Sunday surprise 10: Bach and Laibach
[ by Charles Cameron — Slovenian electronic-industrial group Laibach tackles pone of Bach’s late, greatest works ]
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Here’s Glenn Gould playing Contrapunctus XIV from Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Art of Fugue, complete with the hum that seems to generate itself from his immersion in the music:
And here by way of comparison and contrast, is the Laibach — “music wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective” — interpretation of that same piece:
For my money, Laibach does a far more interesting job of “electronicizing” Bach than Wendy Carlos ever did, all those many years ago.
For my money too, there’s the complete Laibach Art of Fugue on CD on its way to me courtesy of Amazon.
November 17th, 2013 at 10:43 pm
Gould’s “hum” drives me crazy. Simone Dinnerstein’s rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is just as good—without the humming.
November 19th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Hi Scott:
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I know many people find Gould’s hum distracting — I think he set the bar for future performers very high in terms of letting the voices speak independently in counterpoint, and as with the four-minute mile, others who have followed him have accomplished the same with greater ease because of it. And the hum — a little like the involuntary cries of sex or discovery? I don’t really mind them, any more than I mind his left hand conducting while he’s waiting for it to come into play…
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And an announcement, if I may:
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Cheryl Rofer commented on this post on our “fallback” site during our recent period of server difficulties, so I’m bringing her comment and my response across here in hope they may spark further discussion.
November 19th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Laibach, of course, has much better electronics than Wendy Carlos did.
November 19th, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Hi Cheryl.
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Indeed. And hey, I’m very far from the most reliable of music critics. But I was then, and remain, more of a Bach person than a pop person, yet what Pink Floyd was doing with electronics in Saucerful of Secrets (“Set your Controls for the Heart of the Sun”) in 1968 far oiutpaced (to my ear) what Carlos did with Switched-On Bach that same year. I didn’t feel Carlos renewed Bach, to my mind he just played Bach on a different keyboard… Laibach seems to me to be making their own exploration…