Re: The Listener as Artist

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Allan MacLeod wrote:

> HEALTH ADVISORY:  Anyone who lives in the fantasy world of orthodoxy or
> who is an extreme musician may well, on reading this message, suffer
> severe physical or mental breakdown.
> 
> As I think back about the conversation amongst f_minors over the last
> few weeks, I begin to suspect that few of us have read Gould--not read
> about him and all his eccentricities, but actually read his own
> writings.  In particular, how many f_minors have read what is, by far,
> his most significant article, "The Prospects of Recording"?
(...)
> If anyone has actually read this to its end, my thanks.  I was getting
> rather tired of reading about Helfgott, Tureck et al and thought it
> about time to start discussing this giant amongst pianists again.  And I
> urge all f_minors to obtain a copy of Tim Page's The Glenn Gould
> Reader.  It will provoke, anger, stimulate and make you laugh out loud.
> Without this book at your bedside, you simply cannot even begin to
> appreciate the half of Gould's incredible achievements.  Although we are
> using advanced technology, we are still reading and I fear too few of us
> are reading.

Bravo on your posting, and I agree with you.  It's important to take those
writings seriously.

But still, having read the _Reader_ cover to cover several times over a
period of 15 years, and having dipped into it frequently between times, I
stick by my assessments of his playing.  I've also read most of the
English-language GG secondary literature, including that Angilette book
about GG's supposed philosophies as derived from his work.  Basically, I
grew up musically on all that stuff, and was a GG fan already in the
mid-1970's when I was old enough to realize what I was dealing with.  My
musical world-view has been very heavily shaped by Glenn Gould in all
those media.  His choices and biases for many years strongly influenced my
own preferences as to repertoire and interpretation.  

A large part of the value of GG's work, for me, was in introducing me to
some of the repertoire and ideas he was interested in.  When I then
pursued those tangents on their own, the most exciting adventure of all, I
began to look back on GG's own version of those things with far less
enthusiasm.  I no longer agree so wholeheartedly with what he apparently
found in those things.  Yes, he was a terrific catalyst to point me toward
those things in the first place.  But he cannot remain an end in himself,
as if his way is the only valid way to experience those things.  (That's
really the case with any influential artist, teacher, communicator: if a
pilgrim takes it seriously and grows beyond that initial "hook," exploring
the territory, the pilgrim eventually becomes less fond of that one
initial path.)

I don't care so much one way or the other about his personal
eccentricities as about his overall musical choices and about these very
observations which you point out here.  That's (I think) the essence of
GG's work.  I'm definitely a GG fan, not a GG scholar or imitator.  
That's by choice.  I'm a fan because I think GG was a great and
imaginative musician and thinker.  I'm not a GG scholar because I have
other priorities in my life above dealing with GG minutiae.  And I choose
not to play like him anymore because I think his methods and choices
downplay too many other aspects of the music which I believe are also
important.  (For example: I used to emulate his metrical strictness at so
many levels; now I believe I was fundamentally misguided in doing so.  
The music is richer than that.)  The GG way of seeing something is an
interesting iconoclastic view, always valuable because it's iconoclastic
in how it prioritizes the musical elements.

I agree that he was deliberately trying to be "unorthodox" and challenging
for all the reasons you point out.  They're valid points.  Overall, I
think he succeeded in most of his intentions.  Call it deconstructionism
or whatever, I don't care about the philosophical terms...GG (in the art
of his playing and writing) makes us think.

And I think *in light of* all this literature and especially the _Reader_,
some of his musical choices are still very eccentric and arbitrary, and
sometimes just plain mis-informed.  On the evidence before me, GG was (I
think) much more intuitive than scholarly rigorous, and sometimes just
downright whimsical.  Not that either of those is a bad thing, but they
both can very easily thrive on intensity and shock value as an excuse for
not doing the background work.  I know so, because I am that type of
personality and it sometimes gets me into trouble.  Such a personality
often grabs an attractive idea and runs enthusiastically with it, only to
find out later that there was something fundamentally wrong with
assumptions that should have been questioned earlier.

As Bazzana points out most cogently, GG's view of Bach (especially) was
colored by received conventional wisdom and by intellectual ideals.  Yes,
GG rethought some of that later for himself and came to interesting
conclusions.  But the adult GG's Bach was always seen through a structural
filter of Schoenberg et al.  Yes, that's one valid way to see Bach.  But I
think it's a limited way, it's far outside the realm of serious Bach
scholarship, and GG never really escaped those blinders.  He stayed in a
favorite niche with pet misinformation about Bach.  I came to this
conclusion about GG's Bach years before I read Bazzana; I could identify
the elements that made me uncomfortable, and knew why I prefer early GG to
late GG.  (In short: GG's early Bach sounds to me more graceful and
natural, and seems more like the work of instinctive genius rather than
ruminative genius.)  Bazzana in his analysis confirms those elements of
discomfort by putting names and likely sources to GG's ideas about Bach.

Any music or philosophical idea that was worth consideration by GG is, of
course, far richer than any single viewpoint could bring out.  His
reaction is always worth hearing because it is challenging.  Isn't that a
main point of individual artistry?  GG was unquestionably good at being an
individual artist.

Sorry, no physical or mental breakdown here.  This "Listener as Artist"
has indeed made his own choices based on the prospects of Gould.  My
choice is to prefer GG's genius instincts to his overly-intellectualized
experiments.  (That preference colors everything I write here.)  

Those of you who choose otherwise are of course welcome to your own
choices.  Mine is merely *one* perspective from processing the GG
materials.

Bradley Lehman ~ Harrisonburg VA, USA ~ 38.45716N+78.94565W
bpl@umich.edu ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/