Re: GG: Transcriptions

[Michael Arnowitt <arnowitt@sover.net>]

At 04:41 PM 09/03/1999 +0100, Andrew Thayer wrote:
>I recently got a recording of the Strauss Metamorphosen (the one by Ormandy)
>and I can see how GG thought it such a great a work. I don't know of any
>other piece with a similar level of structure combined with such a level of
>emotional intensity. If anyone knows of any works in the same kind of style
>(along with Verklarte Nacht) I'd be interested to know. Anyway, does anybody
>have a copy of the transcription begun by Gould or know where I could get
>one from? I'd also be interested to know if there are any complete
>transcriptions by others, of any merit.
>	I would also like to know if there are copies of Gould's Wagner
>transcriptions. I have a GIF file of the first page of a Siegfried Idyll
>draft, so does this mean he wrote them out in full? If not has anyone
>dictated them yet? I have very good copies of Horowitz and Cziffra
>transcriptions with crazy numbers of notes, so presumably Gould's pieces
>would be comparatively easy to someone with experience, especially with
>Gould's extreme clarity of touch.
>

I had some correspondence with Schott a few years ago, and I think they told
me that publishing Gould's transcriptions is in their plans, and someone (I
think in Europe) is working on it.  I wouldn't expect publications any time
real soon ... for one thing, Schott is very slow (even after they announce a
publication is imminent, it can be a few years before it actually hits the
market), and I would guess they would concentrate on Gould's original
compositions before publishing his transcriptions.

I have seen the fragments of the Gould transcription of Strauss'
"Metamorphosen" at the National Library in Ottawa ... it was pretty
fragmentary, only maybe the first couple of sections, so I doubt it will be
published.  Handwriting, as will probably not surprise you, was pretty terrible.

My picture of his process is that Gould's transcriptions were maybe
generated by him learning the pieces from scores at the piano, playing
through Strauss and Wagner operas late at night, etc.  Since his enjoyment
of this repertoire was basically a private one, there probably wasn't a huge
incentive for him to write out the transcriptions, since they really weren't
necessary for him to play the music himself -- he had worked out over the
years how to play various passages in terms of note choices and fingerings;
all this can become memorized, particularly if you have a memory like
Gould's, so writing it out may not be totally necessary for casual use.

This is all speculation, but for a long piece like Metamorphosen (25-30
minutes), it's just a lot of work to write it all out, and without a focused
need (e.g., a recording to be made, TV show, whatever) he might have
realized part-way through that doing a transcription of the whole piece
would just take too much time, and stopped working on it.

If you would like a non-Gould piano transcription of Metamorphosen, I
finished this year my own transcription, which I recently recorded a few
weeks ago as part of my tribute to GG recording, "Homage to Glenn Gould,"
which will hopefully be out in a few months on Ursa Minor Records.  If you'd
like a copy of the transcription itself, let me know -- I thought it came
out fairly well, although you'll need fairly decent finger-independence
skills to play all the counterpoint.

Michael



Michael Arnowitt
arnowitt@sover.net