Re: Timothy Maloney interview -- world first for f-minor

["Daniel Vaiser" <vaiser@airmail.net>]

Tim:

Thanks for taking the time to transcribe this interview; I'd frankly like to
read the whole thing in one gulp, so to speak. I was present in the audience
at that panel discussion during the GG Gathering that Tim Maloney was
talking about; it was called "Glenn Gould and the Doctors" and it had three
other people besides Mr. Maloney. In any case, be well and thanks for your
work.

Daniel Vaiser


----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Conway <timcon@comswest.net.au>
To: f-minor <f_minor@email.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 1999 7:42 PM
Subject: GG: Timothy Maloney interview -- world first for f-minor


[Since sending this posting a few minutes ago I have been inundated with
bounces so I am sending it again. My apologies if you all get it twice.]

__________________________________________________

Glenn Gould < the Timothy Maloney (TM) interview on the ABC¹s The Music
Show on Saturday 9th October 1999, producers Maureen Cooney and Penny
Lomax. The interviewer is Andrew Ford (AF).
_____________________________

[Piano music fades away]

AF: They were the third, fourth and fifth of the Goldberg Variations by
Bach, recorded in 1981 by Glenn Gould. They were the piece that had made
Gould almost a household name overnight in the mid-1950s with his
original Columbia recording, and then he recorded it again, and a lot of
people think it¹s the last recording he made, which is not quite true,
it¹s not even the last piano recording he made, but the very last
recording that Glenn Gould made was as a conductor, music by Wagner, and
I have sitting with me in the studio now a man who played on that
recording, Timothy Maloney. Welcome to The Music Show.

TM: Thank you so much.

AF: Timothy Maloney is the director of the music division, research and
information, of the National Library of Canada, and I guess he...you¹re
actually responsible for overseeing the Gould archive, are you?

TM: I am, exactly.

AF: Right. The reason that we wanted to talk to you today is because of
the theory which has been around for a few years now that Gould had a
particular disease. In Peter F Ostwald¹s book, Glenn Gould -- The Ecstasy
and Tragedy of Genius, he quotes Gould¹s father describing Gould as a
baby humming instead of crying (I¹m sure a lot of mothers out there would
wish they had one like that), constantly fluttering his fingers and
flapping his arms around, and Ostwald said this could possibly be
interpreted as a form of infantile autism, except that obviously if Gould
had been autistic he would never have been able to achieve all of the
things he did achieve, and instead Ostwald punts for this thing called
Asperger¹s Syndrome, which I have to confess I hadn¹t heard of until
then, and you have followed this up.

TM: I have...

AF: Is it connected to autism?

TM: Ostwald calls it a variant of autism, and one of the main elements in
which it varies from autism is that the onset of symptoms is typically
later, whereas the classic autism comes on as an infant and it¹s pretty
obvious early on that there are developmental problems in a child with
classic autism. But with Gould many of these symptoms became only visible
or...or perceived as he entered his young adulthood (and perhaps a little
earlier) but many of his so-called eccentricities became more pronounced
during adulthood.

AF: And these were as a result of the Asperger¹s Syndrome, do you think?

TM: I think it all fits the pattern, as far as I¹m concerned. Now I must
confess I¹m not a medical professional...

AF: So what would some of these characteristics be?

TM: Well, I gave a talk recently in Toronto at a big Gould conference,
and I had very limited time because I was on a panel with other people,
so I went down a very quick list of traits -- characteristics -- of the
disease and made a few notes about each, and then mentioned how I felt
Gould...how they applied to Gould. So, among the traits:

** an inability to interact normally with other humans;
** intolerance to change;
** a prodigious memory;
** amazing powers of concentration;
** remarkable talents (many times);
** elaborate rituals and routines that such people go through;
** some physical clumsiness;
** some stereotyped movements (we can come back and discuss these in more
detail)...

AF: Mmm.

TM: ** ...unusual responses to sensory stimuli, and unusual
preoccupations or obsessions;
** intellectual curiosity coupled with what I call moral severity, and
** inability to take criticism.

There are numerous others but those are the ones that I dealt with.

____________________________

End of Part 1 -- to be continued tomorrow.