GG: Gibbons and Beethoven

[Michael Davidson <mcdavids@pipsc.ca>]

K. Berry writes....

>>    David Gardner, a cellist with the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra
>>    wrote an In Memorian poem after Gould's death, part of which
>>    goes

> Do you have the complete poem, or a reference to where it's printed?
> I'd like to read it, and I bet others would, too.

In Memoriam -
Glenn Gould
-------------------------
Grief,
an unwelcome embrace,
Eulogy, 
an unwanted act
while the mind wanders 
to find some solace
in the contrapuntal ecstasy
that was Glenn Gould -
those remembered sounds
that ring inside the head
revealing their intense emotion
when the night is long into its stride
And now, no more.
No more sound or song:
just a vacant space
that saturates the mind
with numbing grief
A genius,
gone,
gone,
before his time.

David Gardner
October 4th, 1982

I found the poem in the newspaper clippings folder for "Gould - 1982"
in the National Library.  The National Library copy is photocopy of
an original in a beautiful humanistic handwritting, presumably by the
author.

I don't actually like the poem that much, that's why I only quoted
only a little of it.  The gloominess of it seems a bit overdone and 
unrealistic.  It reminds me of something I read once written by an
expatriate Frenchman living in a wilderness cabin in the Yukon about
Picasso.  I did like very much however the "Elegy for Bill Evans" by 
Bill Zavatsky quoted by Silvio Gordiani where...

>         Music your hands are no longer here to make
>         Still breaks against my ear, still shakes my heart.

Speaking of Gould and Orlando Gibbons there is an interesting reference
to Gibbons in the Beethoven Bicentennary "Glenn Gould Interviews 
Himself on Beethoven" which I believe is in the GG Reader.
The first line of the article is "Mr. Gould, when did you first become 
aware of your growing doubts about Beethoven?"
My copy is from the 1970 Guelph Spring Festival Souvenir programme
has Gould as interviewer asking himself ...

I.: I simply suggest that if you were to play a work by - - who's your 
favorite composer?  -- 

G.: Orlando Gibbons.

I.: Thank you -- by Orlando Gibbons, that every note would seem
to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter
to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.

G.:  I don't think I've been guilty of any such differentiation.

I.:  Ah, but you have, however inadvertently.  You see, this armchair
analysis of yours compels you to keep trying to like Opus 132 [by
Beethoven], or whatever [by Beethoven], but you don't feel obliged
to undertake any similar probe on behalf of Mr. Gibbons' Salisbury
Pavane, do you? ...

<much cut out here...>

I.: When you reject Beethoven, as I say, you're rejecting the logical
conclusion of the western musical tradition....

<Now here is my question.  What exactly was the Interviewer or
Gould trying to say in the next few lines?>

I.:  It's precisely those works in which an elaborate expose with
which only a professional can cope is related to material with which
anyone can identify.

G.:  Hmmmm.....

I.: - - and that disturbs you, Mr. Gould, because it represents, first
of all, a comment upon the role-playing, the stratified professionalism 
of the western musical tradition that you, and not without reason, 
question.  No, its no accident that you prefer those works in which 
Beethoven was less emphatically his logical-extremist self - the 
works in which the predictability quotient is lower, the works in 
which the composer is less concerned with making the mystery 
of his art explicit.

<end of quote>

So what is he trying to say here.   What is he rejecting -- the heroic
symphonic pieces that Beethoven is normally identified with?  What 
were the parameters of this predictability quotient?  This is a very
interesting statement about his private enjoyment of music as
opposed to its normal performance by him and his colleagues as
professional musicians.  Are there any other writings by him on this 
theme?

Sorry this goes on and on.  I write it between compiles and program
submits.  I would still like to know where he is buried... 


Michael...