“Goldberg Variations” variations

[Update Sept 2014]  For a beautifully analytic visualization of variation #10, try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83tCGa_NIJ4&index=45&list=PLEB5B1DFA5C94D5EE


[Here is the original post from 2011:]

For some years now, I have gradually withdrawn from the regular appreciation of music.  Darwin reported the same symptom in later life, and I imagine that our reasons are similar.  The sole exception has been sunny Sunday mornings, which I have marked by a listening  of the “Goldberg Variations”, either in the 1981 recording of Glenn Gould, or any of various harpsichord renditions.  Lately, as I concentrate ever more thoroughly on philosophy and logic, this piece has received repeated playings – partly for the mere negative reason of shutting out all contingent noise from the fallen world beyond the windowpanes, and partly to channel my own attention.  It is not, in and of itself, anywhere near my favorite piece of music; indeed, its suitability for present purposes lies in part in a certain dryness which is undistracting.  Yet with time, the piece  in all its iridescence  has become an audio equivalent of the air we breathe, of the light we see by.

*

Let us give thanks for the munificence of Amazon-dot-com, which allows us to listen to pretty substantial samples of every CD they sell.  You call up the piece, and can run through every major recording in succession.  Each variation is not quite complete, but you hear easily enough to compare them; and their slight truncation actually renders the experience more mathematically abstract, and less like mere indulgence.  Of interest too are the “Customers who bought this also bought those” annotations:

* For Gould 1955, the co-buys were unsurprising:

The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

French Suites - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: The Goldberg Variations ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations (1955 & 1981) ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Partitas 1 2 & 3 - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

Partitas 4 5 & 6 - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

Bach: Goldberg Variations ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

*Similarly for the likewise mainstream Perahia:

Bach: English Suites Nos. 2, 4 & 5 / Perahia ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 4 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Songs Without Words ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: English Suites Nos. 1, 3 & 6 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Chopin Etudes ~ Fryderyk Chopin

Handel/Scarlatti: 3 Suites/Chaconne/7 Sonatas ~ George Frideric Handel

Bach: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 3, 5, 6, 7 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

*By contrast, for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of the piece transcribed for string trio (not so heretical as it might sound, since even the pianoforte performances are transcriptions), there was no overlap:

‘The Painter's Music - The Musician's Art ~ Warren Lash

Janaki String Trio Debut ~ Jason Barabba

Piano Quintet in F Min / Complete String Quartets (1, 2, 3) ~ Johannes Brahms

Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazón: Duets ~ Georges Bizet

The Berlin Concert - Live from Waldbuhne DVD ~ Rolando Villazon

Gitano ~ Rolando Villazon & Placido Domingo

Chopin, Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 ~ Fryderyk Chopin

Romance of the Violin ~ Joshua Bell

[Note: The transcriptional experiment worked rather well for some variations, much less well for others.]

            Of course, what I’d really like, for guidance,  is not the rather predictable musical co-selections, but something more along the lines of

“Those who bought Recording A, also bought:

Aquinas,  Summa Theologica

Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Gödel, Gesammelte Schriften

“Those who bought Recording B, also bought:

Hitler, Mein Kampf

Realtor Magazine: the Swimsuit Issue

Anonymous, Jokes for the John.”

which would speed the selection considerably.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

*

Imagine, indeed, a world in which, for a thousand years, music just was the Goldberg Variations – no other music existed, nor had anyone an idea of composing any new.  The score was thus like the text of the Mass – you didn’t meddle with it.  But apart from that, it lay in the arena of art, not ritual:  Everyone in the society would learn the piece, and play it, with ever greater depth, his whole life.  (Just as everyone must fall in love, not promiscuously with a representative of every species, but with a woman, and marry her.)  It wouldn’t be musically as rich as our own world, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing, either, and in some ways doubtless richer:  More like faith, or philosophy, and less like turning on the TV. 

            This fable would not work so well, if instead of the “Goldberg Variations”, the society had to make do with, say, “Happy Birthday”.  Bach’s exercise is a nice balance of unity and diversity.  Moreover a spiritual task is obvious:  to learn how the reprise of the aria is to be played differently from the first.  For it is not the case, save for degenerates, that “in my end is my beginning”.  Rather, the opening rendition of the aria should be performed straightforwardly, dutifully, naively, with all the trust of a child.  The closing rendition, although note for note identical, should reflect what we have all been through in the course of listening to the work itself, and what we have learned.  (Compare Borges, “The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard”.  -- The variations separating the arias are of course here metonymic for the whole course of human history.)

