GG: review by Takahashi (belated reply)

["Junichi Miyazawa" <walkingtune@bigfoot.com>]

Cynthia, Ron, and others,

Thank you for your replies to the part of my article
re the review on GG Edition II by the Japanese composer
Yuji Takahashi.

Sorry for a long silence.  During the time, I was writing
and revising the whole article "GG and Japanese publications."
After the correction by a friend who is a native speaker of
English, now I re-post the part of Takahashi's.

I think the quotations by my translation and my comments were 
not good ones, with some misleading parts.  For example, 
"Gould stop appealing..." the part Ron attacked.  
It was a mistranslation.  I corrected the sentence
as ". . . lost its significance . . ."

Though an indirect one, I hope the revised writing will be 
an answer from me to your questions on, and criticism against,
 Takahashi's idea.

Regards,

Junichi

--------

     . . . As expected, many favorable reviews appeared for the 
*Glenn Gould Edition II*, but there was only a single review, 
though a skeptical one, which might be worth reading:  
a review by one of the leading composers in Japan, Yuji Takahashi 
(b.1938).

     Takahashi says, "Glenn Gould's approach to performance had 
almost lost its significance by 1970," and he regards it as a 
"self-oppressive stoicism of North American intelligentsia before 
the Vietnam War when they believed in technology." Gould's 
performance, according to Takahashi, achieved by excessive control 
at the sacrifice of natural physical mechanism, is an achievement 
that "every note on the score is visible."  It is "a performance 
praised in North America in 1960's."  Even the re-recording of the 
*Goldberg Variations *, integrated by a single 'pulse,' is
"a representation of the stoicism."  It was a performance version 
of what American composers, such as Eliot Carter, had tried to do 
in their compositions in 1950's: a composition which varies 
rhythmically, but the music itself is stative and homogeneous.  
Moreover, Gould's controversial understanding of J. S. Bach's image
as a composer who abandoned his self-indulgence and pursued stoic 
expression is "a projection of the Eastern American Puritanism." 
Gould overestimated Bach's "indifference about instruments" so 
much that he neglected the importance of timbre. This, according 
to Takahashi, is also a result of "self-oppressive stoicism." 
"After ten years or so, gourmets of music enjoy the 'sound' 
of Gould as a most musical interpretation, but that is 
a passing fad, retrospectively missing the 1960's"
(*On-Stage Shinbun*, January 27, 1995).

     Takahashi, a pupil of Xenakis, who studied and taught in 
the United States in the 1960's, is also a distinguished pianist 
who tried performing and recording many of Bach's keyboard 
pieces on the piano including the *Goldberg Variations*.
Takahashi's criticism against Gould's approach is a manifestation, 
or at least a desire, to dismiss "metaphysical" music-making which 
both Gould and Takahashi might have had in common.  However much 
he sounds idiosyncratic and full of controversial, possibly 
inappropriate,  judgments (referring to "stoicism," "Puritanism," 
the Vietnam War, etc.), his opinion makes us conscious of a 
feature of Gould's performance: a quest for integration, which 
may attract some people but not others. (By the way, Takahashi 
is now seeking a non-homogeneous fingering on the keyboard to 
revive the character of each finger, which makes music 
a "physical" achievement.)


***************************************
 Junichi Miyazawa, Tokyo 
 walkingtune@bigfoot.com / junichi@poetic.com
  (aliases for:  farnorth@mbc.infosphere.or.jp )
***************************************
  http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/3739