GG and scholarship

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

Anne wrote:

>Perhaps if Glenn Gould had received his diploma from an American
>conservatory instead of a Canadian one, Bradley would give his education
>more credence.

And that was in response to my posting where I said in part:

>Gould was certainly a remarkable player, and he wrote plenty of essays
>about music.  He read a lot of books, too.  But he didn't do anything
>resembling real scholarship.  (Remember: he didn't even attend
>university.) And his forays in a halfway-scholarly direction were
>creative writing about the music itself, not the history of its
>interpretation.  In interpretation, he was either blissfully unaware
>of this field or chose to ignore it.

Glenn Gould completed the years of high school (as we call it in the US,
anyway), at Malvern Collegiate Institute, but he did not complete the
academic requirements to graduate from it.  He left academia at age 18.
After a concert career, he retired from the stage in 1964 and received an
honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto that same year, at age
31.

That's a remarkable achievement, and that honorary doctorate recognizes
his abilities as a performer and thinker.

At the same time, he was *not* a scholar in the league of the people I
mentioned.  His contributions as a writer don't resemble classic academic
scholarship; his writing style probably wouldn't make it past a first-year
graduate course.

Take a look at Dr Gould's published book, a guest lecture recast as an
essay.  _Arnold Schoenberg--A Perspective_, Cincinnati, 1964.  The
complete text is on pp 107-128 of the _Reader_. Gould's methods of using
evidence aren't scientific.  His sentences are wordy and padded with
adverbs.  The tone is chatty.  He makes his points with unsupported
generalizations.  He brings his personal preferences and value judgments
into the essay in a way that no real musicologist would be allowed to do.
There is only one footnote.  And he does not cite the research or
analytical work of anyone else in the field, except an unnamed music
critic "in one of the leading American national magazines."  This essay is
wholly Gould's personal opinion about the music, writing as one of
Schoenberg's biggest fans.  It's an entertaining and informative piece,
but it isn't scholarship.

It doesn't matter what country presented him with his high school
education and his honorary doctorate; the fact remains that he did not go
THROUGH the process of training in academic scholarship: the training of
his research skills and writing skills.

The field of "historically informed performance" (and broader musicology)
is an established discipline.  Its branches include study of the surviving
instruments (organology), source studies of the surviving copies, dating
of manuscripts, biographical data about the composers and their audiences,
contextual study of the culture that shaped a composer's growth, study of
a work's reception history since its premiere (what effects did the work
reportedly make on its audiences?), stylistic analysis, study of treatises
and reports about playing techniques (articulation, phrasing, tempo,
aesthetics, etc.), study of tuning/temperament theory and history, and of
course study of how composers and improvisers and performers were trained
in their craft.  All these things are relevant in the preparation of
publications and "historically informed" performances.  The performer and
scholar try to "get inside" where a work is coming from, as a prelude to
making it speak effectively today in a different culture.

Gould the writer was remarkably good at synthesizing ideas from various
places and presenting them in ways that non-scholars can understand.  In
the same way, Gould the piano player presented ideas that appeal to
listeners at all levels of familiarity with the materials.  His
presentations are immediately interesting and thought-provoking; one can
also find more in them on repeated encounters.  That is, they're effective
pieces.

But they don't resemble the musicological directions I mentioned above.
Gould's performances show that he rethought the pieces to make them sound
new, yes, but not from a standpoint of the historical evidence about
practices.  And Gould's writings are (as I pointed out last week and again
today) personal reactions to the compositions, based on his own analyses
and preferences.  As I said above, I still think they're effective pieces
of writing and performance: they're entertaining.  But they're simply not
scholarly in any normal use of that term.  They're in a different genre.

Bob/Elmer wrote:

>I just didn't want to get in the position of throwing a long list of
>musicology books back at Bradley. Because I don't think that's really
>germain to the issue.

Isn't this just a way of admitting that the musicological evidence for
Gould as a scholar is thin?  The "long list of musicology books" can't be
thrown because it doesn't exist.  It would indeed be germane to the issue
if they DID exist.

Gould's liner notes "A Tale of Two _Marienlebens_" from 1978 have at least
the seeds of musicological thinking.  It's an insightful commentary, but
again the tone could stand some reworking.  It's still only a personal
value judgment about the music, just as his other writings and his
performances were.  And he (once again) veers into Schoenberg-worship and
Strauss-worship.  This essay is the position paper of a fan: he's trying
to get the general reader to be as excited about the music as he is, and
to understand his disappointment in it as well.  Gould's personal value
judgments about music are interesting, but they're not scholarship: they
tell us more about Gould than about the music!

Here are his concluding paragraphs and his footnote, which (I believe)
show Gould's unscholarly style to be self-evident:

-----

(...)
The ability to sum up a work of substance was never a strong point with
Hindemith.  (In this also he shares a tendency with Brahms and Bruckner.)
He lacks some ultimate, transformational impulse--the willingness,
perhaps, to set aside the burden of motivic development--the very quality
through which, as so often in the final measures of a Wagner opera or a
Strauss tone poem, the motivic strands themselves are ultimately
dematerialized.  Any number of Hindemith's finest sonata-style
compositions are coda-compromised by this inability to transcend his
material, this urge to exhibit ever more concretely the process of its
working out.  In the piano sonatas, for example, the codas are frequently
marred by unnecessary triad fill-outs, chord clusters in inconvenient
registers, and a thematic predilection which one can perhaps best define
as "when in doubt, augment."

I would dearly like to say that "Vom Tode Maria III" is the exception that
proves the rule.  This conclusing song, however, sees Hindemith succumbing
once again to his familiar finale temptations.  Though its central segment
finds him in his nimblest trio-sonata mood, its primary theme transforms
the motives of Mary's birth into a vigorous alla breve, octave-doubled in
keyboard registers five octaves apart, and the concluding fourth
chord--open fifths in C and B-flat respectively--is hammered home by a
final embarrassing reinforcement in the upper regions of the treble.  It's
the sort of windup gesture one might perhaps countenance as a musical
postlude to a meeting of the Loyal Order of Imperial Moose, but it
emphatically does not provide a proper conclusion for a composition that
deals with the miracle of transcendence.  As a result, the work ends
perfunctorily and without emotional reference to the intense devotional
atmosphere which otherwise permeates.  And I am saddened to concede this
point, because, as the reader may perhaps have gathered already, I firmly
believe that _Das Marienleben_ in its original form is the greatest song
cycle ever written.

Footnote: In a diary entry dated January 1949, an unusually distinguished
critic made the following notations: "The _Marienleben_ has been put on
anew.  Earlier, so P. H. confesses, it was only a demonstration of power.
Something had to be overcome, and anyone who perhaps believes that this
could be the result of inspiration was completely wrong."  The critic was
Arnold Schoenberg, who, according to his biographer H. H. Stuckenschmidt,
had "more sympathy for Hindemith's gifts than the orthodox Schoenbergians
liked" and who "regarded the [_Marienleben_] corrections with
displeasure."  And so say I.

-----

My conclusion to my comments here: Gould's writings and performances are
about Glenn Gould.  They tell us how he thought about things, and how he
prioritized points in his interpretations.  They tell us how he molded
others' compositions as raw materials into whatever he wanted to say for
himself.  Glenn Gould excelled at being Glenn Gould.  If Gould's writings
and performances are now thought of "scholarly," by some new standard,
then all the real musicologists might as well give up and go buy their
lunches at the haberdashery.

"Yo there!  Dr Kerman!  If you dip that brim in honey mustard it'll taste
better.  Yeah, we marinated it to make the chewing easier.  You want a
side of shoestrings with that?"


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot