The popularity of programs such as "Sound into People's Hearts" has made classical music "walk off the altar" to some extent, but most people's imagination of classical music may still be sitting in a concert hall listening to musicians. In this sense, the Canadian pianist and composer Gould may have been the first to embrace classical music.
His first work of his career, Bach's Goldberg Variations, recorded in 1955, successfully placed "this highly formatted" musical work in front of a wide audience, sold super high sales, and ushered in a new era in the history of showmanship.
He was also the first musician to actively embrace the era of mechanical reproduction. In 1964, at the peak of his career, Gould had to find ways to capture and maintain the distortion of the audience's attention in order to escape the concert, and in order to avoid becoming a vassal of the stage, Gould abandoned the concert stage and began to work in a completely private recording studio.
As Sayyid wrote in The Ultimate Realm of Music, in the mid-20th century, the concert experience became more refined, elegant, and professional, fundamentally far removed from everyday life, "Gould is both a product of this world and a reaction to this world." He moved from concerts to recording studios, so that classical music no longer just serves the elite and the middle class.
In the studio, Gould is the creator, the interpreter, and "without succumbing to the likes and dislikes of the ticket-buying public", creation becomes production, "through the full use of technology, he can almost touch the infinite possibilities, unlimited reproduction, endless copies of recordings, and then infinite creation and re-creation." ”
Gould wanted to "rebel against the hall's most harmful and suffocating canon by constructing a casual, casual studio space," but as the American literary theorist and critic Sayyid commented on Gould, Gould inevitably became an accomplice to business. In contemporary times, the "casual and casual recording space" has fallen into a kind of commercialization of machinery and exhaustion.
Screenshot of Gould's 32 Short Films
The Music Itself: Gould's Counterpoint Insights
Author:Edward M. W. Sayyid
(Excerpt from "The Ultimate State of Music")
1.
No one else in the world can play, copy, and understand Bach's almost demonic technique like Gould
For almost all music performers of this century, Glenn Gould is an outlier. He was a talented and skilled pianist (there are, of course, many talented and skilled pianists in the world), his unique voice, offensive style, rhythmic creativity, and, most importantly, the quality of concentration, all of which seemed to extend far beyond the performance itself.
Gould recorded a total of eighty records, and the sound quality he delivered was extremely recognizable and recognizable. With a distinct personal style running throughout his career, you can always easily tell that this is Gould's, not Weissenberg, Horowitz, or La Rocha.
His Bach is a school of his own, like Gissekin's interpretation of Debussy and Ravel, Rubenstein's Chopin, Schnabel's Beethoven, Kachen's Brahms, and Michelangelli's Schumann.
Gould plays Bach, as if defining Bach's music, and if you want to understand the true meaning of this composer, you must listen to the interpretation and interpretation of this artist. All of these brilliant pianists have their own works, but Gould's interpretation of Bach is no less than that of sensual, direct, pleasant, impressive, etc., and what he wants to convey is very different, as if he is making ideas on a mysterious subject and constructing his own knowledge system: this cannot help but make people think, Gould playing Bach, is actually proposing some complex and quite interesting ideas.
This pattern of behavior became central to his career, not so much playing Bach or Schoenberg as he was accomplishing his own aesthetic and cultural projects, and correspondingly, playing was not a one-time transient act.
Most people think that Gould's eccentricities are still tolerable, because his performance is so worth listening. Some outstanding critics, led by Lippmann and Rosstein, further suggested that Gould expressed his uniqueness in a maverick and capricious and eccentric style—humming while playing the piano, dressed strangely, always playing with intellect and elegance, which we had never seen before Gould—all attested to one thing: the pianist not only took it upon himself to perform, but also made his opinions and criticisms through performance.
Gould wrote numerous articles throughout his life, and after retiring from the concert stage in 1964, he devoted himself to the field of recording, studying every detail of the recording. He was always chattering, fond of intricate Rococo rhetoric, obsessed with sophistication and asceticism. All of this reinforces the notion that Gould's performance evokes thoughts, experiences, and situations, while people rarely have similar associations with other virtuosos.
