GG a scholar? Ni! Ni!

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

At 03:55 PM 5/6/01 -0400, Elmer "Bob" Elevator wrote:

(...)
>What strikes me is that, of all musicians I've ever read about, Gould
>seems to have been by far the most dedicated scholar of the history of
>keyboard interpretation; and yet his results raise such critical howls
>and 911 calls. That really makes no sense, unless you attribute it to his
>knowing much more than most critics about the history of interpretation.

Bob, Bob, Bob.  Gould was not a scholar at all, let alone a "dedicated"
one.  It seems you need to read about more musicians!

Stand him up next to Willi Apel, Howard Schott, Klaus Beckmann, Robert
Marshall, Sandra Soderlund, Howard Ferguson, Howard Mayer Brown, Beverly
Scheibert, Richard Taruskin, Kevin Bazzana, Alexander Silbiger, David
Ledbetter, and another fifty dozen scholars in musicology, and Gould is
not even out of grammar school by comparison.

That's not even mentioning scholar-performers and scholarly performers
such as Ralph Kirkpatrick, Richard Troeger, Christopher Hogwood, Alfred
Brendel, Robert Levin, Edward Parmentier, Gustav Leonhardt, Wanda
Landowska, Larry Palmer, Elizabeth Farr, Alan Curtis, Eva and Paul
Badura-Skoda, Robert Hill, Kenneth Gilbert, David Dubal, Nikolaus
Harnoncourt, and 478 dozen others...along with anyone who's ever finished
*any* graduate program in keyboard, ...there is no shortage of people who
know considerably more about the history of keyboard interpretation than
Glenn Gould did.

If Gould ever read CPE Bach, JD Turk, M Corrette, G Frescobaldi, G Muffat,
N Pasquali, JJ Quantz, T de Sancta Maria, or any of the other historical
treatises standard in this field (not to mention all the modern
commentaries and other secondary sources), the evidence does not show up
in his performances.  Gould preferred to forge his own way of playing,
scholarship and tradition be damned.  That individuality is the red flag
for the critics.  Gould took chances; sometimes it worked, sometimes it
just made the critics mad.  The path usually had little to do with
historical information.

Gould was certainly a remarkable player, and he wrote plenty of essays
about music.  He read a lot of books, too.  But he didn't do anything
resembling real scholarship.  (Remember: he didn't even attend
university.)

And his forays in a halfway-scholarly direction were creative writing
about the music itself, not the history of its interpretation.  In
interpretation, he was either blissfully unaware of this field or chose to
ignore it.  (In Gould's oeuvre, just about the only musicologically sound
point of keyboard performance practice I can think of offhand is his
willingness to improvise continuo parts in the Mozart c minor concerto.)
In areas such as phrasing, fingering, articulation, tempo,
instrumentation, and other serious components of historical performance
practice, Gould was a dilettante.  A phenomenally gifted and creative
musician and thinker, able to make almost anything work *his* way, but a
dilettante vis-a-vis scholarship.

On the other hand, compared with some other performers, Gould was indeed
decently informed.  It's a continuum.


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot