Re: CBC Glenn Gould Contest

["Harding.Matthew" <Matthew.Harding@CIC.GC.CA>]

Title: Message

Hello again. Kate and Iori Fujita commented about the winners of the GG Contest on CBC. I listened to this segment and these are my comments.

 

The two winners of the written portion of the competition had quite well written essays. The only problem, from a Gouldian perspective, is that they had little to do with Glenn Gould! The CBC was obviously looking for well-crafted literary pieces, the sort of thing that reads well on air, is politically correct, and is artistically intellectual. Needless to say, my piece about Gould skinny dipping didn't win :-).

 

I can't remember all the details, but one essay had to do with a woman shedding her low self-esteem by realizing she could wear a bathing suit in public for the first time. The second one was a funky kind of story about an adolescent who attended a party given by a classmate who always played the Goldberg Variations, and the only reason she liked Glenn Gould was so she could go to this party, as the mother explained to the father. In other words..... DIFFERENT!!! And absolutely nothing to do with GG.

 

The winning audio entry was quite good, it was a reminiscing kind of work, with lots of every day, regular noise, kind of audio in the background, and various commentaries from different people in the foreground. There was nothing particular Gouldian about it either (although there was a Gould piece playing in the background, I forget which one). The entire day sort of blurred together for me.

 

Anyway, I can provide more exact details if anyone is interested (I have it all recorded on audio tape and Real Audio saved on my hard drive). An interesting competition, but not much for hard-core Gould fanatics. I think someone summed it up earlier on this list as.... "whimsical". That it was.

 

Cheers,

Matthew