Open Culture has posted a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” by the pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, the recording of which was funded by Kickstarter and about which the post says, “You can do pretty much whatever you want with the recording because it’s released under a Creative Commons Zero license, which automatically puts things in the public domain.” At the same time, there’s a link to a video of Glenn Gould’s last recording of the Goldbergs, from 1981; it wasn’t funded by Kickstarter but by CBS Masterworks Records (now Sony Classical), and you can’t do whatever you want with it, but it’s at an entirely different level of musical accomplishment. Ishizaka plays the notes skillfully and evenly but without any surprises; there are no jolts such as the one that Gould provides with the very first note of the first variation; there’s little drama to the counterpoint as in Gould’s high-relief realization of the music’s multiple lines; Gould’s very touch of the piano evokes a world in sound, while Ishizaka just turns the score into sound. Hers is a respectable performance, a sort of sonic photograph of the score; his is a work of genius.

But what if you’ve never heard the Goldbergs and want to satisfy your curiosity on a budget? Why would it not suffice to hear such an honest and sincere performance to whet the appetite for Bach’s musical cosmos? And what can it even mean to call a performance a work of genius when, of course, the genius of Bach is, in turn, an altogether different order of creation? It’s one of the paradoxes of musical experience that a performance not meant for the ages by way of recording can achieve an agonistic grandeur in person. I’ve often said, if a little ironically, that the finest performance of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux” I’ve ever heard was delivered by a pianist in his living-room in Munich in the summer of 1983, in the presence of three or four friends and me, their guest, who crowded around him at the bench. I don’t remember his name, and I don’t think he has made an international career as a soloist, but the very fact of being in such close proximity to him as he channelled the score, and of feeling the piano’s vibrations as much through the body as through the ears, transcended the specifics of interpretation to become a distinctive and primal experience such as no public concert or recording could replicate. (Here’s an astonishingly personal take on the first of these pieces by Vladimir Sofronitsky, from 1959.) Ishizaka’s performance of the Goldbergs might have offered that thrill in person for her engineer or page-turner, but it doesn’t come through here.

The first thing to hear in a performance of music is that it not be pedestrian—playing it should seem like a thrill and an exaltation. First experiences leave an imprint. I first experienced Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” from a student performance in a campus basement, and was hooked on it for good—not least by the very sense that it’s a play about youth, about a mother’s son—yet I’m sure that seeing a videotape of that performance would have had an entirely different, altogether more disheartening effect. The recording is an object; the live performance is an experience; and the distinction between the two is one of the decisive concepts of Gould’s life and work. He quit the concert stage in 1964 and devoted the rest of his life (he died in 1982) to studio recordings. He utterly discounted the element of risk, the existential confrontation with music in the moment, as preserved in recordings. He thought that the very notion of the concert, with its rituals and its formalities and its accidents, was a vestige of an age when music was more of a social marker than an intellectual pursuit and that recordings, which let listeners experience music in the abstract, apart from the distractions of theatrics, got to the heart of the phenomenon in a new and definitive way.

But Gould’s exhilarating, exemplary recordings were mainly made possible not because of audiotape editing or digital slicing and dicing but by Gould’s very performances, by his singular way with the piano and with music as such—an inescapable dependence on the preservation of a moment of live performance (which he dreamed of eliding, as seen by his fascination with Wendy Carlos’s synthesizer recordings of “Switched-On Bach”). The video at the top, for example, is a snippet of a 1964 live performance (in the studio) by Gould of the Goldbergs. His statement of the theme is jaunty, even jazzy, in a way that I’ve never heard it played elsewhere—including by Gould himself in his famed 1955 or 1981 recordings. (The earlier recording is faster but chaster; the later one, altogether more sombre.) It’s a revelation, in the literal sense: it suggests something about Bach’s approach to rhythm, his proximity to dance, that other performances don’t. The dominance of the church in Bach’s compositional output casts a sober and sanctified light on his corpus of music—and there is indeed something holy about the cathedral-like contrapuntal order of his works, whether the B-Minor Mass, an organ fugue, or a brief keyboard prelude. Yet the reminder that the Goldberg Variations were composed by the corporeal, even carnal Bach (father of twenty) who heard music in the streets and the taverns opens a new dimension in musical thought. It’s easier to talk about performance as an absolute of technique than it is to talk about the inner worlds of composers, who are, in effect, philosophers without words—and the best performances aren’t “good” ones, they’re revealing ones that convey musical ideas, or, rather, ideas by way of music.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing the pianist Christian Zacharias (about whom I’ve written here before) perform Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Bamberg Symphony (conducted by Jonathan Nott). It’s a piece of music I know well—I’ve been listening to recordings of it for thirty-five years (I’m particularly fond of Rudolf Serkin’s, with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra)—but Zacharias, too, surprised me (as he usually does). Passages that, in exalted recording after recording (by the likes of Claudio Arrau, Wilhelm Backhaus, Hans Richter-Haaser, and other great pianists), come off as essentially similar (despite different emphases), were transfigured by Zacharias—phrases that flow like water he played with percussive zeal. He downplayed chords that others pound and pulled back on high notes to make them ring with quiet poignancy—with the overall point of revealing the phantasmagorically impulsive subjectivity and kaleidoscopic emotionalism with which the severely intellectual Brahms infused his rigorously mastered large-scale musical structures. The power of a recreative artist is to recognize when tradition veers from the path of accumulated wisdom to that of sedimented habit, and, then, to experience the work anew and convey it with the unencumbered power of a new composition, of a shocking new discovery in the garb of the classical.

P.S. In the summer of 1984, while I was working on a documentary and spent mornings in the studio editing on 3/4” tape, I got hold of a copy of Francis Ford Coppola’s “One from the Heart,” broken out over two or three videocassettes in that format. I had seen the movie at the time of its release and thought that the movie’s best moments deserved attention, so I took the cassettes and edited my own remix of the film, selecting thirty excerpts of exactly thirty seconds each, and calling it “Thirty from the Heart.” The tape is long lost (and if it had survived, it couldn’t, of course, have been shown legally), but the idea behind it was in step with the times: with the arrival of videocassettes, remix cinema was ascending. The apogee of the format, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” had been in the planning stages since the mid-seventies, but Godard knew that it couldn’t be realized without video copies (his modest proposal was that cinémathèques surreptitiously transfer prints to video for his use). The tapes, of course, are analog; digital files have made the process all the easier and have expanded the range of manipulations to which images and sounds can be readily subjected. But the question remains: Is the main significance of the open-source Goldbergs its exemption from copyright? Does it exist in order to give remix artists some raw material to use without fear of lawsuits?

P.P.S. Here’s a fascinating cinematic remix, coming to the Northside Festival in Brooklyn a couple of weeks from now (about which, more soon); it’s called “Tough Guys,” by Jon Dieringer. It will be screening at the Nitehawk Cinema on June 20th, and I’m very interested to see (and to hear) it.

Photograph by Erich Lessing/Magnum.