Re: GG: Gould's francophonie...

["Harding.Matthew" <Matthew.Harding@CIC.GC.CA>]

Hello All. I have avoided responding to a lot of somewhat off-topic posts, but I thought I'd jump in here.

In Canada, we have a very special situation whereby our French dialect is unique in the world. It is almost a language to itself and can be quite hard to understand in some parts of the world. I think that Bruno and Glenn agreeing on Glenn not to speak French natively was more a question of accent/dialect than actual facility in the language.

As a person born in the UK but growing up in Montreal, I can attest to the fact that my French accent would be very hard to understand in most parts of Europe, where the community of Europe speaks a much more homogenized French. It's sort of like my wife's friends from Texas, who when they visit seem to me to speak a different language that English!! Accent is everything.

In an officially bilingual country, Glenn would have received daily French instruction (up until he quit high school, that is!), and as a resident of Canada would have been unable to avoid French in the everyday world. As a frequent CBC and Radio Canada performer, I'm sure he would have had lots of exposure to our official language, and like most of us, would be capable enough in a second language.

Like you, Luiz, I share the fantasy that there is footage somewhere of GG speaking French (or any language other than English!) lying in someone's basement or in a vault somewhere. If anyone knows of any, please email me!!!

However, are you aware that Glenn did do a native German language spoken promo for a German release of his record? Here is the info from the NLC:


    File no. / No du dossier: 34 32 10
    Series / Séries: Correspondence, incoming
    Author/composer / Auteur/compositeur: Stracke, Hans Richard CBS Schallplatten,
    Frankfurt, Germany
    Title / Titre: Gould, Glenn
    Contents / Contenu: will send six more sets, suggests Gould record 8-12 minute talk in
    German about Bach in connection with release of CBS Schallplatten S77337
    Date: 1970 Dec 16
    Medium / Média: typescript
    Pages: 1 leaf


Can any of our German friends give further analysis of this piece??? Danke!!

Best regards,
Matthew

-----Original Message-----
From: Luiz Gonçalo de Moraes Prado [mailto:luizpra@ZAZ.COM.BR] 
Sent: April 25, 2003 2:43 PM
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU
Subject: GG: Gould's francophonie...


Hi Elmer!,


First I would like to start this message saying how good it feels to find your messages in my InBox. F_Minor is probably my favorite place on earth (a very post-modern situation... One of those maffesolistic scholars is probably writing "No-Place or, Cyberspace and the Metaphysical Ethos" somewhere... How easy it is to make money these days...) and the lines written by you, by Bradley, Anne, Mary Jo, Jacqueline, Juozas, Valeria and so many others are a kind of (very gouldian) antidote to solitude.

Anyway.... regarding Mr. Gould's french. I think that it's on the Friedrich book... When Bruno Monsaigneon was shooting "The Alchemist" they tried to have Gould speaking french in at least some parts of the film. The results were really disappointing and they decided to keep it all in English and go straight to french subtitles.

I'm at the University Lab right now, so I can't really check in the book, I hope somebody else out there will correct me if I'm wrong. I just wonder if some of that footage, Glenn Gould trying to impersonate Glenn Gould in french, could be found somewhere...

Love you all,


Luiz Gonçalo