More on "keys" from GG himself

[aq094@lafn.org (Eugene Selig)]

This may shed more light on this topic, which I recently addressed. There 
is a film produced by the CBC in 1970 called "The Well-Tempered Listener."
It was, suprisingly, not documented in many of several books on GG. 
In it, Curtis Davis, then director of cultural programming for NET, discusses 
J.S. Bach's WTC, as the title implies, with GG making comments as well as 
playing musical examples on both harpsichord and piano. (The film was shown 
on my local PBS TV station about 10 years ago, and since VCR's were not as 
commonplace then, I only made an audio cassette of it.)
When focusing on the sets of preludes and fugues designed to exploit the 
new tempered tuning, Davis pointed out that Bach transposed a sketch 
for a fugue written originally in C major to C sharp major because he 
needed a piece in that key to make the set complete. The fugue was then 
expanded in its new key. GG's response was one he commonly gave when the 
matter of his playing Baroque music on the 20th Century piano arose. He 
steadfastly held that Bach was not concerned about timbres, given that he 
happily transcribed the same work for different instruments. Furthermore, 
such transcriptions often involved transposition as well. Then, after 
mentioning Chopin's, and particularly Scriabin's fixation on the 
"characteristics" of different keys (some were "bright," some were 
"lascivious," etc.), he added his own whimsical comment about the two 
keys involved in Davis' example, saying that Bach would take a piece in C 
major, "a pure, upstanding, solid citizen key," and transpose it to C 
sharp major, "a slightly dirty-old-man key."
This should convey that GG is definitely referring to KEY, not any scale, 
and that as an exponent of the Baroque era, key signature had no 
"interpretation," and that his description of himself as "f minor" was a 
spoof of those composers who did allude to keys as having significance 
beyond their usually arbitrary selection (except, of course when 
instrumental or vocal ranges dictated a practical key.)