Re: '55 Goldberg + first listening experience

[Howard Sauertieg <Zoticus@aol.com>]

In a message dated 8/6/2002 9:59:59 PM Mountain Daylight Time, LISTSERV@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU writes:


> But as Glenn Gould  humself said, once we had recordings.what would be the
> point of playing something in exactly the same way as another person? 


Hi, 

I'm new to F Minor but I've been reading your archives on the Web and enjoying your discussions on various Gouldian topics.  This is my first post!  

Interesting comment from Gould, but I wonder if recordings haven't had the opposite effect on musicians and listeners -- tending to promote specific performances as "authentic" or "superior" and establishing standard points of reference for the future.  In actual fact musicians of a high level of proficiency won't play the same piece the same way every time, but if s/he records one performance and puts it on the market, that performance assumes greater significance than the dozens that existed only in "real time" -- it's like a rare fossil that gives rise to numerous theories and chatter about the creature it represents.  More fossils of the same species are useful to science because they help to provide a more accurate picture of  that species.  Thus the value of having several Gould recordings of the Goldbergs. As for performers "changing" the music as written by composers, I guess that's something more extreme than merely "interpreting" a work in an unus!
ual way.  Is it commonly done by recording artists?  Even laymen, if they've heard several recordings of a piece, would know that so-and-so has "rewritten" a section of the music, and that could be detrimental to the artist's image as a purveyor of the classics.  This could be another example of how recordings tend to solidify certain interpretations of a composition and create obstacles to new, more "far out" interpretations.  Maybe we could compare recorded music to Webster's Dictionary, which established uniformity in American spelling and word usage in a very short period of time.  
              
Howard Sauertieg