Perhaps I can be of assistance, since you are all being so nice to me. Unusually, the rolls recorded for the Duo-Art reproducing piano were perforated in real time, as the pianist played. They needed a hell of a lot of editing afterwards, but that's by the by.

The original rolls were punched by a perforator running at 60 punches per second, as far as I can tell. But they were drawn on to a take-up spool which in theory turned at a constant rotational frequency. As more paper was drawn on to the spool, the effective diameter and circumference of the spool increased, and as a consequence the actual paper speed accelerated.

The space taken by 60 overlapping perforations was therefore greater at the end of the roll than it was at the beginning, but it nevertheless took the same time to play. In Britain, Duo-Art rolls were manufactured in quantity by the Universal Music Company in Hayes, Middlesex, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Aeolian Company..

QED: The expansion of the Universal Music Roll causes it to accelerate, although the apparent time remains the same.

I'm still working on the Big Bang.

Cheers, Pianola

...and whenever that may turn out to appear, we will no doubt find that it is most unoriginally titled Time and Motion Study I, or some such...

Anyway, I would have thought that Professor Grew's very membership had brought him to realise by this stage that, whatever "motion" it is supposed to undergo, "time" is now...

Goethe, let us not forget, was himself the holder of a number of "crackpot" pseudo-scientific ideas, for example on the nature of colour and the development of plants which, though showing considerable imagination and insight, fail one of the most important tests of a scientific theory, in making no experimentally-verifiable/falsifiable predictions. So it is no wonder he disdained the idea of peer review: if it had operated in his time he would have had great difficulty publishing his dilettantish musings.

We still await a further exegesis of Mr Grew's own theory of Time, though, this forum of course being kinder to crackpots than are the editors of Nature.

Die Leiden des jungen Werther
  By Goethe
Influenced the creation
  Of the German nation.

But his discovery, by chance
  Of the morphology of plants
Is of universal application
  To germination.

Not as polished as it might be, because I'm in a rush to go out. No-one has yet named old beardy the pianist, then?

Cheers, Pianola

So it was not Camille . . . ?


The Member's citation from Cecil Gray's book - we are not sure why he inserted those three little laughing faces - was so interesting that we located our own copy on the Internet Archive. Unfortunately an incipient respect for Gray rapidly evaporated when we discovered some dreadfully disparaging remarks he made about the music of Sir Edward Elgar.


Now in the case of the remarkable A major Fugue (rapid-share / send-space) from his First Book it is really Johann Sebastian himself who was the crackpot. To begin with it is a curious subject indeed, rising as it does in steps of Schoenbergian fourths, but things turn quite "hay-wire" at bar thirty-nine with an orgy of polytonalism, culminating with the truly intimidating sound of the seventh beat of bar thirty-nine (at two minutes twenty-eight seconds). But worse is to come! At three minutes twenty-three seconds (the fourth beat of bar fifty-three) we are all of a sudden plonked down upon C-sharp G-sharp and D natural and with that the work more or less ends. We of the twenty-first century can "take it" of course, but it all even now seems rather futuristic. Bach in his combinations was ahead not only of his time but of our own!

Riemann rewrites the 9/8 time signature as "6/8, 3/8" (dividing every bar unequally), and marks the work "poco lento, con molto espressivo" (ungrammatical since "espressivo" is an adverb - he should have written "espressione"). But some performers treat it as a flashy jig sort of thing. Let us hear what Wanda makes of it. Obviously she has put in a good deal of thought, but she nevertheless demonstrates a rather regrettably old-fashioned desire to disguise bits considered to be awkward.

...And Cecil Gray (with a remarkable assertion of now-outlawed 'sexism'!) has the following to say about it:

which we can already see from Mr Grew's posting is only Gray's interpretation of what Riemann actually states. Gray continues:

WELL...! I should have thought it (to continue Gray's now-distasteful 'sexism' - please forgive!) extremely masculine in character (inasmuch as such allusion has the slightest relevance).

Mr Grew's performance is, perhaps, a little on the 'eunuch' side we think. It is neither forceful nor restrained, neither flowing nor hesitant, neither lyrical nor outwardly dynamic, and neither happy nor mournful. (Perhaps his Classical upbringing has caused the Neuter gender to reassert here its previous ascendency and equality alongside the other two?)

On a couple of occasions, the harmony Mr Grew evinces tends more towards his Schoenbergian bent than towards what Bach actually wrote and clearly meant. One notes, for instance, that the 7th note of bar 20 (highest voice) smacks our bottoms rather abruptly with a D# (giving us cause to wonder what we did to deserve that one); and a similar punishment (for no obvious fault of ours) is delivered at bar 34 (where the 6th note in the bass smacks us with an A-natural). In both cases the harmonic effect is one of extreme tonal equivocation, almost as if Gray's anatomy (as outlined above) might have been developed even further (!).

But surely, since this movement is in 9/8, we need to have a sense of three beats to the bar (that surely seems not too much to ask does it?)? If so it would seem unavoidable that the performance must be fast enough for each pulse to sound (at least initially, without sight of the notation) as though it was divided into triplets. This cannot really be achieved by 'poking' every quaver so that it plods us through the whole fugue like having one's head relentless banged with a teaspoon. Wanda manages to avoid this, but her problem is that in this fugue she doesn't seem to know whether her current weapon is a box of paperclips or a staple machine (perhaps she, too, had a Classical education). It rattles along happily shaking its box, but every now and then (indeed apparently whenever a main cadence presents the opportunity) she grinds to a halt in order to replenish her staples.

Overall, therefore, I think that Gustav has the right idea for this piece. Uncharacteristically for him, he gives a (not inappropriate for the piece) fast and dynamic performance. But his part-playing (if listened to attentively) is absolutely immaculate. The internal phrasings, articulations and pacings of each and every strand are stunningly subtle, giving this virtuoso piece of compositional inspiration the effect it really deserves!

CLICK

Baz

Indeed, and there was an awful lot of this kind of sacrilege perpetrated by these self-made musicological 'toffs' was there not? We have to be constantly on our guard against their sins - especially since they appeared not even to know that also the harpsichord only reached the same compass. Here - as in many other places - the slight changes that Bach made to keep within the range of his instrument (which was not such a bad thing for a 'quality' composer to do was it?) actually enhanced and added to the development and logic of a piece. I could cite at least one clear example (from the top of my head), but perhaps this should be left to another thread at another time.

Why cannot we just stick to Bach's own notes? What was good enough for him should certainly be good enough for US!

Baz

My opinion - for what it may be worth - is that it is Brooke who gets his 'knickers in a twist' here. His supposed 'unravelling' of Bach's two upper voices actually perverts the intervals of the Subject rather than clarifies them. What?

Baz