I heard an interview with Murray Perahia on CBC where he said he didn't like Gould's contrapuntal approach of making the voices more or less equal because it weakened the underlying harmony... Or something to that effect.
It got me thinking, that maybe the idea of playing each voice equally might be misguided? Of course Bach wrote contrapuntally, but to take it so literally. In many cases I think it's easier to listen to by letting a certain voice to the forefront and subjugating the others as elaborate, excellently crafted harmony...
But I'm just thinking out loud here, haven't gotten around to exploring the idea so much. I wanted to do a taste-test and compare Gould vs Perahia but the library had neither, I'll probably have to order recordings off the internet. Perhaps explore some non-keyboard Bach as counterpoint says
Gould's aesthetic, I think, was a strange combination of ancient and modern (this is why Stravinsky courted him, hoping he would play his works). On the one hand, he often treats the piano like a harpsichord, playing all the voices almost exactly equally, not varying his attack; on the other hand, he employs a fantastical imagination that doesn't have a counterpart on the harpsichord (listen to Variation 15 from the 1980 Goldbergs), and achieves an austerity that the harpsichord, with its constant ringing overtones and jingling-jangling mechanism, can't produce.
I don't agree with Perahia, though it sounds right in a theoretical sense. I definitely feel the harmony very strongly in all his Bach recordings. Perahia also claimed that Schoenberg was music for the eye, not for the ear, so apparently he and I disagree on many inessential topics.
Bach, it has been suggested, wrote much of his music not intending it for specific performance. Works like the Goldberg Variations, the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the Art of the Fugue especially, are catalogic works that don't seem to have a place in our knowledge of public music-making in that time. They are in many ways, the deepest kind of theoretical works. If played on harpsichord, there is no possibility for highlighting one voice over another, there just isn't. They are automatically equal. The clavichord offers only a very small range of nuance, and the organ cannot provide the contrast that one would desire in the canons, for instance.
Bach's music is never just melody and accompaniment. I honestly can't think of a single piece that works that way, even the organ chorale preludes, based on solid, familiar melodies, have distinct lines besides the chorale (think Wachet auf...). For all the research they have done on how music was experienced in that time, the answer still lies, and will always lie, in the aesthetic of whoever is interpreting the music. Pieces like Goldberg Variations supply a huge range of idiosyncratic performances (thinking of GOuld, Nikolaeva, Feltsman, Schiff, Gavrilov).
There's something elemental about them that allows them to be manipulated, but at the same time remain intact. If you have doubts about voicing, the best thing you can do is listen to a huge range of performers, and experiment for yourself. Above all else we have to define and satisfy our own desires, and not a pre-determined definition.
Just some rambling,
Walter Ramsey
Topic: Bach Technique