Re: GG...and that harpsichord

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 10:40 PM 7/9/2000 -0700, Jim Morrison wrote:
> I'm still listening to the infamous Handel disc in question, and I must say
> I do enjoy the prelude to Bach f# fugue, BMV 883, track 27.
> Gould seems to have gotten the odd sounding harpsichord right on this piece.

...But he didn't use the buff stop on that one.  He did use it on the E
major prelude.  And his WHAM WHAM WHAM keyboard touch on both those pieces
is even more brutal than on the Handel....  <shudder>  And the 16-foot stop
is horribly out of tune........

> And I'm curious, how does Gould's use of this rubbery sound a few years
> before he lost cd318 or got involved in the soundtrack to Slaughterhouse
> Five affect Bradley's ideas on why GG made his harpsichord sound so
> plastic/elastic. (Dare we say, fantastic?)

Well, those TV recordings from 1970 (the two Bach P&F's) are indeed from
before the Slaughterhouse-Five and the loss of CD318, but I think you've
maybe misread what I said.  It's quite possible that I didn't express
myself very well, though....

I said that the bizarre interpretation of the prelude of the Handel A major
suite, with the hands totally disjointed from one another, sounds perhaps
Slaughterhouse-Five-ish.  That has nothing to do with registration (the
choice of the "rubbery" buff stop or not).  It just sounds like
experimentation, or maybe an outright prank.  Handel didn't specify how the
rhythm should go, so GG gave us two amorphous parts crossing back and forth
over one another, aimlessly.  Very odd.

I also said that I thought GG was riding along with the 1960's/early 70's
pop fad of using harpsichord as a novelty sound.  The buff stop sounds fun
and exotic, it commands attention (at least for the first minute of its
use), so there it is.  I suspect that some of the reason GG used it so much
was that it sounds different from everybody else.  In Columbia's own
stables, the organist E Power Biggs was doing his own series of Bach,
Joplin, Tchaikovsky, etc. on the pedal harpsichord as a fresh sound, and
the young Anthony Newman was also doing harpsichord and organ recordings
every bit as idiosyncratic as GG's work.  The more established
harpsichordist Igor Kipnis was recording for Columbia's daughter label,
Epic.  And Switched-On Bach was all the rage, and GG its biggest fan: the
wilder the tone colors, the better.  This Handel album is to me a child of
its time, GG having a go on the coattails of Columbia's other harpsichord
projects, not to mention the popularity of harpsichord in studio work in
pop music.  Cash in!

More on that Wittmayer: it is one of those modern "concert" instruments
resembling no particular historical style.  It was a machine-produced
instrument, not hand-crafted.  The basic 8-foot sound is bland and even
(rather than having much variety of tone color from octave to octave), and
so the variety comes from adding and subtracting the special effects.  Buff
stops, a 4-foot stop (plays an octave higher), and a 16-foot stop (plays an
octave lower).  On this type of instrument, the action and voicing are such
that the player's release of the key is not a very significant event; that
is, the action doesn't allow much expression in this area, especially when
the buff stops are on.  This is like giving a speech where none of the
words are allowed to end in consonants, only vowels.

Furthermore, on the evidence of this recording, the bass of this Wittmayer
is woefully inadequate.  It's just a muddy mess of dull thuds down there,
probably due to the fact that the soundboard is not doing much.  The note
in the CD booklet is telling: GG reported that this harpsichord was about 5
to 6 feet long.  That's barely long enough for an adequate set of strings
at concert pitch ("8-foot").  Strike one.  Then a 16-foot set is added to
that; physically they should be twice as long to play an octave lower, but
they obviously can't be in such a short case, so instead they're made
thicker and flabbier.  That's strike two.  Then a 4-foot set is added,
anchored into the soundboard since those strings are only half as long as
the 8-foot set.  The presence of a 4-foot stop once again reduces the
overall basic resonance of the instrument, since the soundboard is now
carrying that hitchpin rail and therefore has more mass and less
resilience.  Strike three.  To support all these competing tensions, the
case is made of heavy wood and therefore doesn't resonate much
itself.  Strike four.  The foreshortened 16-foot strings are so thick that
plastic plectra won't work on them; the only option is thick stiff leather
plectra there, and those make a bluh-bluh-bluh dull pluck instead of
anything crisp.  Strike five (not that the 16' is contributing much
anyway).  Result of all these strikes: a weak and muddy sound with no
projection.  To make up for that basic inadequacy, the builder puts on a
couple of buff stop mechanisms to give added variety.  Whoo-hoo, more
choices, all of them tonally lousy!

As harpsichords go, the Wittmayer (along with the Sperrhake and Ammer,
those other German factory-production instruments) is one of the dullest in
tone, not suited to much of anything as a solo instrument.  It doesn't do
well in the scrutiny of a closely-miked recording.  By contrast, on a
well-built harpsichord in a suitable room, a good player can play an entire
recital on a single 8-foot set of strings and there will be enough interest
and contrast.  All those changes of registration aren't necessary if the
basic sound is well designed (with enough variety from octave to octave)
and if the player knows how to deliver the music with expressive phrasing
and articulation.  But on a bad harpsichord such as these factory
instruments, the player has to work like the dickens to get any interesting
musical results at all, since the sound has little character and the action
doesn't respond to subtlety.