            The parable is not so counter-factual:  Our present relation to Elizabethan drama is exactly like this.  Only a handful of plays get performed, and those over and over.


[Update:
For an even bleaker, more minimalist  inspissation than this,
click
here ...]

For the whole list of our music-related posts, click here.

~

[Update Dec 2013]

For a quite wonderful cembalo interpretation, or re-invention, or alternative incarnation (rather:  ennoöfication) of the Goldberg Variations, performed by Wanda Landowska back in 1933, listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWD-JvJ-6yk

When listening to other pianists performing this work, it is difficult to refrain from comparing them to the classic performances of Glenn Gould.  But Landowska operates in a magical parallel dimension of unexplored topology, and thus is neither better nor worse that Gould’s take on the matter, being rather strictly incomparable:  as would be a mathematical recreation, which should embody the entire structure of that abstract work, in ways not directly intuitable to the musical mind, but which were strictly homeomorphic, or isomorphic within the mutually containing Category, whatever that (as yet unimaginable) Category might turn out to be.

Co-ordinated Independence

[‘Tis Sunday … and our thoughts turn,  as ever on such occasions,

to Glenn Gould ….]

While I was but a tad of a lad,  I began drum lessons.  Ours was a most unmusical household,  and this, alas, was the highest to which I might aspire.

Anyhow, once a week, I trudged off  after school  to the lessons,  which took place in the basement of a (very) modest house,  far off  down a treelined lane.

(Back then, parents didn’t ferry kids everywhere;  we walked.)

Being young, I was completely earnest, as young lads are.   And the teacher encouraged me, saying that I was his best student “since Buddy Rich”.

(We pause to allow the reader to laugh, weep, or snort, according to taste.)

Later, and wiser, I realized, that:

   (1)  He probably said that to all the girls.

   (2)  He probably never taught Buddy Rich in the first place.

But one counsel of value  he did give me:  That the point of the drums, was not to simply make a lot of noise, but to achieve …. Coordinated Independence -- an uncharacteristically fancy phrase (for he was not otherwise a fancy man) for that unabhängige Selbstständigkeit, whereby the dexter and the sinister  overcome, not only their contraposition, but their unity:  self-guiding, yet united  towards a common goal.

[Update re Buddy Rich]  I finally got around to looking the guy up in Wiki, to see if my drum-teacher’s claim was even geographically possible.   It was not;  but worse, according to Rich himself,

He received no formal drum instruction, and went so far as to claim that instruction would only degrade his musical talent. He also never admitted to practicing, claiming to play the drums only during performances and was not known to read music.

~

I never came close to that. 

The shortfall did not materially hamper my brief professional career as a drummer,

but the question re-arose acutely when, 

many years later,

I attempted (belatedly)

to master the piano.

True, you never reach the fluency, the facility,  that you might  if you started on the instrument as a child -- but it was more than that.

My parents could have sat me down (Schroeder-like) at a piano,  in my very most tender years, but it would have been a waste of time.   The kind of proprioceptively asymmetric right/left DOE required by the guitar (and all other non-keyboard instruments), where a single effect is aimed at, I could handle; but the split-brain-requiring interconnected parallel worlds of the left and right hands of a keyboard, must be forever beyond me.  The piano now decoratively gathers dust.

~

The excellences of Glenn Gould,  are too numerous to mention.  So let us mention just one.  The man has two (interrelated) brains,  much as he has two hands.

Gould is no slave to the treble clef.   He passes the baton  imperceptibly  between the left hand and the right -- following and bringing forth  the underlying melodic interest -- now here, now there -- wherever it might reside.

If Gould were a string quartet unto himself,

the first violin would not hog the limelight;

he would allow, as well, the viola

at times to find its voice ..

~

 

Here is a truly humbling factoid  I just stumbled across:

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.  Now, while doing this,

draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will

change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.

I wonder if Gould had the same problem.

 

 ~

[Update] My violist friend Cap’n Mike writes in:

Nice of you to notice that the viola does get a shot at the melody now and then.  Dvorak and Brahms, Mozart (quintets especially).  And I practice those nasty bits so that if someone pulls the music off the shelf ("how about Brahms Op67?"), I'm more or less ready for it.  But to me the true glory of the viola is as a unique inner voice that blends it all together.  I love the occasional passing tone that shifts the harmony without much ado, but so satisfying to hear and play.

