I do Art Stuph. When I'm satisfied that it's Exactly the
Way I Want It, then I let it
out the door and into the world.
Once in the world, I get feedback. This lady (in Toronto,
as a matter of fact) does
not like the curse words in it. Some newspaper guy says
he doesn't get it at all. To
my horror, a proofreader my publisher contracted just
unilaterally "corrected" all
my contractions. (I re-corrected them; my editor was
very apologetic.) Whatever
-- the world is filled with critics and people who think
they have a vote.
Well -- they do. Up to a point. They can criticize my
stuff. They can say it sucks.
They can merrily choose not to buy it. They can dislike
this small or large thing
about it.
BUT THEY CANNOT CHANGE IT.
Even after I die -- ESPECIALLY after I die -- they cannot
change a single
semicolon. My publisher can't. Pirates can't. Mean old
nasty Bob, alive or dead,
says This Is the Way He Wanted It, the publisher agreed
-- and that's the way it
stays forever.
I guarantee -- and I don't often make guarantees about
the opinions of dead
people -- but I guarantee Gould saw it precisely that
way when he said "This is
my Goldberg. It's finished now. This is my Gibbons and
Byrd. This is how I want
it. This is how Columbia/CBS/Sony will forever sell it."
Don't confuse leapfrogging from vinyl to CD -- and the
necessary re-engineering
necessary for the inherent technological differences
-- with some perceived
posthumous freedom to alter content, tempi, humming.
And within the next few
years, Gould's recordings will face the .mp3 / .mp4 /
.mpn+ challenge. Yes, Gould
loved and stayed always on the cutting edge of recording
technology -- but only,
as every great artist does, to best nail down precisely
the result he wanted. (Just as
I was delighted to transit from a manual to an electromechanical
typewriter and
thence to a computer.)
Someone today mentioned -- with the appropriate contempt
-- colorization of
movies. I was particularly horrified by a colorized television
broadcast of "The
Maltese Falcon" -- as if "noir" suddenly meant "black
or color, whatever" in
French or in film. Colorizing black and white movies
is not the same as the loving,
scholarly restoration of old movies -- which often restores
the director's original
and clearly stated intentions. (Cf. the recent restoration
of Peckinpah's "The Wild
Bunch" -- a masterpiece butchered by the studio on release.)
Just as my pal now devotes his life using scholarship
to produce a variorum
edition of the work of Charles Ives, musicologists will
have a great deal of work in
the future to properly and lovingly preserve, research
and steward Gould's music,
thought, writing, documentaries and life for future generations.
But this is not a liberty, and not a process of arbitrary
or subjective change. This
is a very different business from piracy or retro-digital
editing.
One profoundly important distinction: Musicologists and
scholars will be chosen to
do such work with the approval of Gould's estate and
copyright owners.
Hum-removers are just merrily appointing themselves.
Bob Merkin
Mike Flemmer wrote:
Someone wrote:>Deleting this intentional part of his work after
his death
strikes me
>as a ghoulish posthumous betrayal of a lifelong respect and
understanding>between artist and label.Seems to me that intentionally
deleting
GG's humming using modern
technolgy is just the kind of thing GG would have loved.
I like the
humming, but there will ALWAYS be people who don't. Why
not
let them enjoy just the piano? After all- the piano playing
alone IS
incredible. People who just don't 'get' the humming aspect
about
GG would then enjoy the music on their terms (no humming, as
they
see fit).
Because wasn't it GG himself who rushed towards new recording
technology with a vengence? GG even wanted you-the-listener
to
have total control over your stereo and control every aspect
of
your listening experience. He would have loved todays
computer
technology that let's you do fancy things like:
- speed up a recording while maintaining the pitch,
- skip a track by setting a control (we can do that now with
CD players)
- digitially record it and cut/paste/splice it to our hearts
content
- add artificial stereo to mono at the push of a button
- etc, etc...
GG would love all these things. Or how about this- imagine
a
stereo of the future- where you control the orchestra as they
play! You push buttons, turn knobs, and you control the
balance
of the instruments, the tempo, the dynamics, the phrasing, the
dynamics, the key, everything! Now, would that be fun
or what?
In essence, you 'be' the conductor. This is exactly what
GG wanted
you to be able to do one day. Actually we can- but
only in PC's,
using MIDI. There are already expensive programs that
approach
this type of real-time control over the music.
