GG: changing composers' scores

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

Yes, it is/was pretty common for an imaginative interpreter to change
things, whether or not that interpreter is also the composer.

When Rachmaninoff recorded his own G minor prelude (twice: piano roll and
then disc), both times he added notes at the end that are not in the
published edition.  His liberties with Chopin's B-flat minor sonata are
initially startling, but then afterward they've made great sense and it's
hard to hear the piece the usual way anymore.  He interpolated a cadenza
into Liszt's second Hungarian rhapsody.  And his rhythm and tempo in
Bach's D major sarabande (partita #4) are similarly surprising yet
compelling.  All of these examples show an extraordinary interpreter
thinking creatively, not just re-creatively.

Ervin Nyiregyhazi played music as he felt it, changing tempos and dynamics
and even repeating whole sections sometimes, and he couldn't make a
recording of a piece if the producer was sitting there following along
with a score.  It made him too nervous that he was being checked up on.

Leopold Godowsky's piano transcriptions of Bach's solo string music are so
free and lavish that they aren't Bach's music anymore, they are new
compositions.  His Chopin arrangements are like that, too.

Gould's extensive textual departures in his recordings are thoroughly
analyzed in Kevin Bazzana's excellent book _Glenn Gould: The Performer in
the Work_.

Wanda Landowska's recordings of Bach and other composers have plenty of
textual changes, too.  So do the harpsichord recordings of Albert Fuller,
Igor Kipnis, and Ton Koopman, to good effect.  I can think of another
prominent harpsichordist (not named here) whose extensive liberties just
sound to me like a series of silly and arbitrary graffiti...insensitive to
the content and spirit of the music.  Good taste is important....

I've compared Albert Fuller's early recordings of the Rameau harpsichord
works with the remake he did several decades later.  Both are fine, but in
the later one he is much more free with changing the notes and rhythms,
inserting dramatic pauses, changing tempos, etc....taking more chances in
personalizing the music, bending it to make it more expressive.  And it's
compelling because he obviously feels very strongly about the music,
compelling even when none of those interpretive details can be seen in any
existing printed edition.  His performances (like good performances by any
well-focused interpretive musician) have taken on a life of their own:
they give the sense that anything that happens within them will be fine
and convincing.  We might not always know what's coming next, but when it
arrives it makes sense in the context of everything that has gone before.

Ditto for Alfred Cortot's recordings of Chopin and Schumann.  He
italicizes details one wouldn't expect, but the commitment is so strong as
it goes along that everything seems to have a life of its own.

Stravinsky revised his own major works several times, and rerecorded some
of them.  His arrangements of "Happy Birthday" and "The Star-Spangled
Banner" are pretty wild.  And his ballet "Pulcinella" is a modern
reworking of pieces by Baroque composer Pergolesi, heard through new ears.

When I perform my own (admittedly humble) compositions, I change some of
the ideas in them almost every time.  The works are always in flux,
sometimes with improvised changes, sometimes with composed changes.  Some
of the pieces are *about* that process...for example, I have a
"Make-Believe Rag" which started as a combination of two Scott Joplin
rags, and then each time I prepare a performance I (cumulatively) change
more of the notes, writing in new ideas that have less and less to do with
Joplin...the piece still sounds familiar enough to be recognizable, but
the process of entropy has made it like what one might hear in a strange
dream, where the world is not quite as one expected.  (That's also sort of
the effect I get from listening to some of Stravinsky's music, or Conlon
Nancarrow's studies for player piano, or indeed many of Glenn Gould's
recordings of anything familiar.  There's something teasingly otherworldly
about them.)

Then there are the modern productions of classic operas, by directors such
as Peter Sellars.  Opera fans can say more about this than I can, but I've
heard that some of these are so deeply changed and modernized that the
works are almost unrecognizable.  Similarly, when classic movies are
remade in a later generation, some elements are preserved while others are
new.

-----

In the booklet notes of Joao Carlos Martins' recording of the
Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, the annotator wrote:

Previously unknown work by reclusive twentieth-century master

Many of the most ambitious modern composers have produced long keyboard
pieces that are designed to explore particular compositional ideas
exhaustively. (...) The latest of these modern masterpieces is
"Well-Tempered Clavier" (1988), an exhaustive keyboard work by the young
German composer J. S. Bach, reportedly a recluse who has never before
made his compositions publicly available. (Rumor has it that since the
composer uses only initials for first names, he may be a woman. This
mystery perhaps accounts for why Bach does not allow him/herself to be
photographed and why his/her whereabouts are, like those of the American
author Thomas Pynchon, always unknown.) It should be made clear that this
"Well-Tempered Clavier" is not the classic work incidentally of the same
title, by an eighteenth-century composer with a similar name, but
something else--a thoroughly contemporary composition, richly eclectic and
challenging in the ways that only modern music can be.

This new Bach work was discovered by Joao Carlos Martins, the celebrated
Brazilian pianist whose name is incidentally identical to that of a
precocious keyboard player, deceased in the wake of a tragic sports
accident, who recorded the classic work as a young man some twenty years
ago. (...)

It has been speculated that this new "Well-Tempered Clavier", coming as it
does from a composer who otherwise has no public existence, was actually
written by the late Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, who until now was
most successful at bringing Bach into the twentieth century. There is no
question that if Gould would have written piano music, he would have
written something as audacious, well-proportioned and exhaustive. There is
no doubt in my mind, as Gould's sometime friend, that the composer of this
contemporary "Well-Tempered Clavier" is someone else, this mysterious
Mr./Ms. J. S. Bach and then that this is the sort of masterful music that
many well-known modern composers would have sold their grandmothers to
have written two minutes of. (...)

- notes by Richard Kostelanetz

(Volume 2 of Martins' recording has more normal historical/analytical
notes from Eric Salzman)



Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
clavichord CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
trumpet and organ: http://www.mp3.com/hlduo

I dislike lined paper.  My thoughts don't fit into lines that are all the
same size.  - BPL, 9/15/01


Jorgen Lundmark wrote:
>Arne Klindt wrote:
>
>> Yet to me this is what classical music should be about nowadays: take
>> a composition and render it according to your own ideas, lifelines,
>> subjectivity. Can little black specks on crunched and reglued trees
>> really serve to create an objective recreation of a piece of music? Is
>> that what the composer wishes for? (see also "The Glass-Bead-Game" by
>> H. Hesse)
>> Maybe GG was WAY ahead of his time in taking liberties with the texts
>> he worked on...
>>
>
>These are definitely very interesting and important questions. Gould
>isn't the first artist to "rethink" or expand on the written text.
>Chopin is spoken of as playing his own music differently from what he
>himself indicated in the score, and this would probably also be true
>with master improvisers as J.S.Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. I
>believe Bach's many re-arrangements of his own and other composers'
>music does indicate his willingness to experiment with the text.
>
>The question of absolute fidelity to what is written is, I would guess,
>rather a modern concept; the romantics would probably have found the
>idea strange. I don't think any musician strives for "objective
>recreation", which in reality is impossible since the listener always
>creates his own understanding of what is performed. Tradition is on the
>other hand vital, since no-one creates in a vacuum.
>
>Whether Gould went too far in relationship to either historically
>informed concepts or what is regarded as "sound" keyboard practises is,
>in my opinion, less interesting than the immense emotional impact of his
>recordings.
>
>Regards,
>Jorgen