So much for the instrument.  Now on to GG:

There is such a thing as practicing on the instrument one is going to
record with.  For someone who was as good at touch control as GG, it's
dismaying that he didn't at least give a half-hearted attempt to adapt his
technique to the harpsichord's mechanism.  Clearly he already had the type
of finger control that could have transferred well to harpsichord (as
evidenced by fast quiet passages on piano, beautifully controlled -- e.g.,
the Mozart sonata in the Salzburg recital, since we're talking about that
this week).  But he totally underestimated the level of finger expression
that he *could have* had available to him (even on this bad example of a
harpsichord) if he'd just worked at it seriously.  It's mostly an art of
listening carefully to the sound, and adjusting one's tempos and touch to
what the instrument is doing naturally.

But instead of allowing his fingers and ears to learn something from the
harpsichord's action and sound, he just power-drove the poor thing as if it
were a malnourished piano.  He treated the harpsichord as something to be
battled, not as a cooperative friend.  He imposed interpretations that go
against the instrument's ability to bring linear clarity to the musical
texture.  His heavily muscular touch, his tempos, his phrasing, his shivery
fast trills, and those bizarre registrations all conspired to make hash of
the music.  (In GG's defense I'll grant that maybe this is a reasonable way
to handle a Wittmayer, pretending it is something else.)  Given that the
Wittmayer was not inclined to deliver anything beyond a wimpy delicacy,
GG's performances would have been more successful here if he had at least
treated that thin sound as a virtue, and explored it on its own terms.  To
my ears, the most successful track on that entire CD is #2, where GG uses a
single 8' stop, a sensitive touch, and a moderate tempo.  (Well, the repeat
of the first half with buff stop has to be ignored.  Ugh!)  Track 11 also
isn't too bad, except that his touch is a lot heavier and so is his humming.

In my opinion, the overall musical result on this album is: his
performances don't have the usual levels of GG clarity that his piano
performances do.  Beyond the weird registrations that call attention to
themselves as novelties, GG's interpretations seem to have nothing to do
with the fact that this isn't a piano.  If instead he had taken a couple of
months to learn some things about playing the harpsichord expressively, and
had hired a better instrument for this gig....

It's particularly sad because GG knew better.  When the Bach Partitas were
issued as an LP set (with a foldout purple cover), GG provided a liner note
about playing contrapuntal music on the piano.  He described how on the
harpsichord one can play for hours without undue effort, due to the way the
instrument naturally brings out the counterpoint with "marvelous clarity,"
but on the piano everything has to be balanced carefully and it takes more
work and concentration if the counterpoint is to have this linear
clarity.  (I wish I had this album handy to give the exact quote, but
that's the gist of his argument as I remember it.  Anybody have it?)  And
he's right, of course, if talking about a good harpsichord played as a
harpsichord.  So now, here we have a recording of GG playing harpsichord
himself, and he does everything he can to go *against* the harpsichord's
natural strengths.  Frustrating!

So, my objection to this recording is in two directions: (1) it's not up to
GG's own musical standards, anywhere near his abilities to present music
with textural and intellectual clarity.  It just doesn't make GG sound like
anything special.  It's like Michael Jordan playing baseball.  And (2) it
features a basically dull instrument (a bad-quality example of a
harpsichord) played in such a way as to make it sound even more inadequate
than it is.  Borrowing a useful phrase from John Hill, GG makes the
harpsichord "sound like crap."  It gives the harpsichord a bad reputation
that something this amateurish was released as a serious presentation of
Handel's music.  (By "amateurish" there I refer to the bad instrument and
GG's amateurish playing technique, despite the strong musical intellect
behind it.)  If there is a listener somewhere who has never had any
exposure to harpsichord music except this album, this is some pretty
hazardous material.

All that said, I still think it's fun to listen to, just to hear GG's ideas
about these compositions, and as a 1972 novelty.

And I still feel that this disc could have been so much better if GG had
just taken the instrument seriously.  His famous claim that he was
deliberately going against the harpsichord here has always seemed to me a
major "cop-out" (again borrowing some 1970's jargon), a poor excuse for not
practicing.  Why would a serious and thoughtful musician settle for one of
the worst available harpsichords and then not learn how to play it,
either?  What was the point of doing this recording at all?  Sure, his own
piano was fatally injured by December '71 and he had a contract to do some
Handel in March-May '72...under the circumstances, why not postpone it
until either a suitable piano could be found, or until GG could develop
some harpsichord technique?  Even a good solid *week* of practice on that
harpsichord during those months would have helped.  (Ditto for the Art of
Fugue recordings on organ, where similarly he didn't practice on
organ.  What is to be gained by not playing an instrument as what it is?)

One listening technique that I've found helps this recording: listen to it
at a much lower volume setting than normal, even lower than the Wittmayer's
weak level.

> (...) [Jim Svejda], like Bryce Morrison, raves about Richter and
> Gavrilov's recordings of
> the Handel suites.  Anyone ever heard them?  I like them, but their
> superlativeness flies past my ear.  So Bradley, who does do the Handel
> Suites well?

I've been happy enough with the Richter/Gavrilov on piano, and the single
disc by Bob van Asperen on harpsichord (Sony 68260).  I don't find any of
those earth-shatteringly interesting, though.


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