Steve Paxton about the video

In 1982, Glenn Gould released a second recording of the Goldberg Variations by Johan Sebastian Bach. Several things happened between the first recording, in 1955, and this one. In these 27 years he had stopped performing for live audiences in preference for the recording studio. And during this time recording technology matured to become more precise, and sound reproduction became truer; closer to the intentions of the musician.

I wanted to listen to both versions and study the differences, so I started this project in 1986. Being a dancer, I naturally listened with my whole body, rather than listen only with my ears and perhaps let one foot tap out the rhythm.

Bach is reputed to have been a brilliant improviser. Of course we have inherited only his musical writings; though even in these scores there is opportunity, from performance to performance, for change, adaptation, or interpretation.

Glenn Gould, by choosing the studio, further removed us from the living source of music - the movement of body and mind.

Instead, these unchanging recordings are the equivalent of sound paintings, or sonic sculpture, or acoustical architecture.

It was music as an art, caught on the wing in 1955; in 1982 he could compose his version like a tile mosaic in the studio. Both recordings are embedded in some computed disc, fixed as music has never been before.

As I dance I am fascinated with this new reality. I try to dance every performance differently - new spacing, new directions, new relationships to the notes. I want to examine the possible connections these two masters have left for us to hear: reflecting as well that everytime we listen we are different.

Realizing that however we, at the end of the 20th C., can fix the moment of performance. We do not experience this fixity twice the same...

We the listeners are alive (as the music is not), and so the equation between the performance of music and the experience of it brings us back to the changes of our mind, and improvisation.

The more I listened, the more I heard beyond the brilliance of composition and performance, the reasuring baritone of Gould can be heard. It is the vocal equivalent of foot-tapping. It is a part of his mind apart from his fingers; it croons to them. Other music Bach might have included, or reinforces melodic lines around which the fingers danced.

In performing to these recordings his voice has been a companion in my thoughts on musical fixity in these days. It, too, is fixed; but it's traces survive despite the recording technology, not because of it. Gould said he played better when he sang, and he played so amazingly that the voice, subdued, remains to remind us that the music was once pumped by blood.

And I assume that Bach might have hummed when his fingers were busy with his music.

I have used the 1982 recording for variations 1 to 15. Variations 16 to 30 are from the 1955 recording.

In this videotape my improvising becomes fixed. It is composed like some of the musical forms, from many improvisations recorded in 1992, at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam; with a very helpful technical crew and a director whom I greet again and thank.