You know the piece. Consider a listener who doesn't.It's an integral aspect. If treated as filler, the driving semiquaver rhythm turns into slow quavers. And a load of interesting intervals of increasing sizes vanish, leaving something that merely moves almost entirely by step.Herein is the problem. You take no interest in them and they are thus lost. The romantic generation of Bach players didn't have to abandon those varied intervals in order to give some attention to the implied quaver line. They succeeded with both. You're only looking at one issue, where it's possible to see things both ways and achieve both. I like many of your ideas, but the moment you start bringing out one thing by abandoning another, you lose the essence of the counterpoint, the full motific value of the subject and the prevailing semiquaver rhythm.You also have the option of using dynamic differentiation, without making notes of the subject so quiet as to become nothing but mere filler. Listen to various recording of the Bach/Liszt fugues and you'll hear that none of the romantic generation play these configurations without keeping the repeated notes melodic. They simply don't need to relegate notes of a motif to a completely empty role, in order to be able to bring out implicit quavers lines.
Oh, and if anyone wanted to see the video we are talking about; here is a link to the video I made over the summer (It's the famous Bach/Busoni fugue in D-minor):https://www.maestroanth.com/videos.html
Hey, I'm new here and this was a pretty good video. Difficult piece! It did take me a couple of hearings to find out what the discussion here was all about though. Irregardless, considering the amount of work that went into the video editing and clear sound, I say you made this look quite professional with a sound performance! I really liked how you took a serious classical piece and gave it a kinda funky fun house environment.Anyway, I am actually a bit curious about your perfect pitch book. How much is it? Have you had any success with teaching perfect pitch?
I think it's a bit arrogant just to dismiss N.'s perfectly fair criticism.
It's a common device, although probably more prevalent in Scarlatti. Kirkpatrick describes them:“One of Scarlatti’s favourite melodic devices, even dearer to him than to his contemporaries, is the progressive expansion of intervals which makes one voice suddenly split in two. Generally one half remains stationary while the other half moves away from it like a dancer measuring off the space of a stage against the stationary spinning of his partner in the middle. This perpetual splitting off of one or two voices into the outlining of other voices produces a frequent confusion of identity. The voices are continually transforming themselves, as if in a dream. They desert their own planes to outline other planes, to hint, as it were, at the existence of other personages, to indicate depth as well as outline of space, in a continually shifting perspective in which these imaginary personages are unpredicatably appearing and disappearing.”
It's almost validating overly simplistic musical tool which I remember finding much of Scarlatti's music as.
It is exactly the ability to create such beauty and variety with rather "simple" means that is one of the things that makes him so special and admirable among composers. So nothing "overly" about that IMO.
The Bach subject doesn't split off into two, it just sits there in a voice above or below (only Busoni's doublings later on makes it more interesting).
Busoni's doublings are there to simulate the organ, for which this piece was originally written. You can hardly blame Bach if it sounds a bit thin on a piano.
Well, I don't view it just as a dismissal because I'm actually quite impressed he noticed not being able to hear the pedal tone in that one section. I'm just saying it's quite small potatoes compared to the bigger picture. I.e. clear recording, nice editing, as well as sound playing (there aren't any mistruck notes!), etc., - I've actually learned these bits of professionalism from an old colleague who wasn't the best instrumentalist, but by god, I secretly respected him the most because he knew how to do these things. The general public did too
The Bach subject doesn't split off into two, it just sits there in a voice above or below (only Busoni's doublings later on makes it more interesting).Plus, this isn't what I like about musicians in general, is that this Scarlatti statement even though eloquently written, is all rhetoric. It's overly subjective and over-romantacising of what it simply is, a pedal tone. It's almost validating an overly simplistic musical tool which I remember finding much of Scarlatti's music as. If you pull a rather high level Schenker analysis on the bach subject (just like a mini-step reduction), you'll see the pedal tone reduced down to a elongated whole note rather quickly with the d-minor in eighths or quarter's depending on which beat you choose to reduce.
Of course those aspects are nice for a video recording. That doesn't mean musical points, minor as they might be to you, don't have merit discussing. (BTW, I did enjoy your recording.) There's no reason to take offense if someone finds some slight detail they think you could improve on.
I think you are compounding [simplicity versus interest] with importance/structural coherence. They don't correlate at all (There is actually a natural opposition between the two.), the art of music is the appropriate balance between both.
There's a certain level of simplicity needed to make music more comprehensible to a listener, but it also needs to be complex enough to maintain interest. This problem underlies the very essence of music at all levels. [And yes, the implication here is that the aural sophistication of the listener does indeed have a role.]
I actually believe simplicity vs. interest do correlate a lot because as soon as something repeats, it slowly becomes mundane. However, I do believe in the balance between unity and variety thing.I totally concur! It rides in tide with the unity and variety thing I mentioned. I enjoyed reading your post!
I think we actually do agree on that point. What I really meant is that simplicity/coherence has a negative correlation with interest. I phrased it wrong in my previous post.Since you are familiar with Schenker, you might be interested in reading Westergaard's Tonal Theory. His work is essentially based on this concept of structural simplicity/coherence versus structural ambiguity/interest, and how this influences how a listener comprehends a piece of music as it unfolds in time. He combines Schenkerian pitch operations with operations on rhythm/time into a theory of Tonal Rhythm that allows you to account for the function of every note and the "weight" of that function. These are ideas that are implicit in Schenker, but Westergaard turns it into an explicit, metalanguage. Because of that, it allows one to intelligently discuss issues on performance with a clear language that refers to structure of the music. In fact he devotes an entire chapter doing so. (Can you name any other "undergraduate" theory book that devotes an entire chapter to how one can use theoretical language to explain how musical structure influences what good performers do intuitively?)I've attached the last 3 chapters of his book.
Topic: Bach=Emotionless=BS 