GG: 70th birthday

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

Bob "Elmer" wrote:

>(...) I think GG, more than any other musical artist, has marbled my
>life not just with great beauty, but with a standard of creative excellence
>bordering almost on perfection. As close to perfection as performed music
>will ever get.
>
>Can anyone cite a GG release that he/she felt was artistically shoddy or
>slapdash or not up to his standards? Can anyone cite a GG release which
>was ordinary or commonplace, "background music," "elevator music," which
>didn't somehow add some richness to our love or our understanding of
>music or beauty?


Well...not up to Gould's usual standard?  Six of the seven Bach toccatas!
My reasons for that assessment are detailed in my review at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000028NM

In the big picture:

I'm not as impressed by Gould's "perfection" as you are, because I feel he
had a severe lack of spontaneity.  I think he put way, way, way too much
emphasis on squelching or belittling anything he couldn't control,
couldn't rationalize.  He had fantastic musical instincts, natural
abilities, as evidenced by his early recordings: a great sense of beauty
and structure and grace, a sensuous tone, a declamatory fire in the
spirit.  And then he walked away from that in favor of more rational
control, nothing left to happenstance.  It was an artistic choice, to be
respected: what would a man's life and art become if he chose an
artificial "hermetically sealed" environment and re-made himself?

On the other hand, "real life" (and a more "healthy" or "normal"
musicality) includes rolling with punches and surprises, reacting to
things that happen, dealing with less than ideal conditions.  That ability
is character, whether in music or life; things come up and we have to deal
with them using whatever resources we have.  Some of the most interesting
or meaningful things in art (or science, or a game, or a drama, or looking
at a brook, or whatever: life!) come up when something unanticipated or
irregular happens, and the flow adjusts around it.  Some things might
shatter, others might grow stronger, others might go in some new exciting
direction, others might go quickly back to "normal," but something
*happens* in response to the surprising stimulus.  There is some type of
growth and adaptation.

Gould's art shows us the opposite of that reality.  It shows us what
happens when spontaneity or accident are not allowed to intrude; a world
in which one does not need to cultivate flexibility.  Even though I
disagree with Gould's premise, I admire the way he took that commitment to
its logical conclusions.  It *can* be interesting and beautiful to hear
what an amazing level of control sounds like.  It can bring out formerly
unnoticed structural qualities in the music.  Artifice, taken to an
extreme.  Artifice, for its own sake, because artifice is interesting.

His writing, his "interviews," his recordings, his radio and television
productions...those all show what can happen when a sharp creative mind
carefully constructs a state of "perfection," a serenity, a deeply-ordered
structure.  Many of those works are brilliant.  Some are too
self-conscious: _sui generis_ and proud of it!  All are interesting, even
if one doesn't agree with some of the points.  Gould's art was his ability
to turn his resources into these thoughtfully ordered idea-objects (he
really *was* a composer, through and through, just not very often with
musical notes that he made up himself...he built his compositions of other
people's notes, and of his own words).  Gould's art was his vision of an
artificial world where chaos doesn't exist, where everything is ordered
(at least outwardly, in what one *does* officially).  And that's
interesting.

(Gould's letters, much more chaotic, are also interesting.)

Gould wrote about how he thought it might be stimulating for a while to be
a prisoner.  A completely ordered existence.  And (supposedly) no pesky
spontaneous surprises to deal with; just live out life completely within
the controllable environment of one's own mind, no distractions, no
disorder.  Maybe that's what he was trying to show us in his art?  (The
rhythmic straitjacketing, the reduction of conventional dynamic contrast,
the elimination of musical "party tricks" of projection to the balcony,
the structured un-spontaneous ornamentation, the choice of unpianistic
repertoire....)  He constructed that prison for himself and showed us what
life is like inside it.  His own life, as an ecstatic art.

Music, like any art, is a blend of rationality and irrationality.  Gould
showed us what can happen if that balance is tipped artificially toward
extreme rationality.  I don't think that such a rationality is
"perfection" because the beautiful and stimulating features of
irregularity/irrationality are missing...it's like a food without spice, a
relationship without arguments, a drama without a plot, an environment
where everything is one color (Gould's favorite "battleship grey").  But,
for its own sake, it's interesting to contemplate.


> (...) One interesting thing f_minor has taught me is that whatever GG
>was, what he left behind was strong enough to sustain and survive any
>criticism, any savage review, any nosey question, any misunderstanding,
>any ghoulish posthumous diagnosis of any outre condition. God knows this
>group has picked the poor man apart from his toenails to his tonsure,
>from his love life to his hypochondria. (...)

Agreed, and well said!  Gould and his art are strong enough to withstand
all this analysis....


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot