Re: GG: Art of Fugue, and 12 tone

[John Hill <jphill@home.com>]

Elisha J Tseng wrote:

> He made an analogy of a comment by Robert Schumann (and I'm just
> paraphrasing this): Within the deep forest admist a gamut of noises,
> there is this silence and this one single but soft note wavering in the
> air.  Only a few special people can hear it and appreciate it.

I think that's more a statement of how people within our society are 
"conditioned" to hear music, both popular and "classical".   Bach has
never been very popular within the mainstream of "classical"
musicians and listeners.  He's a bit better know than, say, Ockegem
or Machaut or Webern, but not by much.  Contrapuntal music is not
particularly high on most people's lists and that's too bad.  I think that
with just a bit more exposure and some education, it might be much
more widely enjoyed and appreciated.

> Another comment he said, was that, like the Goldberg Variations, Kunst
> der Fuge must be played--during performance--in its entirety.

I would tend not to agree.  Leaving aside the fact that I *can't* play the
whole thing from start to finish, I think some of the pieces can stand
very nicely on their own.
 
> Same thing he said about the second Viennese school, and the composers
> were just artists trying to break the old mould of "Romanticism," but it
> died anyway because of unpopularity.  Many people I know either never
> heard of Schoenberg or just dismissed him as one would with the Dada
> anti-art fad after WW I.

Again, that's unfortunate, because there are many great pieces and wonderful
moments to be enjoyed there.  But what can we expect from a musical culture
that idolizes Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks and Metallica and thinks that Mozart
is the be-all and end-all of Western art music?  Hey, while we're at it, how about
*non*-Western musics?

> The situation disturbed me somewhat, or GG was wrong about his opinion
> that every man has the ability to comprehend these difficult styles when
> given the chance (GG example in the Two Portrait of an 8 month old child
> raised exclusively on 12-tone music).  At any rate, I had to return the
> KDF to the library and stopped working on it at my mom's request.

Gould was wrong about lots of things (like Petula Clark & Tony Hatch being
more important in the long run than the Beatles!).  But in that particular sequence,
Franz Kramer postulated that a child would build it's own songs with members
of it's peer group and that they probably would *not* have been 12-tone in
nature.

Wow, it's disturbing to me that you stopped working on a *great* piece of music
simply because your Mom didn't understand it.  If you like this piece, I would
recommend that you go out immediately, buy it and start learning it cover to
cover.  It's an amazing work and arguably a good example of Bach writing in
a very "pure", contemplative, inward style.

jh