GG:musician

[fotosint@imiucca.csi.unimi.it (Alberto Vianelli)]

Dear f_minor fellows and friends

        since this is my first message to the group, let me introduce
myself, my name is Alberto and I am a biology researcher and in my (little)
spare time I leave the lab and run taking piano lessons and practicing
home(I am not going to talk about GG influence on my playing in this
occasion,  maybe next time).
Just adding some thoughts that came recently to my mind after listening to
GG (by the way, I never stopped listening to Gustav Leonhardt's Bach, I
bought recently also some Christophe Rousset's Bach CDs, they are very
interesting especially in terms of interpretation; Gould though is the only
one making me clear the structure of the piece, naive for what this
sentence will sound).

I am probably not going to tell something new on our subject, I am afraid.
Still, I think useful to the present discussion could be  Susan Kocsis'
sentence ("...so much of what  has been written about Gould has been
suchpsychobabble that I don't always recognize  the person I knew. The only
way that a new generation can really become  acquainted with Glenn is to
watch him, listen to him, think things through with him."  Kristen, would
not mind If I borrowed it, I hope).

I mean one should really start from listening Gould as if it was the first
time, trying to follow its evolution also through some of his writings (I
think listening is better, though); to compare  his different recordings,
be they separated by one month or ten years (have you ever compared the
Beethoven op.110 performance live in 1958 and the one in the studio, if I
remember 1957 but I might be wrong)? So close in time but, I think, so
distant in the perception of the essence of time, the live one being
suspended in the infinity, although time is being compressed and stretched
inside the sonata. (The comparison was suggested to me by Michel
Schneider's book, "Glenn Gould.Piano solo", a really beautiful and deep
book, I suggest everybody to read it, although I do not know if any english
translation has been made available).
I think Gould's Beethoven is extraordinarily poetic, as his Bach of course
is, although with a different metric. I can think of Giacomo Leopardi
(sorry I am playing home, I have no idea how many of you do know Leopardi)
but also of Dylan Thomas, for the flesh-stripped images/sounds.

GG was not a magician, he was above all great musician: I was enthralled
listening to the part of the interwiev with Vincent Tovell, which was
released as a CD last year from the Friends of Glenn Gould, when after
having played the third of the op.27 variations of Webern (where his
humming was making clear, at least to my point of view, he had a complete
command of the underlying structure and hidden-to-the ear continuity of the
piece), asked to give as a comparison an example of Bach, he choosed with
little uncertainty, the 4th Contrapunctus from "The Art of Fugue":
incredibly, it "sounded like Webern"(at least in the first twenty bars or
so); that is GG was able to make the point, I think, of the unity of music
(or may be of "sound"), that might be different accordingly to the  choose
of the  background level, of the filtering of the structure, of the
compression/decompression of the "theme"; computers can now do that, but
the human brain, especially in musicians and artists was always able to do
the job (he did not say that at all; I take of course all the
responsibility for it). Or I think at least he was looking for it, he was
struggling to find unifying principles, as other great minds in other
fields of knowledge. And "poetry" in its highest sense has never been
absent from these principles, because it is the hallmark of human nature.
Here I stop, apologizing especially with Mary-Jo if I fell outside its
guidelines, and with everybody for my long message and for the obscure
arguments and examples (especially for those without all the cited
material).

Regards to all

Alberto

P.S.: I was very sad reading in one of the past messages that Bob Fulford
(is he really?) unsubscribed from the list. To me, it suggests we really
exaggerated this time with our polemics, although I am the first to say
that discussion is the reason for which this list exists.


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Alberto Vianelli
University of Insubria
Department of Structural and Functional Biology
via J.H. Dunant 3
21100 Varese
Italy
E-mail: fotosint@imiucca.csi.unimi.it

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