Re: [F_minor] Re: Zenph 55 G'bergs released! (Brad Lehman)

["MJ Watts" <mj.accounts@gmail.com>]

> From Gould's radio show on Stokowski:

The maestro speaks:

"First of all it's our privilege and our necessity to try to realize
what was in the soul of the composer (enter piano) and to make that
alive again.  This is very difficult. One must realize that our system
of notation is extremely limited.  It's primitive beyond all
possibility. We write black marks on white paper and we write that
it's G natural or G sharp or G flat.  The mere facts of frequency but
music is a communication much more subtle than mere facts so the best
a composer can do when within him he hears a great melody, we'll say,
is to put it on paper.  We call it music but that's not music, that's
only paper. It's black marks on paper. "

[and later]

"I believe the time will come when we shall make records in the open
air where every instrument has its particular pick-up and is amplified
to the right extent and then all those sounds are brought together in
one composite…

I would like to have 100 results from each individual instrument…

The engineer and the conductor would have to work very closely together..."

Gould's admiration for Stokowski is well known.  What I find
illuminating about the above is a vague sense of frustration that
music is impossible.  It is impossible to notate, impossible to play,
or rather it is impossible to sound.  There is a notion here (hear?!)
of Platonic sound which I think GG shared.  The first problem of
medium is to get the sound from someone's brain to another's brain
then to an instrument and then from the instrument to the audience--
first the recording engineers and then the rest of us.  I'm certain
there is a vast difference between what a composer and then a musician
hears and what we, the listeners, eventually hear.  I hold no love for
Gould's recordings as originals, as his imprint (an aura in Walter
Benjamin's sense from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.")

I don't doubt a bit that Stokowski would be thrilled by Zenph's
project.  Can you imagine, from Edison to this?!!!  And I personally
think Gould would be tickled pink at watching a piano play more or
less like him.  I'm certain he'd have sent the piano on tour in his
stead.  (As Andy Warhol sent actors in wigs to give speeches for him.)
But more than anything I think Gould would be giddy at the idea of
*reperformance* which is about distinguishing the performance from the
medium.  Philosophically that's mindblowing. Sure there are all kinds
of arguments to be made for what humans can do, what the artist does
to adjust for the medium of the instrument in the space of the hall--
but remember humans- engineers and engineer-musicians and extremely
dedicated ones at that, are behind this project.  So for the man who
found such possibilities in Wendy Carlos' Bach-- I think Zenph's
reperformance is a great hommage.

But it isn't really important what Gould whould have thought.  Don't
most of us (myself included) think we can make Gould's case both pro
and con Zenph's project.  Seems like there's an essay GG wrote along
those lines...

How about the ghost of Glenn Gould interviews John Q. Walker about
Glenn Gould not playing Glenn Gould's piano?!

-Mary Jo
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