Re: Re: Re: GG: Die Kunst der Fuge (revisited)

[jerry and judy <jerbidoc@zianet.com>]

>OOPS!
>GG did indeed read through the CONCORD for his own amusement at one point,
>but never performed it publicly.
>
>SH

Interesting.

You have to understand, GG has been my hero and my 'musical friend' since
the sixties. (we disagreed sometimes -as do all good friends!)  He's
probably the reason why I started seriously and still play (trying to
improve toward his goals of 'clarity', especially).  He's also probably the
reason why I still find all music so fascinating, as an amateur, and so
'always new'!  We don't have quite the same thing as 'that' in my field,
which is meteorology.  :)

When I started buying his Mozart sonatas 'in installments' with my precious
allowance money, I never dreamed that they would change my life. (that's a
little bit dramatic, I know, but that's the way I think of it now.  Of
course I might have been inspired as well by some other performer, I just
can't conceive of it!  ;)  :)

All I was after at the time, was a good 'sounding' (i.e. high priced, --oh,
what we went through back then to get high fidelity!) recording of the
Mozart sonatas, which I had first heard on the radio played by Phillip
Entremont (sp?).
I figured they sounded easy enough for me to 'master' heh heh (what I
didn't know!, and have forgotten etc. etc.!!).  I was playing a Farfisa
(sp?) organ in a rock band at that juncture, and I was 'gonna expand my
horizons' into long-haired music! (which of course at that time was a
pretty funny label!).

 But when I spun that first set of early sonatas I was 'changed'!  All the
'information' in that early Mozart was revealed to me! and it struck a
chord in me, a youngster who had a yearning for scientific knowledge and
'explanations'.  Mozart is usually deceptively simple, but he's very good
at getting to the heart of the human way of 'ascertaining' (artistically or
'scientifically'), and I've never changed this opinion of him (Glenn gave
that to me, no matter what Mozart meant to him).  Anyway, back then, I
hadn't found anything like this 'Mozart as communicated by GG' in popular
stuff, which I was quite a student of, going back to ragtime.  I thought
that if Gould could play this way and he could be so 'explorational' and
'untraditional', I could too and it would be a lot of fun with my more
serious friends (and female prospects, heh).  And so the rest is (my)
history, as they say.

IMO, Gould's performances of Bach 'can' be categorized as very very very
fine, insightful playing, but what he did to Early Mozart was perfect for
me!

BTW, I don't agree with much of his Mozart now,  <hearty laughter!!>
but Glenn was there when I needed him!

signed, a grateful Gouldian,
Jerry