<h1>Screenshot of Approaching Piano Wizard Glenn Gould</h1>
It is clear that the real beginning of Gould's career began in 1955 with the recording of Bach's Gothenburg Variations. In a sense, the record foreshadowed all of Gould's subsequent words and deeds, including the re-recording of the work shortly before his death.
Prior to Gould's release of the album, few mainstream pianists, with the exception of Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003, American pianist), played the Gothenburg Variations publicly. As a result, Gould's opening appearance (and final curtain call) was with A-list record labels (Turek never seemed to have had such a relationship with a big-name record label) to put this highly formatted musical work in front of a wide audience for the first time, and thus established a field that was entirely his own—out of the box, full of quirks and different.
The first impression you get is: this is a pianist with magical skills. In his technique, speed, precision, and strength all serve a certain discipline and calculation, which does not originate from the clever player, but is born out of the music itself.
In addition, in the process of listening to the music, you seem to see the original tightly wrapped and well-structured works gradually stretching out like a layer of veils, almost dissolving, becoming a set of intertwined threads. The one who dominates all the clues cannot simply be reduced to two hands, but ten fingers, each of which quickly echoes the remaining nine fingers, and then echoes a pair of hands and the mind behind it that controls everything.
The music emanates a simple theme from one end, which is then transformed into thirty variations, reconfigured in multiple modes, and the music continues to move forward, and its theoretical complexity increases with the rising pleasure. At the other end of "Gothenburg", the theme repeats itself after a series of variations, echoing the beginning. However, this repetition (to borrow Borges's evaluation of Menard's version of Don Quixote in the novel Pierre Menard, author of Quixote) can be described as "literally the same, but the realm is far more infinitely rich".
Gould's first "Gothenburg Variations" achieved a wonderful round trip from micro to macro, and then from macro to micro, which is an extraordinary skill: showing the world such a process through the piano, experiencing the results of reading and thinking, not just playing an instrument.
I have no intention of disparaging the "playing an instrument" at all. I would say that from the beginning, Gould's pursuit of musical expression was different from others, such as the interpretation of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff's Concerto by another pianist of the same era, Van Kleben, in a very different way than Gould.
Gould's choice to start with Bach and then record most of Bach's keyboard works was central to him. Since Bach's most representative works are mostly counterpoint or polyphonic, which in turn affect the career of the pianist, Gould conveys an unusually strong individual identity.
In essence, the counterpoint method pays attention to the synchronicity of the parts and the supernatural control of musical materials, and the music correspondingly presents endless creativity. In counterpoint, a melody is always repeated between different parts of the voice: the music takes on a horizontal posture rather than a linear vertical distribution. Notes in any set of sequences can take on infinite variations, more precisely transformations, and a certain set of musical sequences (or a melody, a certain theme) may first appear in this part and then be replaced by another, and these parts will always continue to sound in a complementary or opposite way to all other parts.
Bach's musical construction does not take the way of laying the melodic line at the top and then supporting the main melodic line with thick and dense chords, Bach's counterpoint music is composed of several parallel lines traveling at the same time, each voice part is intricately intertwined, and self-expression is free to follow strict rules.
Needless to say, the fully developed and evolved Bach counterpoint occupies a unique position in the musical world and has a special prestige.
Gould and his dog in 1946, picture from wiki
First, the sheer complexity and frequent interrelated constraints of the counterpoint style are tantamount to demanding a more refined, precise statement; when Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart compose in a fugue fashion, the listener unconsciously assumes that there is something unusually important in the music. For, in the course of counterpoint music, everything that is constituted—every part, every moment, every interval—is recorded in detail, and it can be said that they are the result of thorough inquiry and full measurement. There is nothing more musically important than a strict fugue (the first thing that comes to mind is the wonderful fugue at the end of Verdi's Fastav).
Musical counterpoint patterns always seem to be related to theological eschatology, which of course is partly due to the religious nature of Bach's music, or you could say that Beethoven's Solemn Mass fugue is strong enough to make the listener associate, but for more reasons than that. The rules of counterpoint are very strict and precise in detail, as if they were all predestined by God; any violation of the rules—such as marching in a forbidden sequence or harmony—will be condemned as "the music of the devil."
