Re: GG: quote about centipede?

[Ed Price <edp@panix.com>]

there may be other sources but here's one:

``I was recently talking to a group of educators about the problems
concerning the teaching of pianists in institutionalized technical
"factories".  You see, I think there's a fallacy that's been concocted by
the music teachers' profession, to wit: that ther's a certain sequence of
events necessary in order to have the revealed truth about the way one
produces a given effect on a given instrument.  And I said: Given half an
hour of your time and your spirit and a quiet room, I could teach any of
you how to play the piano -- everything there is to know about playing the
piano can be taught in half an hour, I'm convinced of it.  I've never done
it and I never intend to do it, because it's *centipedal* in the
Schoenbergian sense -- that is to say, in the sense in which Schoenberg was
afraid to be asked why he used a certain row in a certain way, saying he
felt like the centipede, which doesn't want to think about the movement of
its hundred legs because it would become impotent; it couldn't walk at all
if it did think about it.  And I said: Therefore I'm not going to give this
half-hour lesson, but if I chose to, the physical element is so very
minimal that I could teach it to you if you paid attention and were very
quiet and absorbed what I said and possibly you could take it down on a
cassette so that you could replay it later on, and you wouldn't need
another lesson.  You would then have to proceed along certain rather
disciplined lines whereby you observed the correlation of *that* bit of
information with certain other kinds of physical activity -- you would
discover there are certain things you can't do, certain kinds of surfaces
you can't sit on, certain kinds of car seats you can't ride in.
  And by this time I was getting a great laugh -- they regarded this whole
thing as a routine, which it was *not*.  I was trying to make quite a
serious point, which was: that if this were *done*, you would be free of
the entire tactile kinetic committment.  No, *correction* -- you would not
be free, you would be eternally bound to it, but so tightly bound to it
that it would be a matter of *tertiary* interest only.  It would be
something that could be "disarranged" only by a *set* of circumstances that
would confuse it.''
 -- Glenn Gould [Payzant p94, from Cott, _Forever Young_ p33]

-ed