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Re: '55 Goldberg + first listening experience
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