GG: Ecstasy and obligation?

["John P. Hill" <jphill@frank.mtsu.edu>]

Hi, Kristen:

I'm not sure that there's any direct connection between "ecstasy"
and the "obligation" of the artist to perform in public.

For GG, ecstacy or "repose" as he often called it, resulted when
he was able to be completely comfortable/relaxed and realize his
best vision of a particular musical work.  Clearly, this didn't happen
very often when he performed in public and I would suggest that he
had no particular interest in "pleasing his audience" during the
years that he toured and concertized extensively.  I think it's
pretty clear that he had *no* particular interest in the audience
whatsoever and that he would really have prefered them *not* to be
there.  On very rare occasion (Salzburg Goldberg set, for example),
he felt that something good happened while he was on stage, but that
the audience being there really had nothing to do with it happening.

Artist who *like* live performance often refer to the positive
feedback that they receive from their audience and feel that this
helps them to perform on a higher level than they might otherwise,
without the benefit of whatever adrenelin rush is involved.  For them,
the audience is a type of support mechanism.  I'm sure that these people
do feel some sense of "responsibility" to play well and please the
folks paying for the tickets, but I'm not sure that "ecstacy" enters
into that very much.

Gould clearly felt that he was better able to share a stronger and
more personal version of a piece of music by utilizing the potentials
of recording technology and the isolation from public interference that
this made possible.  Through analytical playback and subsequent editing,
he was able to create a master tape that even *he* might not have been
able to recreate in even the most comfortable live setting.  The parallel
with the Beatles Sgt. Peppers album is quite direct:  the technology of
the studio made possible recorded versions of compositions that could
*never* be realized in live performance.  No matter;  GG had no interest
in trying to make that happen.

I very much agree with most of what Gould had to say about the concert
experience;  I'd *much* prefer to listen to a well made recording, for
any number of good reasons.  I *can* say that my listening experiences
represent a kind of ecstatic condition on occasion, whereas live events
rarely work on the same level. I think GG's experience with listening was
similar.  He often listened to favorite albums *multiple times* start to
finish (Strauss and Streisand come to mind) and could be literally taken
to another plane of awareness in the process.  This has a lot more to do
with "ecstacy" than getting out in front of an audience and worrying about
how many finger slips will be noticeable in the execution of a difficult
piece of concert repertoire.

As far as Helfgott goes, I find the whole thing interesting on the level
of pure commercialism.  What we have here is an audience that is largely
musically illiterate but highly devoted to a personality that has been
immortalized by a commercially successful film.  It's a bit like rappers
becoming *hugely* commercially successful because they've been marketed
to folks who want to hear a certain message that fits with their
lifestyle (Frank Zappa wrote extensively about this phenomenon, although
not rap in particular).  Music doesn't have too much to do with it
because most rappers are musically illiterate and their fans really don't
care because, in many cases, they are too.  Ditto for the Helfgott
crowd.

That's not to say that folks shouldn't be allowed to listen to Helfgott
(or rap) or admire his struggle with adversity in his life, but let's not
confuse this with great musical art.  Comparisons with Gould or other
truly great pianists are really unfortunate (maybe fraudulent?), but the
general public might not care much. INDEPENDENCE DAY made *tons* of money
at the box office, but is probably not a great piece of film art.  People
who even know who Glenn Gould *is* represent a niche market within a niche
market.

I'm not sure where this leaves the discussion of ecstacy vs.
responsibility.  My gut sense is that Gould worked to achieve this
reposeful state in his execution of the music as often as possible
and I think it comes through very often on his audio and video recordings.
Perhaps his sense of "responsibility" came in trying to provide these
realizations to the widest public possible, through the usage of new
technology and media.

jh