Re: Gould in the Headlights

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 07:39 PM 9/19/2000 +0100, Birgitte Jorgensen wrote:
>> More than 200 years ahead of his time, Bach sympathetically anticipated the
>> psychological phenomenon of terror that a deer experiences on the highway:
>> freezing and staring into the oncoming headlights.

>Or perhaps he intuitively sensed the coming of the phenomenon known as
>Spinal Tap, which would be enough to make anyone empathetically one with
>that deer.

Yes. Witness the fact that the first 45 minutes (i.e. before the mirror
fugues) have just gone to eleven with one of his most complex and bizarre
fugues (not to mention that we're in the "saddest of all keys, d minor").
Now, the bloke is there at eleven, and where's he going to go from there?
How much more intense can it be? The answer is none: none more intense. So
that's when everything has to get folded, like those little pieces of
bread, so he goes into mirror fugues. And then it goes over the limits of
what a single instrument and a player with two hands can do, just like in
Nigel's solos. Then at the end of the "unfinished" fugue it goes off into
silence...just listen to that sustain...well, you would hear it if it were
playing. And there's another part (Cp 10a) that you're not supposed to play
at all, or look at it, not even supposed to point at it.

Brilliant.

[And then in the film, obviously when Nigel mentions young girls and
armadillos and fear in his interview, he is speaking euphemistically of
deer and automobiles. (And everyone knows what fast automobiles symbolize,
cf GG's Lance and Longfellow.) Nigel himself, as a character, is clearly
within the "noble savage" archetype, coincidentally also manifested in GG's
Teddy Slutz. GG himself is of course also represented in the film, more
directly: they got Howard Hesseman to play him in that scene where he's
strolling through the lobby with his disciples.]


Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl