Re: Ecstasy and obligation

[Robert Kunath <kunath@hilltop.ic.edu>]

Dear F-Minors,

	I've been thinking over Kristen's ideas about the possible tension
between ecstacy and responsibility for the performing musician.  I think
she portrays Gould's dilemma very well, but I wonder how broadly-shared
that dilemma is.  My guess (without any real knowledge) is that a person
trained as a classical musician expects to perform in public (I gather it
can be different in popular music: major rock musicians apparently view
their public performances as promotional events for their recordings).
I'd imagine that every artist feels at some time the dilemma of how to
speak from the heart yet appeal to the audience, yet I also think that
very few felt (or feel) it as sharply as Gould did.

	One basis for Gould's discomfort seems to me to have been moral:
on the one hand he regarded the public concert as something like public
torture, and, on the other hand, he seems to have regarded art itself as
inherently morally compromised (I think of his comment in the
self-interview where he says that art needs to be given an opportunity to
phase itself out).  At least at times he professed a semi-medieval ideal
of the artist as anonymous craftsman, and he resolutely disdained the
trappings of the romantic conception of the virtuoso.

	The trappings of the romantic conception of the virtuoso, though,
seem to me to be a result of certain broadly-shared expectations about
what the persona of a great artist will be; they are part of a culture of
celebrity that emerged and became increasingly better-defined over the
19th century.  Gould seems to have hated the persona of the romantic
virtuoso (and his satire of Rubinstein's memoirs in the GG Reader and his
well-known aversion to Horowitz attest to that), yet he does seem to have
been attracted by celebrity.  He wanted it on his terms, though, not the
audience's, but I think that he found over time that the attempt to define
himself against stereotypical public expectations was just another way of
being trapped by audience expectations.

	I've always considered Gould's artistic persona as the
anti-Romantic par excellence, but I just read an interesting refutation of
that view by Richard Taruskin in his collection of essays *Text and Act:
Essays on Music and Performance* (Oxford Univ Press):

	I may yet be provoked into attempting a cultural interpretation of
of the systematic belittling one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th
century, Vladimir Horowitz, has suffered at the hands of critics committed
to norm-seeking modernist values like performance practice and reified
'structure.'  The situation is complicated, thoug; there would have to be
a companion piece called 'Horowitz Defended against His Devotees.'  And
there would have to be a concomitant study of Glenn Gould reception, to
discover why this equally arrogant Alberich has enjoyed modernist
adulation. [Short answer: He epitomized unworldliness [transcendence] and
abstraction [formalism], whereas Horowitz particularized and concretized;
and he upgraded modernist indifference to the audience to the point of
anhedonia, while Horowitz aimed to please; all of which is to say that of
the two, Gould was by far the truer romantic. (pp. 17-18).

	Certainly anti-Romanticism can be romanticized, and, if Taruskin
is right, then Gould's attempt to escape the "responsibilities" of
high-culture celebrity may have brought him full circle, back to a
romantic identity.  Martyrdom, after all, has been a part of that since
(at least) The Sorrows of Young Werther.

	I don't think I've made much sense here--sorry for the rambling
thoughts, but perhaps there is something of interest in them (if only the
quote from Taruskin)...

	All the best,

	Robert