{"id":464,"date":"2016-01-13T16:18:12","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T22:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/?page_id=464"},"modified":"2016-01-13T16:19:35","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T22:19:35","slug":"13-ways-of-looking-at-the-goldberg-edited-by-lara-downes-2011","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/13-ways-of-looking-at-the-goldberg-edited-by-lara-downes-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201c13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg,\u201d edited by Lara Downes (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This collection assembles 13 contemporary composers\u2019 variations on the Aria from the Goldberg Variations. It has gotten a fair amount of publicity on the internet, including Lara Downes\u2019s fundraising drive. Yet there is very little criticism; the sequenza21 review is mainly positive. But this is a very uneven collection. The best pieces include Mischa Zupko\u2019s expressive and dissonant \u201cGhost Variation\u201d; Derek Bermel\u2019s ferocious piece, which can\u2019t seem to decide how to engage Bach (an entirely appropriate response); the weird conglomeration of Bach and Satie in David Del Tredici\u2019s neo-romantic variation; Fred Lerdahl\u2019s precise but monotonous staccato variation; and especially Lukas Foss\u2019s \u201cGoldmore Variation,\u201d which is a strong and nuanced response to the Aria.<\/p>\n

Other pieces are weak, or have the sorts of problems of influence that can be expected when the subject is one of the most famous pieces in Western music. C. Curtis-Smith\u2019s piece is very Liszt-like; in Jennifer Higdon\u2019s \u201cGilmore Variation,\u201d the sequences (m. 9) are too simple, and the syncopated passages not complex enough (after Stravinsky\u2019s precedent, Higdon\u2019s piece should have been more challenging, more involved); Stanley Walden strangely calls his piece \u201ccubist,\u201d but that trope is vague, old-fashioned, and over-used; Bright Sheng\u2019s piece combines sourly atonal passages and sweet tonal passages, which makes it seem as if he hasn\u2019t thought how the two could combine to engage Bach more closely; William Bolcom\u2019s and Ralf Goth\u00f3ni\u2019s variations are both, in different ways, helplessly close to Bach; and Fred Hersch\u2019s \u201cMelancholy Minuet\u201d could have been written in the generation of Schumann. The collection is an excellent idea; it would be wonderful to try it again with a more coherent group of composers. Why not a \u201cspectral\u201d anthology, or a \u201cnew complexity\u201d anthology?<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of these pieces are intermediate in difficulty; a couple, like Lerdahl\u2019s, are advanced — more or less the same difficulty as the harder Goldberg variations.<\/span><\/p>\n

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This collection assembles 13 contemporary composers\u2019 variations on the Aria from the Goldberg Variations. It has gotten a fair amount …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":466,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464\/revisions\/466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}