J. S. Bach’s "Habit of Perfection": Andrew Rangell

The Bradley Effect is by definition unmeasurable. The recession, or depression, is unfathomable. So what can we think and talk about to break the obsession with questions that have no answers until the night of November 4? We repair to the consolations of J. S. Bach, and in this conversation to the perfect nest of piano masterpieces that Daniel Barenboim and others refer to as the Old Testament, the 48 preludes and fugues conceived in 1722 and refined over the last 28 years of Bach’s life, the set known as The Well-Tempered Clavier. We repair geographically to the studio of the “quirky, imaginative, intelligent” piano master Andrew Rangell.

I think of Andrew as the Glenn Gould of our neighborhood, our moment. Like so many Bach pianists he grew up with Gould’s great first recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1955, the record that announced the “birth of a legend.” (See the equally famous 1981 re-recording in exquisite video). Like very few others, Andrew Rangell has grown into Gould’s roles as an original writer and performer in celebrated recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Partitas and French and English Suites, also the Beethoven Sonatas, Chopin Waltzes and much 20th Century music from Janacek, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Like Gould but for different reasons (hand injuries in Andrew’s case), he has come to avoid the public performance and to invent his own fabulous and laborious techniques of recording and editing his interpretations. Look here for Andrew Rangell’s available recordings.

I came to Andrew this time to ask what an immersion in The Well-Tempered Clavier does for one’s mind and spirit — this endlessly extended and refined work that also remains, as Andrew says, “minimal music at its best,” music of “the great middle way,” music that “encourages mind, fingers and heart” and that never turns anyone away. The Well-Tempered, for short, becomes the musical metaphor of the long human course in hearing multiplicities of voices — polyphony is the musical word — and their accents, inflections, their placements and interactions. It also becomes a “semi-religious experience,” says Andrew, the non-believer: