Bernard Chasan:

>>>I have to assume that those slow inward grief stricken variations in
>>>the Goldberg Variations are meant to express grief.  Any other response
>>>is simply perverse.

Mimi Ezust:

>>Wait a minute, wait a minute, and hold on there, fella! Who told you
>>that's what Bach meant? That's quite an intellectual leap, there.
>>I love and live Bach and have for years, but when I press the star on my
>>telephone I do not reach Bach and I cannot converse with him. And you
>>can't either. I never HEARD any grief-stricken passages in the Goldbergs.

Bernard again:

>Well, a critic as eloquent as Mimi deserves a second response.

I'm no critic. I'm just a poor country former fiddler.

>I've brought some support with me this time- not to refute Mimi's
>response to the music - that is private- but to show that my response is
>not completely nonsensical.

I didn't and wouldn't say your response was nonsensical.  I was annoyed
at your use of the word "perverse" to describe anyone who did not "feel"
the same emotions at the same point in that music.

>Charles Rosen refers to the "black despair"of the 25 th variation.
>Serge Schepkin says of the same variation:  "It constitutes the moment
>of absolute stasis.  It is a vacuum, a black hole mercilessly absorbing
>the heavenly visions of the preceding pieces (Landowska called it la perle
>noire; the black pearl)." Heck, I not only have a phone line to Bach, I
>share a party line.

I never said that there is not emotion in the Goldberg Variations or in
Bach in general.  There are buckets of it!  However, you can bring in all
the musicians and critics you like to support you ...  even if they all
agree with you and each other that there are black holes, black pearls,
black rooms, black despair, black hair or black shoes, that is just their
opinion and we are no closer to describing the actual musical work.  I
respect their attempt to explain, but they'd be better off sitting in front
of their instruments and demonstrating.

I still do not "see" black holes or pearls when I hear that variation.  I
do not feel "grief" or "despair." I don't feel like a banana split, either.
What I feel is a profound and deep feeling and it stirs me, sometimes to
tears.

I am often in tears when I hear beautiful music, but it does not always
mean "grief" -- sometimes it means the opposite.  It can be a release after
I have perceived great tension in the music.  Sometimes I cry and do not
know why.  Sometimes I am so thrilled at what I hear that I get goosebumps!
It's enough for me to know that it is the music that touches something in
me and reaches my emotions.  Who needs a subtitle?

It does nothing at all for me to put LABELS on those emotions.  Your labels
will only confuse me.  Pearls!  Black holes!  Ugh.  Feh.  How can even a
whole string of genuine black pearls come close to a passage by Bach?

And now, Bernard, in your message you schlep in a red herring, CPE Bach,
who was writing an entirely different kind of music which emphasized
*contrasts* in feelings even more than the music of JSB!  Yes, I hear them
in his music.  But music is much less limited in subtlety than words are at
describing states of mind and heart.

I once read a do-it-yourself book about drawing.  There was an informal
test administered to a bunch of people.  They had before them a drawing
paper with several blank blocks marked off.  A list of emotional states
was read, and they were told to make BRIEF sketches to "represent" each
emotion.  When loneliness was the emotion, almost all of them made a dot
in space.  Some made a dot on a line.  When elation was the word of the
moment, most made something that represented a starburst or a fireworks
display.

I don't know what scientific facts can be extracted from that little
demonstration.  There does seem to be some inborn mechanism of agreement
there.  There may be the same kind of thing in music.  I often wonder
about that, especially when I watch whole stadiums full of kids rockin'
to something, obviously enjoying what they hear.

I, on the other hand, shake my head in wonderment.  If anything can be
described as perverse, it is my reaction to the music of mass hysteria.

Other musics do not move me the way Western Classical music does, and Bach
goes right past most other ordinary mortals.  If I hear a certain passage
that makes me gasp or sigh, chances are only a very small number of people
will also notice it.  And an even smaller number will share my exact set of
emotions which shall remain nameless.  And I have no idea if those feelings
were what Bach himself meant for me to feel.  (I can be pretty sure that
his sacred feelings were NOT my own.) I don't even care.  It's enough for
me that I appreciate his music.  Black holes? Phooey.

Mimi Ezust <[log in to unmask]>