question had been dropped by the
>> movers.  Gould along with the a steinway guy tried to save it.  The
>> inventions are a direct result of these efforts.  personally i have grown
>> fond of these silly instrumental quirks in the recording and listen to them
>> often :)
>
>Actually, this is not correct.  The Inventions (and Sinfonia) were recorded in
>the mid-60's, long before CD318 got dropped.  Gould's explanation for the
>midrange "hiccup" effect on that recording was that he and his technicians
>had been experimenting with some dramatic alterations to the action and
>had not allowed the instrument it's normal "recuperation" period before the
>sessions were scheduled to happen.
>
>The Toccatas were recorded about 12 - 15 yrs. later (in two sessions,
>two years apart) in the Eaton Auditorium.  The dropping incident happened
>in the early 70's in Toronto.  Hence, CD318 had gone through a number of
>sugeries before the toccata recordings were made.
>
>I really like the sound on both these recordings and I don't mind that hiccup
>at all;  in fact, I like it.  It is said that every great work of art has a
>"flaw" that
>distinguishes it.  I think that hiccup counts, so much so that I don't
>even see
>it as a flaw anymore.  Strange how that works.
>
>jh



>From the liner notes of Gould's Inventions & Sinfonias:

------------------------

"BATTLES OVER A PIANO"

"I am by no means a fastworker in the studio", Gould confessed to the
"Columbia" Manager, Ronald Wilford, in 1973. "A good session will consist
of 2 to 3 minutes per recording hour and, consequently, assuming an average
record to include 50 minutes of recorded material, the best figure I can
arrive at would be approximately 18 recording hours per album." His
producers had to get used to the fact that the conditions for a "good
session" hardly ever existed and that accordingly the minimum of 18 hours
was seldom achieved, just as they had to get used to the fact that Gould
spread these production hours over several sessions, which might be months
or even years apart. The rec- ording of Bach's Two- and Three-Part
Inventions and Sinfonias broke all records in this respect: "Columbia's"
"Artist Contract Cards" for the six months from September 18, 1963 to March
19, 1964 indicate no fewer than ten record- ing days (spread over eight
different occasions), quite apart from two further "canc[elled] sess[ions]"
on October 14 and 15, 1963, which Gould had called off at short notice.

It can hardly have been the fault of the programme that this recording
developed into such a nightmare tor the producer Paul Myers and the
technical crew; as far as the Three-Part Sinfonias were concerned, Gould
had since 1953 played a selection (or even the complete set) often enough
in his recitals - including his legendary debut in the USA in 1955 and his
tour of the USSR in May 1957 (the live re- cording of this concert is to be
published in the Glenn Gould Edition as SMK 52685) - for them to be ready
for recording on the master-tape at any time; and the Two-Part Inventions
(which he seems never to have played either before or since) hardly make
such demands on virtuosity that they could have presented any problems to a
pianist such as Gould.

The solution to the mystery is to be found in a few lines appearing as
"remarks" on the "Artist Contract Card" relating to the production: "If
another piano is requested and select- ed tor the sess. such rental, tuning
and transportation costs will constitute an adv. ag. roy.", the point being
that the piano which Gould had brought specially from Toronto to the CBS
Studio in New York suffered from such a pronounced "hiccup" that even the
most ex- perienced Steinway technicians gave up the struggle and no one -
other than Gould, of course - seriously believed that a recording which was
at all acceptable could be produced on this instrument.

The piano in question was a "Steinway" built in New York in 1938 or 1939,
bearing the number CD 318, which had been acquired in 1945 by "Eaton's", a
store in Toronto, for the concert-hall housed in their building and which
since then had travelled the length and breadth of Canada whenever a
pianist had entered into a performing contract with Steinway. In late 1960
or early 1961, when the piano was once again back home in Toronto, Gould
(who had played on it on previous occasions) began to take it seriously. It
was "love at second sight", but all the deeper and longer-lasting: "At one
time, I found it important to have a different sort of piano for every kind
of music that one played. I no longer do. I use it for everything now: it's
my Richard Strauss piano, it's my Bach piano, it's my piano for playing
William Byrd. [...] It's a chest of whistles, it's a set of virginals, it's
just about anything that you want to make of it. It's an extraordinary
piano."

When Gould played the first bars of the scheduled Bach recording on it on
September 18, Paul Myers and the technicians from CBS must also have found
CD 318 "extraordinary" - extraordinarily disastrous! Gould himself had
eventually to admit that it would not do and, although Steinway's mechanics
did their best both to achieve the sound that Gould had in mind and to get
rid of the piano's disturbing background noises, no progress was made (and
not a single take recorded) in the fol- lowing six sessions. On January 2,
1964 the whole affair was therefore adjourned without further ado until the
middle of March. Gould made use of the time to tinker with the instrument
himself, until eventually he got so near to his ideal sound that on March
18 and 19, - a mere two days - he recorded all thirty pieces "en bloc",
without making use of any of the previous takes. Myers and "Columbia",
however, found it difficult to share Gould's enthusiasm for the result:
only after he had undertaken to provide an explanatory, not to say
exculpatory note to accompany the disc, did they agree, with extremely
mixed feelings, to its issue.

