Re: Gould's 1st contrapunctus + finger substitutions

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

> 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.


1959.  It's the slowest of all: 5'17" and overwhelmingly intense.  Yet it
always seems like 2/2 rather than falling into 4/4 or 8/8 (as the 1981 film
performance does, 4'51").  It's like some giant medieval pendulum swinging
with absolute regularity.  There's no huge rallentando into the silences,
either.  (The piece doesn't need it....)  There's no conducting.  There is
lots of humming.  And Gould goes into staccato at measure 48, same as he
would do in the 1981 performance.  He didn't do that in the 1962 organ
recording, which is almost twice as fast, 2'45".  That one is more detached
throughout.

For my money that 1959 performance on film is the best of the
three.  Wasn't there any way to unmix the film soundtrack and put this onto
CD?  (The exposition is mixed with some Lake Simcoe water noises, and we
see GG walking with his dog in the woods.  Then at measure 18 the picture
cuts to GG at the Chickering for the rest of the piece.)

This brings us to a topic I've never seen discussed here: finger
substitution.  The close-ups on his hands show evidence of (1) organ
training and (2) improvised fingerings (never writing them into his scores,
as he boasted later).  He frequently plays a note with one finger (or
sometimes with 4 and 5 together!) and then switches to hold it with a
different finger.  This is occasionally necessary if one wants an absolute
legato on the organ, but it also betrays a disinclination to plan
ahead.  There's one place where GG plays 5(4)-5(4)-5(4)-5 in the soprano
where a simple 4-5-4-5 (4 crossing over 5) works perfectly well and can be
equally legato.  Even more tellingly, there's a place (measure 26) where GG
plays an alto note with 4, switches to 5, and switches back to 4...even
though 4 and 3 have nothing else to do during any of that!  It's as if he
automatically swaps out to 5 whenever he *might* need the rest of his hand
for something, but he doesn't need to know ahead of time.

(Incidentally, the Art of Fugue can be played with few finger substitutions
anywhere.  One simply has to solve it like a practical puzzle, and it's
wonderfully satisfying to get it.  As Robert Hill points out in the notes
of his first recording, "Nowhere else in Bach's harpsichord music does he
demand such understanding of the secrets of fingering, as in the _Art of
Fugue_."  The piece is near the limit of what ten fingers can do on a
keyboard, but there is only one note anywhere that is not playable as
written: measure 59 of the three-voiced mirror fugue.)

What does this say about GG's fingering technique?  Not so much, except
that GG learned his pieces by memory as disembodied music rather than as a
succession of physical motions.  The physical motions are secondary to
projecting the musical idea...even when it comes down to a lot of wasted
motion with finger substitutions and other contortions.  GG's fingering was
improvised, probably never the same way twice.  (That's probably true of
any good sight-reader.)

Also, such extensive finger-swapping doesn't work very well except at
especially slow tempos, as here.  Case in point: I saw a place where he
played a descending line 5-4(5)-4 in eighth notes.  There's no time for
that swap at a more normal tempo in this piece.

It's not a bad thing _per se_ to use finger substitutions...but it can be
an awfully difficult habit to break, if one tries to break it.  And it can
make the hands tired more quickly than simple fingering does.

But heck, if GG's gonna play the piece *that* intensely and overwhelmingly,
I don't care what fingers he's using to do so.


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