New listener

["J. Scheuvens" <Scheuvens@EASYSIXT.DE>]

Dear f-minors,

as a new member on the list I´ll send my best greetings to all.
Let me spend a *few words* to the importance that GG has for me (and sorry
for my english).
Since my early childhood I sang in a few choirs usually performing a rich
repertoire of my favourite composer J. S. Bach. His compositions for me are
representing the right mixture between emotion (without being pathetic) and
ratio (without formal inflexibility). Im convinced that all the time these
two aspects are searching for each other and Bach´s art builds the room for
the play of the vivid tension between them. Form and content are finding in
a magic way together.
Loving Bach for me it was just a question of time, that GG appears on my
horizon.
Through his art I learned a lot about the corresponding voices in Bach and
other´s compositions. GG was addicted to contrapunctual music and structures
at all. The piano was his main vehicel to work this out.
And even if GG seems not to have any technical barrieres in playing the
piano he didn´t stop there, satisfied being one of the greatest pianists in
the world, he went further on, as we know, using the technique of recording
in virtuous ways, in order to work out a deeper sight on the essence of a
composition. Therefore (instead of recording a piece at once) in some
records he found it necessary to unite different recording-takes and
passages of a piece, to get a hole record, that could represent GG´s "best
thoughts" to a composition at this moment.
GG in my opinion has a much wider understanding, of what usually was called
*music*. To him *music* was the relationship of the acting voices (could be
notes, persons (?), phenomens (?) ) of a composition or work of art at all.
I think this is maybe the basic key to understand Gould and his fascination
in art at all, (contrapunctual) music and communication (from a distance
through media).
Therefore he did his experiments like the "idea of the north", where he
combined voices of different people interviewed on the titel theme. By the
first listening it seems to be chaos and confusion by overlapping voices but
while listening conscious the next times one can understand, that GG called
this piece *music* without any written note.
And therefore too, he joined experiments with different mic perspectives
(Listen to it: Sibelius-Sony release - I once saw a TV-Portrait, 2-parted
from B. Monsaigneon, where a Skrijabin recording session using the
mic-experiment-setting was documented - sorry, I don´t know the title and I
haven´t found the Skrijabin (Mic-Mix) recording on CD yet.). Like a director
of a movie combines different camera-zooms and wide-angle shots of a scene,
GG mixed down the input from 5 or 6 Mics receiving the same performance
(installed in different distances to the piano) to one recording and gets a
well dimensioned play of changing mic-perspectives according to Goulds
interpretation. Even in this point GG was going further than being *just* a
pianist. When using the recording-technique in this extraordinary way he
produces a guide to the secrets of a composition in a kind of new
coreographie. GG enters a new meta-level, that goes beyond the possibilities
of playing and interpretation of a score. Here we have an act of composing
on the base of an existing composition.
GG was not interested at the end in what the composer would have ment
writing the piece, or playing note by note, but he makes any effort to
develop the possibilities, the potential and the *elasticity* of the
notationstructure, for this reason i. e. he don´t even disturbs himself on
specifical composer advices (i.e. tempo or pedal).
What would he have done in our digital times and it´s possibilities??

OK - but enough admiration !

Being in good compagnionship in having fun with musical-experiments, years
ago I did one, therefore the purists will blame me for sure: I combined an
election of tracks out of the 1955/59/81-Goldbergs (The 1954 CBC recording
is less important for me) in order to get one piece out of three on a new
CD. Of course each recording is more or less a sequence of tracks with an
intern bow of tension and style and a marvellous artwork on it´s own, but
why not ?

Knowing the Goldbergs by heard and after several trials, I mixed up the
following sequence (and I won´t miss it):

Aria (1955) * Variation No. 1 (1981) * No.2 (55) * No. 3 (81) * No. 4 (81) *
No.5 (81) * No. 6 (55) * No. 7 (59) * No. 8 (81) * No. 9 (81) * No.10 (81) *
No.11 (55) * No. 12 (81) * No.13 (59) * No.14 (81) * No.15 (55) * No.16 (59)
* No.17 (81) * No.18 (55) * No.19 (59) * No.20 (55) * No.21 (81) * No.22
(81) * No.23 (81) * No.24 (55) * No.25 (81) * No.26 (81) * No.27 (55) *
No.28 (59) * No.29 (81) * No.30 (55) * Aria (1959).

At the end - for those who´d like to hear some homemade (no professional)
classical-inspired compositions out of my feather - here is my adress
(sorry, only in German language-and beware the digital piano, it sounds
awful):

www.home.easysixt.de/Scheuvens/index.htm

Thanks

Jörg S.