Delayed Reaction

[Birgittte Jorgensen <bj@kemmunet.net.mt>]

Hello F_Minors,

I?d like to comment on some interesting ideas posted on this list over
the past few weeks. My apologies for the delay in responding to them,
and I wish I could say that it's because I?ve been on holiday, but
instead a pernicious and nasty flu bug took a holiday in my house in
mid-August. One could say I have been "away" on an extended vacation
from my senses. Now that my body has finally stopped playing unwilling
host to this microbe, I?m catching up with Life and the list.


THE GOULD "BASEMENT TAPES"
Robert St-Louis brought up an intriguing question that I too have
wondered about: what has became of Gould?s presumably bountiful private
tape recordings? Even as a teenager Gould was the first kid on the block
(certainly the first in cottage country) to get his hands on the new
gadgetry. Furthermore, the development of his singular piano techniques
are in part attributable to the recording and playback sessions to which
he subjected his playing during his long interval of seclusion at Lake
Simcoe between the termination of formal piano lessons and his landmark
debut performance in the United States. He is even on record as stating
he could not conceive of how musicians honed their craft before the
invention of the audio tape recorder. Informal recording became a
life-long habit, and assuming he kept even a small portion of unerased
tapes, they would represent an invaluable insight into his performance
practice and habits. (However, I don?t recall Kevin Bazzana mentioning
any "bootleg" tapes in his book.) I am not suggesting that these tapes
should ever be commercially released as this would undoubtedly violate
Gould?s wishes and compromise his integrity as an artist, but a
compilation of "selects" guided by some scholarly principles would
surely be of legitimate interest to Gouldians. I would not object to
seeing part of my fee to the Foundation going to pay a small honorarium
to a compiler and cataloguer. I also think it likely that members would
be willing to cover the cost of posting sound samples on the
Foundation?s or the National Library of Canada?s websites by paying for
individual downloads. Indeed, Robert is an excellent candidate for this
task, and he lives in Ottawa where I assume the tapes, if they exist,
would be housed at the NLC. Perhaps the GG Foundation or the NLC can
answer these questions for us.

F_MINOR OPUS 1
A couple of weeks ago Marc Estrin broached the idea of anthologizing the
F_Minor archives and this was seconded by Jacqueline P. Colombier and
possibly others. I think the impulse behind the idea commendable, but I
would like to discourage the idea of producing a hard-copy version for
the following reasons. First, there is the thorny issue of copyright,
and second, there is the problem of editing other people?s
contributions. By their very nature, few messages on the list read like
fully-formed essays, and this is, of course, to be expected since they
consist primarily of a series of posts and ripostes. Also, since list
contributors don?t have publication in mind when they submit messages,
they are often hurriedly composed and fragmented in both substance and
expression. I don?t regard the structure and narrative style of digital
letters as a problem in itself (in fact, I value the format?s potentials
and accept its limitations), but as soon as you transfer it from the
digital realm to the world of print, you encounter a host of editorial
dilemmas, not to mention the expense and hassle of engaging printers and
binders.

Much as I love computing and the Net, I?m not against books (on the
contrary, Anne Smith and I recently exchanged a correspondence on our
enduring love of non-virtual libraries and the tangibility of books:
their scent, their heft, their very materiality), but I believe the
F_Minor archives should remain in the format in which they were born.
After all, just a few short years ago, a discussion group such as ours,
which literally spans the globe and provides digitized archives of all
its proceedings, accessible to any person at any time, was quite
literally a dream that we marvelled would someday come to pass for the
benefit of all. Well, it has indeed become a reality much quicker than
anyone would have imagined in say, 1992, the year of the first GG
Gathering. So, let?s exploit the new technology, and in the process save
a patch of forest. Besides, if you really want to see it on paper, you
can always output it from your laser printer.

Having said that, I would be willing to volunteer some time and effort
to anthologizing at least part of a digital-based selection of
"highlights" from the archives, perhaps classified by topic, and taking
care to preserve the idiosyncratic shape of email prose and its sense of
immediacy.

SONY'S ADDED VALUE
Daniel Baldwin posted a well-founded rant on Sony Classical?s shameful
price-to-music ratio and cited one particularly outrageous case in which
he calculated a Sony Classical CD at (USD?) $0.4247 per minute as
compared to a Nimbus CD?s $0.125 per minute. I?m not here to represent
Sony?s defense, although John Hill has previously pointed out how all
the record companies (not just Sony) have colluded over the years in
gouging the consumer, but in the hope of making your next expenditure a
little less painful, I offer this thought. Every time you buy a Glenn
Gould Edition CD or video, Sony pays royalties to the Glenn Gould
Estate, and, if I am not mistaken, some of that money then goes to the
Salvation Army and The Humane Society, the main beneficiaries of Gould?s
will. Considering that the posthumously earned royalties of many
deceased musicians finance solely their survivors? personal well-being,
at least you can be assured that a substantial part of your hard-earned
cash will end up somewhere other than in a record executive's deep
Armani-suit pockets. Think of the high prices as an enforced charity,
like taxation. With every purchase you make, you may be rescuing a
homeless person from Toronto?s mean streets or saving a defenseless
puppy!

Birgitte Jorgensen