In Gould's words it went something like this: "CD 318 has undergone major
surgery (in effect, to try to design an instrument for baroque repertoire
which can add to the undeniable resource of the modern piano something of
the clarity and tactile facility of the harpsichord). The alignment of such
essential mechanical matters as the distance of the hammer from the
strings, the 'after-touch' mechanism, etc. has been earnestly recon-
sidered in accordance with my sober conviction that no piano need feel
duty-bound to always sound like a piano. Old 318, if released from its
natural tendency in that direction, could prob- ably be prevailed upon to
give us a sound of such immediacy and clarity that those qualities of
non-legato so essential to Bach would be gleefully realized.

In my opinion, the present disc brings us within reach of this objective.
The operation, performed just before the sessions which produced the
Inventions, was so successful that we plunged joyfully into the recording
without number CD 318, which had been acquired in 1945 by "Eaton's", a
store in Toronto, for the concert-hall housed in their building and which
since then had travelled the length and breadth of Canada whenever a
pianist had entered into a performing contract with Steinway. In late 1960
or early 1961, when the piano was once again back home in Toronto, Gould
(who had played on it on previous occasions) began to take it seriously. It
was "love at second sight", but all the deeper and longer-lasting: "At one
time, I found it important to have a different sort of piano for every kind
of music that one played. I no longer do. I use it for everything now: it's
my Richard Strauss piano, it's my Bach piano, it's my piano for playing
William Byrd. [...] It's a chest of whistles, it's a set of virginals, it's
just about anything that you want to make of it. It's an extraordinary
piano."

When Gould played the first bars of the scheduled Bach recording on it on
September 18, Paul Myers and the technicians from CBS must also have found
CD 318 "extraordinary" - extraordinarily disastrous! Gould himself had
eventually to admit that it would not do and, although Steinway's mechanics
did their best both to achieve the sound that Gould had in mind and to get
rid of the piano's disturbing background noises, no progress was made (and
not a single take recorded) in the fol- lowing six sessions. On January 2,
1964 the whole affair was therefore adjourned without further ado until the
middle of March. Gould made use of the time to tinker with the

instrument himself, until eventually he got so near to his ideal sound that
on March 18 and 19, - a mere two days - he recorded all thirty pieces "en
bloc", without making use of any of the previous takes. Myers and
"Columbia", however, found it difficult to share Gould's enthusiasm for the
result: only after he had undertaken to provide an explanatory, not to say
exculpatory note to accompany the disc, did they agree, with extremely
mixed feelings, to its issue.

In Gould's words it went something like this: "CD 318 has undergone major
surgery (in effect, to try to design an instrument for baroque repertoire
which can add to the undeniable resource of the modern piano something of
the clarity and tactile facility of the harpsichord). The alignment of such
essential mechanical matters as the distance of the hammer from the
strings, the 'after-touch' mechanism, etc. has been earnestly recon-
sidered in accordance with my sober conviction that no piano need feel
duty-bound to always sound like a piano. Old 318, if released from its
natural tendency in that direction, could prob- ably be prevailed upon to
give us a sound of such immediacy and clarity that those qualities of
non-legato so essential to Bach would be gleefully realized.

In my opinion, the present disc brings us within reach of this objective.
The operation, performed just before the sessions which pro- duced the
Inventions, was so successful that we plunged joyfully into the recording
without allowing CD 318 its [...] post-operative recupera- tion.
Consequently, our enthusiasm for the rather extraordinary sound it now
possessed allowed us to minimize the one minor after- effect which it had
sustained - a slight nervous tic in the middle register which in the slower
passages can be heard emitting a sort of hiccup - and to carry on with the
sessions without stopping to remedy this defect. I must confess that,
having grown somewhat accustomed to it, I now find this charming
idiosyncrasy entirely worthy of the remarkable instrument which produced
it. [...] However, in our best of all worlds, we would hope to preserve the
present sound while reducing the hiccup effect; so, as the television card
says on those occasions when sound and video portions go their separate
ways - 'STAY TUNED IN: WE'RE FIXING IT'."

Nevertheless another two-and-a-half years (mainly taken up with endless
improvements to the master-tape) elapsed after the completion of recording
on March 19, 1964, until the Inventions and Sinfonias were issued on Octo-
ber 17, 1966 in the precise order which Gould had decided upon and which is
retained in the present edition. This is not from numbers 1 to 15, rising
by semitone and whole-tone steps, as Bach had arranged the collection, but
in an order in which the succeeding numbers - with the exception of the
major/minor combinations which Gould retained (although in three out of the
six cases he reversed the order) - stand in the relationship either of a
third or of a fourth/fifth.

Michael Stegemann (Translation: (c) 1993 Gery Bramall)