As for that fantasy of Gould/Bach for string ensemble,  turns out it’s a reality:

As far as Gould's amazing playing, yes he is able to bring out any line at will.  Are you familiar with the re-working of the Goldbergs for string trio by Sitkovetsky?  There are some YouTube videos.  I'm partial to the recording by Matt Haimovitz and friends.  In his transcription, Sitkovetsky was influenced by Gould's early recording and captures some of that idiosyncracy.  I have the music and can tell you they are difficult.

A lovely trio version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uli8fXrrlc

Here is a live performance by a Japanese trio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdIXzJyENTs

Nice.

And you can listen to a recording by chamber orchestra here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je8brwUWOew

Apart from the aria,  I frankly couldn’t stand it.  Similarly a recording I once heard -- a Beethoven quarter performed by the 101 Strings.   Sort of impressive for ten seconds, then nauseating.

Similarly, “Jesu der Du meine Seele”, rescored for the six-hundred-lunged Bulgarian Soldiers & Steamfitters Chorus, while doubtless supplying a new take on the piece, would take place invitâ Cecilia. 

Preee-cise-ly

~

Many years ago, when I was but seventeen,  and unfamiliar with the literature,  my friend Frank Freeze commended Glenn Gould especially to my attention.

What distinguishes him from other pianists? I naively inquired.

“He’s just … better,”  he replied, with something of a splutter.

Time has amply ratified that critical judgement.

Gould is clear, crisp, analytical -- secco -- but above all, just, better.

Compare this bracing playing of the Bach French suite #5 by Glenn Gould,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzOAZi5vJ8w

with the weepy, drippy, limp-wristed bowl of boiled mush from Emil Gilels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VD2_o7npZo

Or this, from András Schiff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-SrQq6edM4

Here the fingerwork is fine, but he seems to have left a brick on the sostenuto pedal.

In one sense, my inglorious drumming career did somewhat steel me against the florid acoustic excess that deforms Gilels’ performance.   For as I began lessons, it was quickly brought home to me that -- to my mortification -- I would not be permitted to begin on a trap set (and I owned no drum), but must make do with a much humbler instrument:  the practice pad.  This consisted of a wooden frame, the size and shape of a loaf of bread, topped with a slab of rubber.  It mimicked the bounce of a drumhead, but with none of the resonance.  The resulting sound you couldn’t even call ‘crisp’, really:  it was simply devoid of all reverberation or show.   To begin with this preliminary instrument, was to take a vow of humility. (Cf., mutatis mutandis, the Blechtrommel  of Oskar the Dwarf.)

In this manner, one was forced to pay attention to the precision of the triple-paradiddles, and to exact reproduction of the music as scored.  It was an early inoculation against the temptation of intoxication with one’s own sound.

Decades later, when I took up the piano, I did not heed this;  and was duly punished.  For I eventually developed an excruciating plantar bursitis, which put me on crutches at one point.   Of mysterious origin, it baffled my podiatrist (and fellow-student of the same Princeton piano teacher, as it happens);  but I eventually discovered the cause:  sostenuto abuse -- a repetitive-stress injury against my (often bare or slipper-clad) foot against the pedal.

~

To return to Coordinated Independence.

Such blended bilaterality has little to do with simple manual dexterity.  It is, rather,  as though Gould has one mind, but two brains  -- like Steve Martin in the movie, or like our big friend the brontosaurus, who (so I learned as a lad, and never unlearned it)  was endowed with an auxiliary brain (the basal ganglion) at the base of his tail.

It is quite an accomplishment.  After all, though our eyes act in concert, and yield more than the atomistic sum of their parts (namely, integrated stereo vision), yet they cannot (unlike those of the iguana) roam independently.

“Goldberg Variations” variations

For some years now, I have gradually withdrawn from the regular appreciation of music.  Darwin reported the same symptom in later life, and I imagine that our reasons are similar.  The sole exception has been sunny Sunday mornings, which I have marked by a listening  of the “Goldberg Variations”, either in the 1981 recording of Glenn Gould, or any of various harpsichord renditions.  Lately, as I concentrate ever more thoroughly on philosophy and logic, this piece has received repeated playings – partly for the mere negative reason of shutting out all contingent noise from the fallen world beyond the windowpanes, and partly to channel my own attention.  It is not, in and of itself, anywhere near my favorite piece of music; indeed, its suitability for present purposes lies in part in a certain dryness which is undistracting.  Yet with time, the piece  in all its iridescence  has become an audio equivalent of the air we breathe, of the light we see by.

