GG Liner notes

[Kristen Immoor <kimmoor@mindspring.com>]

Hi folks, I've just come across a really great essay from the liner notes
of the "Heritage" Glenn Gould cds on Nuova Era. I reprint it here, it's
kind of long and there aren't any indications of paragraph breaks, but if
you can make it through it is really an interesting read. I think the
writer makes a lot of good observations about Gould's choice to leave the
stage.
Kristen

Glenn Gould - Public Concerts and Private Reflections

To listen to recordings of the concerts of Glenn Gould is almost to violate
a secret, to break into a paradoxically private sphere in which the
features of emotional intensity and unrepeatability that are generally seen
as the qualities of a public performance are considered defects. Gould
however has never felt comfortable in this sphere. The successes that he
reaped in the United States, the Soviet Union and in Europe never had any
charm for him. On the contrary, these experiences had strengthened his
belief that the relationship between interpreter and music should dispense
with the element of representation that a concert imposes with all its
theatricality. Public performances meant that he was forced to expose his
many manias: the psychological protective barrier of his two pullovers, his
coat and the fingerless gloves that he used to wear even in summer; the
strange manner in which he attacked the piano; his position, face bent low
over the keyboard; the low stool with its legs set at different heights
that he had built for his personal use and that he took with him wherever
he played. The net result was that his eccentric personality made a greater
impression on his audiences than the music itself and the particular
qualities of his performances. Gould was an aesthete of clarity, which he
sought to attain by making the subjective effort of mediation as incidental
as possible and by presenting the structural essence of the music. This led
him to mask the meaning of the sound under a highly personal mode of
representation which really was too intrusive to go unnoticed. We cannot
exclude the possibility that he too saw the personality which he had
unwillingly constructed with a certain foppish vanity. There are many
elements which suggest that he was far more condescending towards this
aspect of self-representation than is generally admitted, and the
definition offered of him as "an aesthete of the MacLuhan era" effectively
penetrates this conflict between exhibitionism and his desire to conceal
his "theatricality." Signs of this are found again in the delight he took
in provoking and accusing, both in his performances and in the aphorisms
present in his many essays. However, what is outstanding in Gould is
without doubt the effort he made to attain a level of interpretation in
which the means used in the analysis - the piano, the keyboard, the kinetic
ability of his fingers, the audience, the acoustics of the concert hall and
of the recording studio - are almost forgotten, reduced to mere
instruments, rather like Wittgenstein's ladder which must be thrown away
after one has climbed up it. An ideal of "disembodied" music (in Mario
Bortolotto's definition) has recently been a topic for discussion,
signalling the insignificance of the instrument on which the music is
performed and of the circumstances of the performance: this is one of the
basic elements of Glenn Gould's aesthetic theory, for his intention is to
bring his listener into the most direct contact possible with the music,
excluding the interpreter's intermediating role. Gould had appreciated just
how contradictory were the myth of the unrepeatability of a concert and his
weary repeat performances when he was on concert tours, and had realised
that the idea of being able to gain easy success by repeating a well-worked
repertoire must automatically lead to conservatism. Yet for him the
presence of an audience was always an unknown element, which made demands
on the way in which he considered the sense of musical interpretation.
Bringing the listener into direct contact with the music would involve
hiding the entire process of construction that was necessary for the
performance, placing the validity of this attempt beyond question, and
therefore, necessarily, giving up public performance. Glenn Gould's
concerts possess authentic exceptionality and offer enormous interest to
the critical world through this constant opposition of hiding and
exhibiting and through the suggestion that in every concert performance an
ideal is put to the test, even at times defeated, and sacrificed as it
faces the impossibility of producing the type of contact that is desired.
Few have enjoyed the privilege of being present at his concerts. Glenn
Gould's public performances spanned a period of about eighteen years, if we
count his first appearances as a fourteen-year-old enfant prodige in 1946.
He made his debut in the United States in 1955, at the Philips Gallery in
Washington and gave his last public performance in 1964, making the
long-meditated decision to abandon the concert hall for good and to devote
himself entirely to gramophone recordings. This decision was not, as has
been suggested, the result of obsessive perfectionism. Glenn Gould was not
a perfectionist, if this word is meant as a definition of one who attempts
