GG: Timothy Maloney interview -- world first for f-minor

[Tim Conway <timcon@comswest.net.au>]

Hello all,

Despite being a lurker for many months (years?) I have been keeping an 
eye on f-minor. So it was with great delight that I heard and (luckily) 
recorded on tape an interview on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 
(ABC) Radio National's "The Music Programme" an interview between Andrew 
Ford (AF) of ABC and Dr S. Timothy Maloney (TM), whom many of you may 
have heard speak at the recent GGG in Toronto. I won't say more about TM 
or what he said because that all comes out in the interview.

Having listened to the interview a couple of times I reckoned that 
f-miners would be delighted to read a transcription of it (I checked with 
the ABC Web site to see if the recorded interview could be downloaded but 
the answer was no). I emailed AF to see if he or the ABC planned to post 
a transcription but one of AF's producers replied saying no, they didn't 
have the resources.

I then asked both TM and the ABC if they minded if I did a transcription 
and posted it solely to the f-minor site. TM immediately said he would be 
delighted to see it disseminated thus, and the ABC -- bless their 
bureaucratic hearts -- said the same thing after a little friendly 
persuasion. Very nice of them because they guard their copyright 
jealously. I would stress that the ABC and TM retain the copyright to the 
interview, and that this (ahem) world-first transcription should not be 
passed on to anyone outside f-minor.

Tim Maloney told me he plans to expand on what he said at the recent GGG. 
The times allotted to him there and during this interview were not enough 
for him to expound his views at the length he would have wished. He said 
he will keep me informed, and if I hear from him about any publications 
and the like I shall certainly pass them on to the list.

I have never done a transcription before. I discovered that it's quite a 
difficult thing to do. Despite the fact that both TM and AF spoke 
exceptionally clearly I found it hard to put in writing not only the 
words they used but also the flavour (or spirit) of what they said. There 
were two problems. 

The first was that when people speak they put enormous emphasis into what 
they say, so much so -- sometimes -- that the way they say something 
transcends the words they actually use. You hear them say 'black' but you 
know they mean 'white', that sort of thing. Although one can lard a 
word-processed piece with italics and bold-face fonts and the like in 
order to reproduce to some extent the apparently-intended meaning, those 
cosmetic additions disappear in emailed postings. One can use standard 
setext conventions such as surrounding words with * and _ symbols, but I 
find them irritating. So I decided to eliminate them. What you read in 
this interview contains the dry bones of what was said, as does, for 
example, the script of a play: you, the reader, will have to read between 
the lines to discern the humour and pathos that is inherent in the 
recorded interview.

The second was that it is part of human nature to write one way and speak 
another. That is, the tidy sentences that one reads in books and hears in 
lectures disappear when the author of those books and lectures speaks off 
the cuff. People being interviewed -- and their interviewers -- often 
speak in one unbroken sentence, stringing all sorts of unconnected  
clauses together with conjunctions and "you know"s and the like. We all 
do it. The problem is how much the transcriber should break long 
sentences up. Doing so often changes the meaning subtlely.

I say all that by way of apology to AF and TM in advance if my 
transcription is not as good as they would have wished.

Finally, as the interview runs for 7 A4 pages Mary Jo suggested posting 
it in instalments. What you see below is therefore only the first page or 
two. The others will follow daily, unless enough people say they want it 
all in one go in which case I will post the entire interview. I hope you 
all enjoy reading it. Best regards to all,


Tim Conway
Broome, WA, Oz




____________________________________________________________

Glenn Gould ? the Timothy Maloney (TM) interview on the ABC¹s The Music 
Show on Saturday 9th October 1999, producers Maureen Cooney and Penny 
Lomax. The interviewer is Andrew Ford (AF).
_____________________________

[Piano music fades away]

AF:	They were the third, fourth and fifth of the Goldberg Variations by 
Bach, recorded in 1981 by Glenn Gould. They were the piece that had made 
Gould almost a household name overnight in the mid-1950s with his 
original Columbia recording, and then he recorded it again, and a lot of 
people think it¹s the last recording he made, which is not quite true, 
it¹s not even the last piano recording he made, but the very last 
recording that Glenn Gould made was as a conductor, music by Wagner, and 
I have sitting with me in the studio now a man who played on that 
recording, Timothy Maloney. Welcome to The Music Show.

TM:	Thank you so much.

AF:	Timothy Maloney is the director of the music division, research and 
information, of the National Library of Canada, and I guess he...you¹re 
actually responsible for overseeing the Gould archive, are you?

TM:	I am, exactly.

AF:	Right. The reason that we wanted to talk to you today is because of 
the theory which has been around for a few years now that Gould had a 
particular disease. In Peter F Ostwald¹s book, Glenn Gould -- The Ecstasy 
and Tragedy of Genius, he quotes Gould¹s father describing Gould as a 
baby humming instead of crying (I¹m sure a lot of mothers out there would 
wish they had one like that), constantly fluttering his fingers and 
flapping his arms around, and Ostwald said this could possibly be 
interpreted as a form of infantile autism, except that obviously if Gould 
had been autistic he would never have been able to achieve all of the 
things he did achieve, and instead Ostwald punts for this thing called 
Asperger¹s Syndrome, which I have to confess I hadn¹t heard of until 
then, and you have followed this up.

TM:	I have...

AF:	Is it connected to autism?

TM:	Ostwald calls it a variant of autism, and one of the main elements in 
which it varies from autism is that the onset of symptoms is typically 
later, whereas the classic autism comes on as an infant and it¹s pretty 
obvious early on that there are developmental problems in a child with 
classic autism. But with Gould many of these symptoms became only visible 
or...or perceived as he entered his young adulthood (and perhaps a little 
earlier) but many of his so-called eccentricities became more pronounced 
during adulthood.

AF:	And these were as a result of the Asperger¹s Syndrome, do you think?

TM:	I think it all fits the pattern, as far as I¹m concerned. Now I must 
confess I¹m not a medical professional...

AF:	So what would some of these characteristics be?

TM:	Well, I gave a talk recently in Toronto at a big Gould conference, 
and I had very limited time because I was on a panel with other people, 
so I went down a very quick list of traits -- characteristics -- of the 
disease and made a few notes about each, and then mentioned how I felt 
Gould...how they applied to Gould. So, among the traits:

**	an inability to interact normally with other humans;
**	intolerance to change;
**	a prodigious memory;
**	amazing powers of concentration;
**	remarkable talents (many times);
**	elaborate rituals and routines that such people go through;
**	some physical clumsiness;
** some stereotyped movements (we can come back and discuss these in more 
detail)...

AF:	Mmm.

TM:	**	...unusual responses to sensory stimuli, and unusual 
preoccupations or obsessions;
**	intellectual curiosity coupled with what I call moral severity, and
**	inability to take criticism.

	There are numerous others but those are the ones that I dealt with.

____________________________

End of Part 1 -- to be continued tomorrow.