RE: GG: *Glenn*'s epigraph

["Junichi Miyazawa" <Junichi_Miyazawa@msn.com>]

Hi Eddie:

This is something to help you to understand what the play is like.

*Glenn* is a play about GG written by a Canadian playwright
David Young (b.1946).  It was premiered at the GG Conference
(Toronto) and GG Festival (Groningen, Holland) in 1992.

Here, I quote the abstract of my paper written in Japanese 
"Glenn Gould and David Young's play *Glenn*:  *The Goldberg 
Variations*, Contrapuntal Radio, and Canadian Identity"(*Journal 
of Teikyo Heisei University*, Vol. 7, No.2, October 1995) :

    ...There are four characters in the play, which portray the eras 

of GG's fifty-year life and his thoughts: Prodigy (6-22), Performer 
(22-31), Perfectionist (31-48), and Puritan (48-50).

   These characters act and symphonize their voices in the framework 

of Bach's *The Goldberg Variations* according to the voicing and 
structure of the music.  The use of the framework (the aria, 30 
variations and the aria da capo) is a successful device of transferin
g 
a musical form into a literary from which is independent of the 
time-space conventions of the theatre.

   The play also employs successfully the compositional technique 
named "contraputal radio," which overlaps parallel dialogue and 
makes coincidental conjunction between voices, because it 
makes the four Goulds didguise the other thatrical Gould-like 
personae who enliven the interactions.

   For all the complicated plot, the play can be analized clearly if 

one realizes that the crucial hero is Puritan: the plot is the 
journey of Puritan, who goes back through the whole of Gould's life.

   The recomposed figure of Glenn Gould in the play is a typical 
Canadian according to the model of Canadian identity in 
Margaret Atwood's *Survival*(1972).  Glenn Gould was a man of 
escape who fled from the "Soulth" to the "North" in order to 
survive himself, but happened to be a hero in the world as well as 
in Canada, and is by definition a Canadian anti-hero.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am going to translate the whole paper into English
and polish and publish it somewhere.  

That is why I am eager to know the source of the epigraph.

Junichi Miyazawa, Tokyo

junichi@poetic.com /or/ junichi_miyazawa@msn.com