Thus, those who are proficient in counterpoint law are almost playing God, and it is expected that the male protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Dr. Faust, Adrian Levicken, is well aware of this.
The counterpoint method is a thorough order of sounds, comprehensive time management, fine differentiation of musical space, and absolute intellectual projection. From Palestrina and Bach to Schoenberg, Berger, and Webern's strict twelve-tone system, the entire history of Western music has become an eclectic countervailing maniac. The image is powerfully suggestive, and Thomas Mann's depiction of a German polyphonic music composer who signed a contract with the devil in Dr. Faust is like Hitler in the real world, and the aesthetic fate of the composer in the novel becomes the epitome of his country's anti-heavenly foolishness.
Gould's counterpoint playing is closest to my personal imagination of this technique, and he gives you a vague impression that there may be some controversy or danger in counterpoint writing and playing, except of course for crude political implications.
Not only that, but Gould was never afraid to be funny, and he tried to dig for some rather ridiculous connections: the high level of counterpoint may be just a parody, it is just a pure form, but it is always eager to become an agent of the "world-historical spirit", to become a well-deserved role of wisdom.
In short, Gould's playing, more than any other pianist, allows the listener to experience the unbridled nature of Bach's counterpoint technique—Bach's counterpoint is indeed excessive, a beautiful excess. We conclude that there is no one in the world who can play, copy, and understand Bach's almost demonic technique like Gould. His playing seems to have reached its limits, and the fingers become the embodiment of music and reason, and music and reason merge with this embodiment. Even though Gould was fully focused and engaged in playing Bach, he still had a way of hinting at other possibilities, and a variety of different powers and wisdom appeared in later recordings.
In 1945, Gould and his teacher
2.
He abandoned most traditions,
It was as if it were entirely self-created, self-growing
At the same time as recording Bach's complete keyboard works, Gould also recorded a piano version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by Liszt, and later launched a piano version of Wagner's orchestral and vocal works adapted by himself. The counterpoint style of the late Romantic works showed decay and decay, and Gould forcibly extracted chromatic scales and polyphonic elements from the orchestral score and played them on the piano, in which the contrivance became more and more obvious.
Like all of Gould's performances, these recordings highlight the extreme unnaturalness: a very low chair, an almost lying posture, a seemingly non-stop jumping sound, and the clear sound he strives for. However, the unnaturalness also answers the question of how the preference for counter-music evolved step by step, and ultimately gave the performers a new dimension that they had not expected.
Sitting at the piano, wu zi does what a mortal cannot do, he is no longer a concert performer, but a recording artist who is cicadas outside the shell of the body, has not such a Gourde become a self-justifying, self-pleasing listener? Wasn't he the object of Bach's musical dedication in the mouth of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the famous German philosopher, musician, theologian, medical scientist, humanitarian, known as the greatest spiritual father of the 20th century, the author of On Bach?
Gould's choice of music is a definitive testament to this. In his writings, he wrote that he favored not only polyphonic works in general, but also composers such as Richard Strauss, "who could enrich it while not belonging to it, and he spoke for all times without being subordinate to an era."
Gould disliked the mid-period Beethoven, Mozart, and most of the 19th-century Romantic composers, who in his view had a strong sense of subjectivity, were fleeting fashions, too limited to the instrument itself.
Gould admired pre-Romantic and post-Romantic composers, such as Gibbons and Webern, and the Polyphonists (Bach and Strauss), who had a desperate attitude when composing instruments that gave them the ability to set rules and control the whole picture, which other composers lacked.
Strauss, for example, was regarded by Gould as the greatest musical figure of the 20th century, and Strauss was not only eccentric, but also committed to "making the fullest use of the tonal treasures of the late 19th century within the most solid formal discipline"; Goulder went on to say that Strauss's interest was to "preserve the full function of tonality—not only in the basic contours of the work, but even in the subtlest details of the entire design."
Like Bach, Strauss "took pains to make every detail of the constructed concept clear." If you want to write music like Strauss, then you must have a clear idea of the function of each note, and every note in the composition has meaning; if you want to present the Bach flavor in the creation, then write it purely for keyboard instruments, or borrow from the various types of four-voice fugues in The Art of Fugue, each of which follows strict discipline. There is no careless twirling (though sometimes there are these things in Strauss's work), no mechanical, unthinking, regular chord accompaniment. The concept of form is expressed consciously and confidently in every place, from the architecture to the decoration.
The above description is often exaggerated, but in any case, Gould plays with precision and detail, because he firmly believes that the music he plays is a model of precision and detail. To some extent, his performance extends and expands the original score, making the meaning of the score more legible, and in principle, these scores do not include title music.
In essence, music has no function of speech: although music has infinite possibilities in terms of grammatical structure and expressiveness, it cannot explain clear ideas in the same way that language can argue or quote scriptures. As a result, the player can pretend to be deaf and dumb and play with his eyes closed, or, like Gould, always set himself many tasks during the performance: including absolutely precise control of the performance space; setting the performance environment strictly according to self-standards (such as he always looks out of place in dress and does not follow most traditional patterns); even if there is a conductor present, he must personally guide the orchestra; and hum while playing, humming and even overshadowing the piano. At the same time, Gould deliberately extends the piano's tentacles into the field of language through numerous articles, interviews, and record covers. In all this, Gould did it enthusiastically, like a mischievous little prodigy who could not close the conversation box.
I've listened to many of Gould's scenes, and the one that impressed me the most was in Boston in October 1961 when Paul Paray (1886-1979, French conductor, organist, composer) conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
In the first half, Gould played brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with the orchestra's principal violin and principal flute. He hid himself from the view of the audience, and all that was seen was his arms and head swaying up and down to the music. He listened to and perceived the other two musicians on the same stage, controlling the playing on a small scale according to the timing, showing an admirable lightness, and the rhythm pushed the music forward.
I thought at the time that this was really eye, ear, nose and eye music (all of Gould's recordings of concertos, especially Bach's concertos, have one thing in common: the stretchiness of his playing is extremely agile and sensitive, accompanied by exaggerated and deformed rhetoric, creating a strong, electrifying tension between the heavy, sluggish orchestra and the lively and pulsating piano melodic line. Gould, with incredible composure, dexterously drilled in and out of orchestra-made sound clusters.)
After intermission, Gould again took the stage to play Strauss's Burleske for Piano and Orchestra. It was a busy single-movement piece, not a standard concert track, and Gould had never recorded it. In terms of skill, his performance with the Detroit Symphony is outstanding; the sudden transformation of a pianist known for his interpretation of Bach into a whirlwind, super Rachmaninoff-esque showmano is simply incredible.
However, the real wonders lie ahead, and there are even more inexplicable oddities. Looking back at the trajectory of Gould's subsequent career, the performance of Strauss that day and everything else seems to foreshadow his subsequent development. As if to expand his role as a soloist, Gould conducted the orchestra wantonly, even if his conducting techniques could not be understood. Pare was standing there, and he was of course the real conductor. But Gould conducted himself (his appearance was really disturbing), and there was no doubt that this practice had made the band a mess, and Pare had a sullen face, glancing at Gould from time to time with murderous eyes, perhaps the afterglow of the corner of his eyes was a rehearsed play, but it didn't look like a show.
For Gould, the conductor seems to be his interpretation of The Joke, full of ecstatic, imperialist expansion, first fingers, then arms, and heads, and finally breaking away from his personal piano space and rushing into the orchestra's territory. Witnessing what Gould did was like taking a lesson in "discipline in details" that went astray, and through the guidance of a crazy detail-oriented, broad-minded composer, Gould broke into another world.
There is more to discuss about Gould's performance than that. Most reviews refer to his clean and neat dissection of the work. In this respect, Gould rejected most of the traditions of the piano literature, whether it was the speed or timbre processing that had been inherited from generation to generation, or the eloquent style laid down by the great showman masters, or the eloquent style of playing that had been certified by the famous piano educators Such as Theodore Leschetsky, Rosina Levenje, Corto, and others.
