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Re: Speaking in Tongues
At 05:18 PM 9/19/2000 +0100, Birgitte Jorgensen wrote:
Mike wrote in response to Bradley Lehman's post:
Thanks for that outstanding explanation of the one player
problem in the Art of Fugue. Not even GG could have explained
it better. Grade: A+
Even though the practice of competitive grading goes against the Gouldian
grain, I'll give Bradley an Olympian 9.9 out of 10 for his essay. He loses
one-tenth of a point for not mentioning Gould even once in his otherwise
outstanding analysis of Bach's fiendish art of fugue.
So I was supposed to mention GG gratuitously, even though GG didn't play
the movements in question (Cp 12, 13, 18, and the canons) in his commercial
recording? <smirk> :)
OK, in the Sony release (GG Edition) there's that radio version of GG
playing Cp 13 on piano, but note: GG plays only one half of it! (GG
doesn't play the mirror version that has the famous unplayable note in
it.) And, uncharacteristically for GG, he rushes the
tempo...nerves? Moreover, GG misses the last soprano note of m28;
simplifies the alto in m35 (mis-memorized?); and smudges a note in
m37. (As I said, this piece takes a bit of luck to come off
perfectly...even for Our Hero. If a piece trips up Glenn Gould
technically, making him tense up and miss notes and rush, you *know* it's
tricky.) I suspect that GG's assessment of these mirror fugues would be
that they are "deucedly awkward." They are.
More than 200 years ahead of his time, Bach sympathetically anticipated the
psychological phenomenon of terror that a deer experiences on the highway:
freezing and staring into the oncoming headlights. This phenomenon is
written into the mirror fugues, hidden in the spaces between the
notes. Brilliant. (It is not known whether deer are aware of this
composition, however.) As Pablo Casals pointed out, "Bach is the
profoundest of every feeling."
How's that for rectifying the incompleteness?
Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl