GG: Invention and masking

["Joseph Podlesnik" <veronese@jerseycape.com>]

Dear Bradley Lehman:

Thanks for your note. GG's early epiphany (at the ripe age of 12 or 13)
with the vacuum cleaner really did involve the Mozart Fantasia and Fugue K.
394. You may be thinking of the time when GG, years later, tried masking
the sound of his piano while he was having difficulty playing a Beethoven
passage. However, in this instance, he recreated the masking effect by
placing two blaring radios (perhaps even a TV) on the both sides of his
piano -- to help him to attune (and make subtle adjustments) to his playing
based on INTERNAL feedback, not to EXTERNAL feedback (which would be the
actual sound of the instrument). 

It really is quite remarkable that we should be discussing this just now,
as I am going through similar behavioral/neural approaches regarding my
life-long stuttering problem. My clinician urges me to attend to the
internal feedback of what my articulators (tongue, lips, jaw) are doing as
I speak and make corrections, and not to external cues (the pressures of
the situation, what others might think of one who stutters, etc.) Very
interesting idea. Think about it: GG was VERY attuned to subtle changes to
inner feedback -- to the precise height and tilt of his chair, to the
actual side-to-side "play" of the keys on his CD-318 piano, to the room
temperature, etc.. It's as if he erected a fourth wall (as actors do) to
keep him from be distracted by external feedback (the audience). 

The other interesting idea regarding this approach to creative masking has
to do with the gestalt principle of closure. When something is left
unfinished, we instinctively use our imaginations to complete it. It is
interesting what creative things we can come up with when we are forced to
supplant what is left out. (There is a line from a poem by one of the
English Romantics that alludes to how unheard melodies can sometimes be
sweeter than those that are heard. What masking really does is offer a
different way to view a work (your own or someone else's). In my visual art
courses, I try to show students ways in which they can view their works
differently ( looking at their work through colored or fogged transparent
materials, through the reversed reflection in the mirror, holding the work
upside down, perhaps through dark glasses, or even using a strobe effect --
to see the image in a brief instant, instead of a series of moments. I
believe GG's early formative experience has ties to such ideas.

Joseph Podlesnik