Re: Gould's 1st contrapunctus

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 06:10 PM 4/17/01 +0200, Juozas Rimas wrote:
> What do you think about it (the piano rendition if an organ/haprsichord one
> exists)?
>
> I personally love the first half. At 2:40 he starts playing much staccato
> although this is an interesting twist. One thing I do not like about the
> recording is his HUMMING while playing those two moments separated by pauses
> near the end. Why on earth? There are four quiet notes played simultaneously
> there and the fifth is Gould voice. Let him hum everywhere else but not in
> that
> hyper-subtle and quiet fragment! :)) And he's humming on BOTH of the moments.
> And aren't the pauses a little too long? (my listening experience was
> interrupted by waiting for the pauses to end:)

This afternoon I tried ticking along with him through those pauses, keeping
constant negative acceleration (in the sense of "acceleration" in physics)
according to the rallentando of his preceding measures...tapping along on
the desk.  The first pause ended *exactly* on time.  The second one ended a
little early (!) the first time I tried it, then exactly on time in my
second try.  On my third try I found Gould's entrance to be early
again.  (Try it yourself!)  Obviously there's some room for interpretation
in there, rubato (!) of those silent notes.  But whether he was on time or
early, clearly Gould was counting those individual eighth-notes all the way
through the rests.  Suub-diiii--viiiiiiiiiid----innnnnnnnnnnnng....

Silent notes have the same speed relationships as audible notes.  :)

Constant acceleration is like the bounces of a ball.  In a rallentando, as
here, it's like watching the ball on a film run backwards.

If Bach's metric notation is to be believed, though, this piece should be
felt at the level of the half-notes (cut-C meter in both the manuscript
version and the print).  Gould plays it at the level of the
eighth-notes.  To play it at the quarter-note level would be "to miss the
forest for the trees," so I suppose Gould's performance at the eighth-note
level is "missing the forest for the bark on the trees."  Hummm, what
interesting bark these trees have!  Hummmmmmm!  Hummm hummm
hummmmmmmm!  Who else but Gould would take a piece that has two beats per
measure and play it with eight beats per measure and at half speed?

Incidentally, Vladimir Feltsman on MusicMasters 67173 plays this at a
slightly slower tempo (5'04") than Gould (4'51"), but he plays it as
half-notes and it doesn't seem as slow.  The difference is in the way
Feltsman lets the groups of four eighth-notes flow as a unit while Gould
places every note individually.  That is, Feltsman plays it in 2/2 rather
than Gould's 8/8 or 4/4.

That Gould and his X-ray
vision!
"Note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-note-...."
rather than a gracefully flowing
"Dooooooowwwwwwnnnn-uuuuuuupppppppppp."  It's interesting, in the way that
dissecting a frog is interesting.    Poor froggy.  Science teaches us that
frogs have interesting internal organs, and that frogs die when cut
open.  (Don't blame me for this: Gould himself wrote about dissecting the
music through his recordings.)

For completeness, why didn't Sony include Gould's Contrapunctus 1 from the
early film?  Wasn't it in "Off the Record," a performance at the
cottage?  If I remember correctly, it was slow but seemed more like a 2/2
than an 8/8.



Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
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"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot