Tempos, dynamics and articulation, not to mention characterization – all of this is generally left up to the interpreter. The page doesn’t reveal all of its secrets it can’t be precisely defined. Nevertheless, from a modern perspective, there’s still much vagueness urtext thinkers didn’t know yet how to nail him down. He wrote out much of the desired embellishments into the score with such interwoven precision and detail that he left little to be filled in or changed. He didn’t want to give his compositions over in rounded-out form so that any hack musician could improvise his way over them left and right, as was the custom of his époque. Bach was one of the most careful editors of his time. How can you define what’s just and right for a style if it’s so unclear in the text? It was a conundrum for urtext thinkers. He made his way into the Establishment through the hazy back-door of urtext thought, J. Gould was the first bad-boy of the Urtext Age. Only much later would I begin to understand the genius of the Canadian recluse, but his stamp was deeply embedded in my psyche from the very beginning. That was my introduction to Classical Music, J. Occasionally I would turn it up for a moment to see if we were in sync… Taking him at his word, I put it on every night for a year or so as I fell asleep, each day turning the volume slightly softer until I could only hear it echoing in my imagination. He told me that no matter how many times I listened to it, I could never tire of it. When I was seven and had just begun taking piano lessons, my Uncle Steve, himself a pianist, gave me the legendary 1955 Gould recording of the Goldberg Variations.
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