Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Martin Howard wrote: > > > Bach doesn't tickle me: he's too intellectually clever. I'm sure he was > brilliant, but I listen to music for aesthetic, emotive, and empathic > reasons, not intellectual ones. Which, I guess, is why I can quite happily > listen to Tchaikovsky and Mozart, but find Bach rather boring -- he adheres > to rules too much, rather than playing with them. > > This is a common mis-conception about Bach and can be attributed I believe to the large body of bad Bach recordings we here especially Glenn Gould. He was a fantastic and brilliant pianist but either did not know much about baroque performance practice or didn't apply his knowledge. Bach, and his contemporaries, when performed in a more historicaly accurate fashion have much in common with Romantic music and is not at all mathmatical or rigid. Just as an example, music notation in Bach's time was not considered nearly as rigid as was the custom in the late 19th and early 20th century. Just because a page of notation indicated measure after measure of sixteenth notes did not mean they were all the same. Harpsichords and organs of the time had no internal dynamics like the piano forte and in order to feel the beat and measure of the music, a performer would change the time values of the notes within the measure often by holding the first beat slightly longer and leaving space between notes, in a way a bit like a conpound triple rythmn. Sorry about the off topic post but I couldn't resist John Shick