to reach, step by step, total expressive perfection and full respect of the
musical text. There was rather in him a mystical sense of interpretation,
an aspiration towards an ideal of transparency and precision which set
great confidence in the analytical capacity of the "pure and attentive
mind." This Cartesian quotation is not idle, for Gould saw the "search for
clarity" as being at the same time a "search for truth." A dedicated
student of philosophy and theology, a moralist not far removed from
"German" cultural education, Gould seems to want to insist on the fact that
in every aesthetic judgement an ethical aspect prevails, echoing almost the
famous quotation from Karl Kraus in which he affirms that the qualities of
every language are rooted in its morals. Truth then, not perfection, is
Gould's aim. In almost all his performances he attempts to open out the
architecture and to bring out the structural aspects of the music. This
further explains his well-known choice of technique, renouncing almost
completely the use of the sustaining pedal and of legato, in an attempt to
limit as far as possible all those arbitrary elements which lend too much
weight to the role of the "subject," the interpreter that is, of the
performance. And also his choice of extremely broad tempi, or, in certain
passages, of unexpectedly quick tempi, all of which are destined to give
analytic weight to the sound, as indeed was the struggle that Glenn Gould
waged not to stand out above the orchestra during the recordings of the
Concertos - the sort of dominance that is found in "romantic" readings,
which in Gould's opinion tend to emphasise the role of the subject - but to
create an ideal amalgam which often turns out to be so unattainable as to
reveal to the listener real divarication between the soloist's key of
interpretation and the actual progression of the orchestra. The same
intellectual demand for clarity and truth also explains Glenn Gould's
almost instinctive preference for contrapuntal style, which more than any
other tends to reveal its formal structure explicitly. On the other hand,
the highly important role that Glenn Gould does attribute to the subject
lies in the attempt to give the analytic articulation an order which is
neither mechanical nor prefabricated, in his ability, that is, to conceive
a type of formal elaboration whose coherence is not based simply on the
observance of set rules. Counterpoint, he once wrote, is not a
prefabricated form like Sonata form where themes, developments and
re-presentations follow one another in the order dictated by a model of
reference. Counterpoint is rather an "invitation to create the form which
is most suited to the particular demands of each composition and it is in
the acceptance of this invitation that the coordinating intelligence of the
ego is exalted, revealing that principle of unity which lies at the heart
of the freely articulated construction." This extraordinary presence of the
coordinating ego is at the very centre of the aesthetic construction,
which-once we are in touch with the music can only be "felt," "perceived"
or understood "intuitively." This brings out the second pole of Glenn
Gould's meditation, which exalts the physical sense of sound, the tactile
sensitivity at the keys and the intuitive ability to recognise the action
that gives form to music. There is, however, no contradiction between
bringing out the value of structural and of instinctive elements, indeed
they are the corner stone of Glenn Gould's musical mysticism. He sees the
most elevated artistic creations as those in which the process of rational
decision is closely linked to the instinctive: those that contain occult,
subliminal elements; those that manage to reveal the intellectual aspect of
their conception in a sensual, immediate manner while eschewing ostentation
and servile imitation. Glenn Gould was born in 1932 in Toronto where he
died of a stroke in 1982. He had just reached the age of fifty, and had
long since decided that when he reached this age he would give up playing,
just as he had given up performing in public. He would then probably have
dedicated himself to critical writing, urged by the same interior drive
which had on occasions led him to explain the meaning of his analyses
before his concerts, giving interminable lectures after which his audiences
had to settle for a bare half hour of music. The Austrian writer Thomas
Bernhard imagined his end, Gould playing yet again the Goldberg Variations,
engaged once more in an attempt to offer an intuitive, total, transparent
vision of the piece. His was not a "repetition" of the type that he had
criticised in the concert routine. For Glenn Gould the idea of reliving the
experience of a piece that he had often played before was like renewing
contact with an aesthetic dimension whose motive forces transcend the music.
Stefano Catucci
English translation by Timothy Alan Shaw

____________________________________________________________________________

Perfectionist:  "Okay, high fast ball. Lenny Bernstein."
Performer:      "Bernstein? Why Bernstein?"
Perfectionist:  "Lenny is a pacifist who'd never run for office. I saw him
run for a cab once. Not pretty."

                                                              -- "Glenn,"
David Young