GG and clarity

["Brad Lehman" <bpl@umich.edu>]

Allan McLeod wrote:

>7.  It would be interesting to speculate on the possibility that without
>Gould the original music people would have never got a hearing.  Gould
>to some extent resurrected Gould's keyboard music, but more importantly,
>with his stress on clarity of lines in polyphonic music he prepared the
>way for performances that  put clarity above all else.  And the thing
>critics most often praise the original instrument performances for is
>their ability to bring out heretofore unheard inner voices.  Well Gould
>always did that and did it superbly well.

Understood.  But to give GG that much speculative credit for resurrecting
[Bach's] keyboard music is like giving an American politician credit for
inventing the Internet.

Certainly GG was widely influential, especially because of his eventual
popularity, but Bach's music was not in need of resurrection because it
wasn't
dead.  Pianists from Beethoven and Czerny forward have treated the WTC as
"the pianist's Old Testament".   Ervin Nyiregyhazi and others of his
generation
(early 20th century) learned the WTC so well that they could transpose any
part
of it from memory.  Edwin Fischer, Serge Rachmaninoff, Claudio Arrau, and
many
other pianists recorded Bach (and many wrote books about it) long before GG.
In this forum I hardly need mention GG's artistic debt to Rosalyn Tureck.
In
published interviews she has described the way she got the emphasis on voice
independence from her own teachers.

On the original instruments side, harpsichordists who recorded before any of
GG's influence include Wanda Landowska, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Yella Pessl,
Violet
Gordon-Woodhouse, Alice Ehlers, Rudolph Dolmetsch, Gustav Leonhardt, and far
too many more to list.  See Larry Palmer's book _Harpsichord in America_ for
an excellent survey of the European and North American keyboard pioneers of
this century.

-----

As for ensemble music, a few simple tenets take care of at least 90% of the
clarity issues:

- Clarity comes from musical lines articulated and phrased with individual
integrity.  Heterophony, not homophony.  Good ensembles play in this manner
(i.e. musically!) in the appropriate types of music.  Contrapuntal
independence, not big blocks of sound where everybody's line is submerged.

- Generally, a small ensemble of one or a few players/singers per part will
start with greater clarity than big groups.

- Excessive vibrato obscures ensemble textures; use it as an expressive
ornament, not a constant.

- Room acoustics determine tempo choices and the degree to which lines must
be articulated to make their effects.

- In recording, microphone type and placement are also crucial to clarity.

- Clarity has far less to do with hardware (the instruments) than with
software
(musical priorities).  Otto Klemperer and other mainstream conductors were
getting well-articulated Baroque performances and reducing orchestra size
from
the 1930's or earlier.

The current original-instrument groups tend to be small ensembles.  The
players tend to have studied the appropriate treatises (by Quantz, Muffat,
Geminiani, etc.) which influence the ways in which they bow and tongue their
phrases.  Some conductors (e.g. Herreweghe, Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, Parrott)
get their instrumentalists to phrase like singers, with attention to meaning
and language.  For all the reasons listed above, it's not at all surprising
that there is much greater clarity in their Bach performances than from,
say,
the Berlin Philharmonic's under Karajan.  Microphones are better these days,
too.

-----

None of this is to put down GG's contributions.  He brought
multi-dimensional
clear textures to music that some others played uni-dimensionally: he played
as if he were an ensemble.  He played analytically, with the creativity and
adventurousness of a composer.  He was left-handed, which in Baroque
keyboard
music is an advantage because the music is often led by the bass line.  He
was
trained as an organist: independence of at least three parts of the body.
And
through his own ability to draw fans, he introduced repertoire to listeners
who
otherwise wouldn't have got to know it.

Meanwhile, I believe a large-scale turn toward clarity would have happened
in
musical society anyway, with or without GG's participation.  GG "didn't
start
the fire," to borrow a phrase from Billy Joel.

-----
Bradley Lehman
Dayton, VA
bpl@umich.edu
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl