Re: GG and Schubert

[Arin Murphy <la_murph@alcor.concordia.ca>]

I'm trying to imagine singing with GG as my accompaniment... no, it's 
just not working. I'd go nuts. Nice idea, though!

As for Gould not recording any Schubert, there's a decent explanation in 
_The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision_, an article by 
Edward W. Said, where Said says this:

	[Gould] has written of his preference not only for polyphony in 
general, but also for the composer, like Richard Strauss, `who makes 
richer his own time by not being of it; who speaks for all generations by 
being of none'. Gould's dislike of middle-period Beethoven, Mozart, and 
most of the nineteenth-century romantics whose music was intensely 
subjective or fashionable and too instrument-specific, is balanced by his 
admiration for pre- and post-romantics like Orlando Gibbons and Anton 
Webern, as well as for polyphonists (Bach and Strauss) whose 
all-or-nothing attitude to the instruments theyw rote for made for a 
total discipline lacking in other composers.

In his own essay called `N'aimez-vous pas Brahms?' Gould called the 
concerto a `vastly overindulged form' (he was talking about nineteenth 
century composers at the time), and called Grieg and Liszt `second-rate 
composers'. As a matter of fact, the nineteenth century Romantics are 
very noticeably missing from his recording history. (Liszt? Liszt who? 
And Chopin? You'd think he'd never heard of him.) Gould recorded what he 
liked and what he believed in. I personally consider it a monumental loss
that he didn't record and Schubert; I'm very fond of him. (Second only to 
Bach!)  But I'd rather know that Gould wouldn't play something he didn't 
believe in, than bend to popularity and record Schubert for the masses. 
It's all part of who he was.

And a happy 200th to Schubert!



 Arin Murphy
Concordia University, Montreal
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The absolute requirements of literary labour not unfrequently compel an 
irregular distribution of time, and with it irregular social and moral 
habits. (J.W. Kaye)