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Dear f_minorites,
I didn't post this memoir because I thought it was just too boring, but another f_minorite urges me to do so ... perhaps s/he feels many of us are troubled by insomnia. (I always reach for a Henry James novel myself.) My musical education was zilch, nada, bupkis, but I may have first heard whispers and buzzes about GG because in high school I was a member of a Nerd Cabal which smoked cigarettes in the woods and consisted largely of very talented young musicians, many of whom have gone on to professional musical careers of considerable note. But I never bought or heard Glenn Gould until I was about 24. Hanging with the high school musicians had left me with a sort of Raw Global Guilt that my ignorance of music made me seriously deficient in Culture. In those teen years, this made me a Prime Sucker for any weasel in a tuxedo. When I was 15, I read a review in The Saturday Review (my pipeline to Culture) of John Cage's "Variations IV." I could read the coded subtext clearly: "Buy this record immediately and you will be Cultured." Special-ordering it from Washington DC's premiere artsy-*artsy record store took weeks and denuded me of $15. When the postcard arrived, I leapt on the L4 bus to collect this Wondrous Thing and raced home again to play it on the family Webcor, with its heavy coin Scotch-taped to its cast-iron tonearm. To this day, I am filled with rage (I was too humiliated to demand my money back) and sincerely believe John Cage was a con artist who steals the life savings of unsophisticated children and his estate owes me $15 plus interest. O the Joy of Being Musically Dirt Ignorant! After the army, I soldered together a nifty kit-built Dynaco stereo and was simultaneously seized with an obsession to finally become acquainted, as a Civilized Fellow ought, with Classical Music. Maybe I started with Mozart because, whatever else I didn't know about him, I knew he would not scare me and would be harmonically and rhythmically accessible. (Bartok and Berg and Webern I thought best to put on the back-burner for a while.) And I probably picked Glenn Gould's LPs first because a nice Canadian fellow like that wouldn't have any weird sneaky European tricks up his sleeve. Or sneer at me for being a North American hayseed. I fell in love with Mozart instantly. And forever. Almost to this day entirely to the exclusion of any other composer, and almost to this day entirely to the exclusion of any other pianist. GG's Mozarts are Number 1 on my BBC Desert-Island list. My Plan for Musical Self-Improvement did not include any reading -- you know my prejudices about classical Liner Notes, how useful they are for insomnia. So it was ten years before I ever read that Gould's interpretation was generally considered Wrong or Quirky or Psychotic, and a few years after that before I discovered that GG didn't LIKE Mozart! (By this time my GG Mozarts were the most scratched-up, overplayed, exhausted records in my collection.) I am convinced he was Lying. I'm not in the least joking. No one could transfer Mozart's notes to my heart, and transport me so instantly and permanently and profoundly to Heaven, if he didn't love that music profoundly. I have since listened to many interpretations by guys and ladies who spout all over the Liner Notes zat zey are chust vild about Mozart, and their playing doesn't lift me even to my one-storey rooftop. Clearly I have to credit GG that he loved Bach a bit more. I am pretty much convinced that Gould foresaw his early death and chose the Goldberg as his farewell to the world, nothing else would do. And early on I bought the wonderful "A Consorte of Musicke" of Byrd and Gibbons -- and Gould's joy and rapture just explodes from that album, next to the Mozart it is my wild runaway favorite. But GG loved Mozart deeply, passionately, every note, and I would tell him so to his face, and if he disagreed, call him a liar. The proof, by the way -- is in the Hum. Bob Merkin
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