Re: unrecorded keyboard

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Uh oh,

Juozas is taking us down the "question of instrument" road.

My two cents worth is that harpsichord or piano are fine for the music.
What matter most to me is if I get an, admittedly subjective, sense of soul
from the performer.  People not use to listening to harpsichords, and until
recently I was one, can have trouble detecting that quality because they
need to teach themselves  to listen differently than they listen to piano
recordings, and they need to get their hands on great harpsichord discs in
order to get educated. It's a bit unfair, isn't it, comparing some of
Gould's incredible Bach recordings to some lackluster harpsichord
recordings, and to thereby conclude that there must be something wrong with
the instrument, when the more significant issues were actually with the
performer or the recording engineers or the people who made the harpsichord.

It took me months of listening to harpsichord recordings in order to come to
what I think of as a significant appreciation of the instrument.  Maybe
you'd be better off starting with some harpsichord concerti or harpsichord
and violin sonatas as your recordings to try to better familiarize yourself
with the instrument.  Or maybe not.  The point is I'm pretty sure it will
take time and commitment, time you may not have to spare.  I think the
rewards are worth it though.  Great harpsichord performances, in my
experience, can be extremely subtle, due partly to the restraints of the
instrument.   Trying to appreciate these harpsichord recordings has
increased my ability to appreciate such subtle in music.  Maybe I'm just
showing off my musical naivete, but I'm sure I have a keener appreciation
for *music* now having gone through this harpsichord education.


One thing you have to train yourself to get use to is the relatively lack of
volume dynamics in harpsichord playing.  Such dynamics, as well as
articulation and tempo, are  some of the most prominent features of piano
recordings.  And such dynamics are certainly not as abundant  or as extreme
as on harpsichord recordings as they are on piano records.  But perhaps, and
I'm sure Bradley can say more about this, the churning produced by the
volume dynamics of the piano isn't something necessary to Bach's keyboard
works.  I can be fun to listen to.  I know I enjoy it.  But perhaps we
should complain too much about harpsichord recordings lacking these because,
in actuality, they are a kind of gloss to the deeper meaning of the music.

I know one of the things I love about Gould is his restraint in such
matters, and one thing that annoys me about some other pianist is their
over-use and sometimes unimaginative and cliched changes in volume.

With harpsichord recordings you've got to start listening for other areas of
interest because if you're mind is set on hearing the dynamic changes of a
piano, then you're pretty much guaranteed not to enjoy a certain section of
music that people have been making for the last four to five hundred years.

It helped me to listen to the sound of the harpsichord, the sheer harmonics
of the sound, the timbre and color  of the instrument, the sound of the
tuning.  The choice of instrument, I think, in learning to appreciate
harpsichord recordings is more important than, say, the choice of piano.
Not that all pianos are the same, it's just that there seems to me a greater
change from harpsichord to harpsichord, and if you're listening to a
relatively mechanical and dull harpsichord changes are you won't like the
performance, even though the person at the keyboard may be working magic.

The description of the harpsichord performance you mentioned brought to mind
a couple of visual analogies.

You're experience reminded me a bit of how I feel sometimes while watching a
documentary film that makes use of black-and-while still photos.  You know,
the way the camera pans around the image, trying, and often succeeding, at
adding movement and energy to the singular photo.  Now imagine a bad example
of such a sequence in which it doesn't seem to add anything, the motion of
a camera over a still photo.

That is to say, the performance as you describe it, as you certainly
experience it, seems monochromatic and lacking in organic movement that's
inherent to its condition.  What movement you do sense in the image is of an
artist playing the notes.  The artist isn't adding much  movement and energy
to the piece, he's merely showing you in a linear fashion what notes exist
on the score.  (To go back to the movie analogy, you're response might be
"stop that silly panning and just show me the picture.")

And yet, when I listen to a great harpsichord performance, I hear music that
reminds of the opening images of that great French film "Time Regained."
Anybody know that recent film? It's out on videotape now. Well the opening
credits are run over a lovely full screen image of flowing water, (very
impressive on the big screen where I was lucky enough to see it) a
sundappled water of a stream low and clear enough to see the small  rocks in
its  the bed.  Only the camera again doesn't stay still and hold the image
steady, but rather moves in the direction that the stream is flowing in.
The harpsichordists I enjoy the most keep the music flowing and yet add
those moving ripples that I see in the Proust film, water ripples with a
little extra magic to them because the movement of the camera adds movement
to the water and the ripples.

Many performers, harpsichordists and pianists, have trouble or either don't
try to keep the music flowing *and* add those special ripples.  Some move
through the music on a smooth surface,  probably like the performance you
have.  Others, like Rubsam, create such a "geodesic" turbulence and rippling
that the flow can almost cease.  Perahia is good at keeping the flow going,
and while he does vary his phrasing, he doesn't vary it as much as some
harpsichordists.  Gould gets both in.

It's hard to get this across in words.  What you really need is a great
harpsichord recording to listen to side by side with a decent piano
recording of the same work.  You'd hear, for example, how Parmentier creates
interest in the first movement of Bach's first partita by ever so slightly
changing the way notes are grouped in similar phrases repeated throughout
the movement, phrases that even good  pianists can play in the same manner
over and over again.  Listen for slight hesitations, and slight increases in
tempo.  Nothing so extreme as Rubsam, but I suspect Rubsum has been
attending harpsichord recitals.  Due to the natural short sustaining
capabilities of the harpsichord, it makes sense to try to keep the music
flowing, otherwise it will fall apart.

That is to say, I hear a greater sense of spontaneity and variety in the
phrasing of harpsichord performers than I do with some famous Bach on piano
performers.  That's the sort of thing you  have to train yourself to listen
to, the sort of thing you have to work through the "metallic" sound and the
lack of volume dynamics to get to.

Jim

Oh, here's a PS to this rather lenghty email.  It seems to me that composers
work with the instruments they grew up with and the ones they are familiar
with, and that they don't spend a whole lot of time wishing they had a
different instrument and instead work with the one at hand and in mind.  The
step from harpsichord to piano is a radical one and though there may be
exceptions I'm looking over, I can't recall any composer making such a huge
leap from one instrument for which they composed significant literature to
another related, though vastly different instrument.  That is to say,
suspect Bach worried more about the strength of his compositions and the
abilities of the performers to bring his music to life much more than he
worried about what the harpsichord could not do.  To imagine Bach writing
for the piano is really to imagine Bach as being from another time than the
one that shaped him, perhaps making him not Bach at all, but here we get
into the rather slippery realm of trans-world identity.  Rachmaninov  didn't
write for the harpsichord or the synthesizer and Bach didn't write for the
piano, and it seems to me that there is the ground we must stand on.