And if anyone loved recording the human voice and splicing it
up, rearranging it, playing it backwards, etc.. it was GG!
Heck, he even owned his own professional tape machines.
The guy loved his tape recorder. All of his studio recordings
have been cut/spliced/rearranged to produce the final product.
When the big debate about splicing a studio recording was
a big issue back in the early days- GG did not hesitate to use
splicing. For all we know, GG may have added humming AFTER
a recording where he thought it might need it! This is
certainly
possible. This could have happened when maybe he had a
sore throat and couldn't utter a sound, yet recorded piano and
then later added humming to make sure it got his 'trademark'.
This could have happened because GG hated to repeat a
performance once he was happy with it.
So, as much as I am a humming supporter, and want to have the
fullest GG experience possible, I refuse to join one side of
the
hummers/non-hummers camp. I would certainly listen to
GG
recordings with the humming removed just to see what they
sound like and I would be very aware of what was missing.
I very much doubt that Sony would release a non humming version.
This seems HIGHLY unlikely. Even if non humming bootlegs
appear
from some independant source, they will certainly not appear
on the
shelf at music stores or show up in cyber CD stores. I
do not foresee
a mad buying rush where everyone who owns a GG recording would
run out and replace it with a non-humming version. That kind
of market
does not exisit. But I do conceed there is a market for those
who do
not buy GG because of the humming. This is probably what Sony
is
reconsidering. The market for people who want to buy GG,
but don't,
could be quite large. And with the crazy things recording companies
do these days, it could happen.
So maybe we need to shift our viewpoint a bit and offer new GG
fans
a choice. Otherwise, they might pass up on GG alltogether.
I know
that's a hard pill to swallow for the hardcore GG devotee, but
as we all
know, the future is always changing, and if you look at he amazing
changes
in the past 100 years (which gave ups the technology to hear
GG in
the first place), the next 100 years is going to be as they
say " you
haven't seen nothing yet!"
Mike
Bradley P Lehman wrote:
On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, jv wrote:> If Gould is permitted to interpret Bach and add humming, why must the
> buck stop there? Why can't I, the listener, "interpret" Gould
> interpreting Bach - and remove the humming? If Gould refused to PLAY on
> the COMPOSER'S terms, why must I LISTEN on the PIANIST'S terms?Let us all pause to remember that Glenn Gould himself wrote about wishing
for end-user kits. Take the exposition of a symphony, splice in the
development section from somebody else's recording, etc....make your own
customized interpretation. (And this is fun to do: the finale of
Beethoven's 7th is particularly easy to experiment with.)> I,
> inspired by the example of the iconoclastic Gould, will also refuse to
> conform to the Establishment's rules, one of which is expressed by
> Lichter's "Either listen on the pianist's terms, or choose another
> pianist." I say, NO. Gould's choices affected all his listeners; my
> choices in this regard, should I succeed in my editing goals, will
> affect only myself and individuals who actively seek to emulate me.Before Sony reissued Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" last year, I made myself
a cassette copy for the car using a retail-purchased copy of the first CD
issue. And in making the cassette I CORRECTED that silly pitch problem
that plagued part of the album. I made a cassette of what I wanted to
hear, rather than what was issued. What's the problem? And then when
Sony reissued the album with the pitch problem solved, I bought it and no
longer use that home-fixed cassette copy.A difference here is that the cassette copy is not for sale.
If you can't stand GG's humming, why not just slam a couple of the
relevant sliders on your equalizer to the bottom? Listen to him the way
you want to. But the recordings should be *sold* with fidelity to the
recording sessions.The same argument can be made against too much CEDARing on reissues of
early recordings. Yeah, slippery slope. But that noise reduction is to
remove sonic flaws in the medium, not elements of the performance. GG's
humming is part of the performance.Now let us all pause again to remember that Glenn Gould himself wrote
about wishing for end-user kits.How about issuing a CD-ROM where the default output is a straightforward
GG recording, as faithful to the master tape as possible, but where
various filters can be put on by the user? The CD would play normally in
a standard player, but have options when played through a computer. I,
for one, would like to hear some of GG's interpretations played
artificially faster or slower but at the correct pitch.Bradley Lehman | http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/ | Dayton, VA, USA