*

Let us give thanks for the munificence of Amazon-dot-com, which allows us to listen to pretty substantial samples of every CD they sell.  You call up the piece, and can run through every major recording in succession.  Each variation is not quite complete, but you hear easily enough to compare them; and their slight truncation actually renders the experience more mathematically abstract, and less like mere indulgence.  Of interest too are the “Customers who bought this also bought those” annotations:

* For Gould 1955, the co-buys were unsurprising:

The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

French Suites - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: The Goldberg Variations ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations (1955 & 1981) ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Partitas 1 2 & 3 - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

Partitas 4 5 & 6 - 70th Anniversary Edition ~ Glenn Gould

Bach: Goldberg Variations ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

*Similarly for the likewise mainstream Perahia:

Bach: English Suites Nos. 2, 4 & 5 / Perahia ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 4 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Songs Without Words ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach: English Suites Nos. 1, 3 & 6 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Chopin Etudes ~ Fryderyk Chopin

Handel/Scarlatti: 3 Suites/Chaconne/7 Sonatas ~ George Frideric Handel

Bach: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 3, 5, 6, 7 ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

*By contrast, for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of the piece transcribed for string trio (not so heretical as it might sound, since even the pianoforte performances are transcriptions), there was no overlap:

‘The Painter's Music - The Musician's Art ~ Warren Lash

Janaki String Trio Debut ~ Jason Barabba

Piano Quintet in F Min / Complete String Quartets (1, 2, 3) ~ Johannes Brahms

Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazón: Duets ~ Georges Bizet

The Berlin Concert - Live from Waldbuhne DVD ~ Rolando Villazon

Gitano ~ Rolando Villazon & Placido Domingo

Chopin, Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 ~ Fryderyk Chopin

Romance of the Violin ~ Joshua Bell

[Note: The transcriptional experiment worked rather well for some variations, much less well for others.]

            Of course, what I’d really like, for guidance,  is not the rather predictable musical co-selections, but something more along the lines of

“Those who bought Recording A, also bought:

Aquinas,  Summa Theologica

Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Gödel, Gesammelte Schriften

“Those who bought Recording B, also bought:

Hitler, Mein Kampf

Realtor Magazine: the Swimsuit Issue

Anonymous, Jokes for the John.”

which would speed the selection considerably.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

*

Imagine, indeed, a world in which, for a thousand years, music just was the Goldberg Variations – no other music existed, nor had anyone an idea of composing any new.  The score was thus like the text of the Mass – you didn’t meddle with it.  But apart from that, it lay in the arena of art, not ritual:  Everyone in the society would learn the piece, and play it, with ever greater depth, his whole life.  (Just as everyone must fall in love, not promiscuously with a representative of every species, but with a woman, and marry her.)  It wouldn’t be musically as rich as our own world, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing, either, and in some ways doubtless richer:  More like faith, or philosophy, and less like turning on the TV. 

            This fable would not work so well, if instead of the “Goldberg Variations”, the society had to make do with, say, “Happy Birthday”.  Bach’s exercise is a nice balance of unity and diversity.  Moreover a spiritual task is obvious:  to learn how the reprise of the aria is to be played differently from the first.  For it is not the case, save for degenerates, that “in my end is my beginning”.  Rather, the opening rendition of the aria should be performed straightforwardly, dutifully, naively, with all the trust of a child.  The closing rendition, although note for note identical, should reflect what we have all been through in the course of listening to the work itself, and what we have learned.  (Compare Borges, “The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard”.  -- The variations separating the arias are of course here metonymic for the whole course of human history.)

            The parable is not so counter-factual:  Our present relation to Elizabethan drama is exactly like this.  Only a handful of plays get performed, and those over and over.


[Update:
For an even bleaker, more minimalist  inspissation than this,
click
here ...]

For the whole list of our music-related posts, click here.

~

[Update Dec 2013]

For a quite wonderful cembalo interpretation, or re-invention, or alternative incarnation (rather:  ennoöfication) of the Goldberg Variations, performed by Wanda Landowska back in 1933, listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWD-JvJ-6yk

When listening to other pianists performing this work, it is difficult to refrain from comparing them to the classic performances of Glenn Gould.  But Landowska operates in a magical parallel dimension of unexplored topology, and thus is neither better nor worse that Gould’s take on the matter, being rather strictly incomparable:  as would be a mathematical recreation, which should embody the entire structure of that abstract work, in ways not directly intuitable to the musical mind, but which were strictly homeomorphic, or isomorphic within the mutually containing Category, whatever that (as yet unimaginable) Category might turn out to be.