GG: revision of earlier post

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

Hello again, here's revised version. Thanks for your patience.

GG's early epiphany (at the 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 trouble playing a difficult Beethoven passage (c.f.
interview with 
Jonathon Cott.) In this instance, he tried to recreate the vacuum cleaner
masking
effect by placing two blaring radios (Beatles music, or a TV) on the
both sides of his piano -- to help him to attune (and make critical subtle
adjustments) to his playing
based on INTERNAL feedback, not to EXTERNAL feedback (which would be the
actual sound of the instrument). 

It is remarkable that we should be discussing this just now, as I am going 
through similar behavioral/neural approaches regarding my life-long
stuttering condition. My clinician urges me to attend to the INTERNAL
feedback of what my
articulators (tongue, lips, jaw) are doing as I speak and to make
corrections thus, and
not to EXTERNAL cues (the pressures off the situation - real or imagined;
what
others might think of one who stutters, etc.) It is a fact that when I
attend more to
outer feedback, I have *less* success in attaining my speech fluency
targets. Golfers, for
example, do not need to ask the caddy or listen for the audience's response
in order
to know that their golf shot was on target. They usually know it right
after they
hit the ball. Same applies to baseball players. Think about it: GG was very
sensitive,
highly attuned to any changes to inner feedback -- from the precise height
of his
piano 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. During his performances on
stage, you could
say he erected a fourth wall (as actors do) to keep himself from being
distracted by
external feedback (the audience). I have a friend who confirms this: He saw
G
perform live in NYC back in the 50's. and recalls vividly how G behaved as
if there was no
audience infront of him, as if he were playing (back in the family cottage
at Lake Simcoe?) alone to himself.

The other interesting idea about 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 - Keats? - 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). [By the way, there was a speech therapy device in 
use for some years known as the Edinburgh Masker.]   In my visual art
courses, 
I try to show students ways in which they can view their works differently 
(for instance, by looking at their work through dark, colored or fogged
transparent 
gels, through the reversed image in the mirror, holding the work upside
down, 
even somehow 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
these
ideas.


--JP