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NYT: Is Bach Better on Harp? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/arts/music/bach-goldberg-variations-harp.html

By Parker Ramsay

I suppose I have some explaining to do to my perplexed fellow
musicians, as well as to Glenn Gould devotees. Why? I decided to
transcribe Bach's "Goldberg" Variations--for harp.

I'm the first to admit that my project--a recording comes out
Sept. 18 on the record label of King's College, Cambridge--can
sound outré or precious. But I come by it honestly: My musical path
has been a tad unorthodox. The child of a harpist and a trombonist,
I was home-schooled in rural Tennessee to allow for a weekly
rotation of lessons on harpsichord, organ and piano, intermingled
with youth orchestra and choir practice (and my mother yelling at me
from the kitchen about my harp technique).

At 16, I headed to a small British boarding school before studying
history at King's College while serving as organ scholar there. I
then returned to the United States to spend two years learning
historical performance at Oberlin and then two with the modern harp
at Juilliard.

That's a lot of different repertories, but the "Goldberg" Variations
were one strand of continuity. That continuity also brought some
persistent dissatisfaction. When it came to Bach, I was unhappy
about the piano's awkwardness with hand crossings, the harpsichord's
lack of dynamic vitality and the tootiness of organ pipes.

I kept struggling with what my ideal "Goldbergs" might sound like. I
wanted the raw pluckiness of the harpsichord, but with the
expressive qualities of the piano. About five years ago, I came to
realize that the way to hear this work--and most of Bach, for that
matter--as I wanted would be to use my first instrument, the
modern pedal harp.

Thinking that a piece known almost exclusively on keyboard could be
transmuted to harp isn't so fanciful: Bach himself appears to have
often been agnostic on matters of instrumentation. Like many
composers of his time, he was constantly borrowing and rearranging
his own compositions. The Double Violin Concerto, composed around
1719, turns up some 20 years later as a concerto for two
harpsichords. The Preludio from the Third Violin Partita, written in
1720, reappears in 1731 as a Sinfonia to Cantata 29, rescored for
organ obbligato and orchestra. And the Siciliano from the second
sonata for viola da gamba is better known as "Erbarme dich," from
the "St. Matthew Passion."

In the 18th century, transcription and arrangement were a means of
preservation and dissemination. Bach himself produced solo organ and harpsichord transcriptions of violin and oboe concertos by Vivaldi,
Alessandro Marcello and Telemann. His cantata "Tilge, Höchster,
meine Sünden" is a re-orchestration in full of Pergolesi's "Stabat
Mater," using a Lutheran translation of Psalm 51 in place of the
original Latin text. Fast forward to the end of the century, and we
find transcriptions of fugues from Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" in
Mozart's and Beethoven's hands, rescored for string ensembles.

Outright ambiguity exists in some of Bach's best-known works. "The
Art of Fugue" and the ricercars from "The Musical Offering" have no
indication as to what forces ought to perform them. There is debate
about whether "The Well-Tempered Clavier" was intended for
harpsichord or clavichord. And in the curious case of the Fantasia
in G, Bach included a single pedal note outside the playable range
of any instrument he had access to, but one that would have been
commonplace on larger organs in France.

The musicologist Donald Tovey wrote that "Bach wrote on the
principle, not that music was written for instruments, but that
instruments are made for music." Since World War I, many musicians
have showed us other sides of his work by switching up what the
pieces are played on. Wanda Landowska was one of the original
iconoclasts, making history with the first harpsichord recording of
the "Goldbergs," after they had been performed solely on the piano
for over a century. Stokowski's and Webern's atmospheric
re-orchestrations of Bach fugues; Wendy Carlos's mind-blowing
"Brandenburg" Concertos on the Moog synthesizer; Chris Thile's
fast-as-lighting mandolin treatments of the Violin Partitas: With
many of Bach's works, there's now a general recognition that
transcription is not only fair game, but even an expectation.

And yet things have been different when it comes to the "Goldberg"
Variations, for which the boundaries of performance remain largely
defined by the recordings made by the harpsichordist Gustav
Leonhardt and by Gould, who recorded them twice on piano. Perhaps
because of the work's purity--or austerity, depending how you look
at it--transcriptions of the "Goldbergs" are usually seen as
novelty projects, somehow stepping on the keyboardist's turf. While
orchestral transcriptions of organ fugues and ricercars have become
mainstream, and Busoni's piano rendition of the great D Minor
Chaconne, originally for solo violin, is considered standard rep, no transcription or adaptation of the "Goldbergs" has yet stuck.

There are those who prefer to hear the work as they imagine Bach
might have done--on the harpsichord--while others would rather
take the variations in on the modern piano, our culture's go-to
instrument (like the harpsichord presumably was in Bach's). The
results are very different: The harpsichord allows for very distinct articulation and encourages rhythmic flexibility, while the piano's
natural suaveness suggests a more straightforward approach.

My solution? Take the piece to the harp. In the opening of Variation
1, keyboardists spend hours trying to amplify instances of implied counterpoint, whereby the left hand jumps around so much that it
conceivably represents two voices rather than one. The pianist can differentiate with volume, making the lower notes a little heavier
than the smaller notes on top.

The harpsichordist, on the other hand, lengthens the lowest notes as
long as possible, to feign some dynamic contrast, while making the
upper notes shorter by contrast.

On the harp, one needn't choose. As the instrument has no damping
mechanism, the two voices keep sustaining, while creating some
harmonic ambiguity.

In Variation 20, a pianist has to figure out how to make multiple
voices ring while the hands are fumbling around one another.

While this is perhaps easier on the harpsichord, the lack of
dynamics accentuates the natural dryness of the instrument.

But the harp allows for the bass line to sustain while playing other
voices, and is less complicated to perform, as the hands approach
the strings from opposite directions.

Everywhere in the "Goldbergs," the harp's lengthy "overring" allows
harmonies to take over, rather than melodies. This is perhaps apt,
as the melody heard at the beginning and end of the work never
resurfaces. Indeed, one thing that makes the "Goldbergs" so
interesting is that the theme is not in the right hand's melody, but
in the left hand's harmonic pattern. If one looks to the score, the
left hand of the opening Aria is composed in "style brisé" ("broken
style"), indicating the continuity and sustenance of multiple
voices, akin to the arpeggiated style typical of performances by
plucked instruments like the lute and harp.

The harp isn't perfect. It struggles with intense chromaticism,
since the harpist must use his feet in an elaborate pedal mechanism
to achieve sharps and flats. And we only play with eight fingers, as
the pinkies are too short. As a result, some tempos have to be
slower and the aura of the work becomes quieter and more intimate.
(This can actually be an advantage.)

The elephant in the room is that Bach never wrote for the harp, and
it's likely he could not have conceived of an instrument that looked
and sounded the way it does. But I never felt I had gotten into
Bach's brain until I took the plunge into transcription. To my mind,
his music is written for all instruments and none, and the harp is
just another instrument as invisible to Bach as his mind is to us.
Time's distance prevents us from asking the master any questions, so
why should we place any restrictions on how and what we inquire of
his music?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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