These traditions are all lost to Gould. He sounded nothing in common with other pianists, and I could be sure that no one could make his voice that way. Gould's method of playing, like his career, seems to be completely self-created, even self-growing, with no precedent for predecessors, nor a fate beyond its essence that controls and shapes all this.
Part of this is the result of Gould's straightforward egoism, but also the result of contemporary Western culture. Most of the composers that Gould selected and whose works have in common with his way of interpreting them, are intended to show the style of the absolute self, with a method of saying, "I have never benefited from anyone."
Not many pianists can confront and interpret meaning in the voluminous and intimidating works of Gould, including: Bach's two volumes of The Average Piano, all the Suites, two and three, Tocata, the English and French Suites, the Fugue Art, and all the keyboard concertos, including the Italian Concerto, plus some peculiar music such as Bizet's Chromatic Variations, Sibelius's Sonatas, and Byrd's 1543–1623, English Renaissance composer) and Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), Works by Strauss' Enoch Arden and The Song of Ophelia, Schoenberg's Concerto, Wagner's Siegfried Pastoral, and Piano Versions of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
In all his works, he maintains a style that, to paraphrase Sibelius's comment, is "passionate, but not abusive." This style allows the listener to observe Gould's "progressive, lifelong state of mystery and stillness", which is not only about independent aesthetic phenomena, but also stems from Gould's own theatrical experience.
3.
Careers in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
A show about the self
In 1964, Gould officially withdrew from the concert stage to become a technologist. By making full use of technology, he can touch almost infinite possibilities, unlimited reproduction, endless copies of recordings (during the recording process, Gould most often says "do it again"), and then infinite creation and re-creation.
No wonder he says that the recording studio is "like a womb", where "time has never had a beginning and will not end", and that with this recording artist was born a whole new "art form, which has its own set of laws of operation and freedom... There are extraordinary possibilities."
Geoffrey Payzant (1926–2004, Canadian philosopher, writer, and organist) wrote a readable book, Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. I spent a lot of ink on this metamorphosis and how Gould did everything he could to maintain his status as a "focal point." Leaving the concert, Gould spent the rest of his life developing this tendency to be enthusiastic and not to let emotions flood themselves to the fullest, stemming from his penchant for solitude, originality, and his desire to be an unprecedented model and sometimes a sociable socialist. In short, a man who has never been bored with himself.
In less obscure terms, Gould's post-1964 career was nothing more than a shift in focus. In a concert hall, the key is the listener's acceptance of live performers, a commodity that is purchased, consumed, and then used up during a two-hour concert. Tracing back to the roots, such a deal arose from the aristocratic patronage system of the 18th century, built on the classes of the old system.
By the 19th century, musical performances had become a relatively accessible mass commodity. By the late 20th century, however, Gould realized that new goods had become objects that could be infinitely reproduced, such as plastic records or tapes; as a performer, Gould moved from the stage to the studio, where creation became production, where he could be a creator, an interpreter, and without succumbing to the likes and dislikes of the ticket-buying public.
Nowadays, some of the new friends around Gould are mostly technicians or business executives, and whenever we talk about relationships with these people, Gould's wording is always full of intimacy, and the irony is really not small.
At the same time, Gould took his view of counterpoint a step further. Like Bach or Mozart, Gould, as an artist, had a goal of organizing everything thoroughly within the realm, subdividing time and space with extreme control.
As Thomas Mann put it in Dr. Faust, "guess and calculate the possibility of elemental reorganization," take a set of note elements and force them to change as much as possible. The more you change, the better, and the way to make the change can be to rejoin the tapes to form a new whole, or to shift the sequences in a staggered manner (e.g., the different thematic representations in Gould's 1981 version of the Gothenburg Variations are not recorded sequentially), or different sections of the same work are played on different pianos.
Neither recording nor life is confined to specific rules of time, and the construction of a casual and casual studio space is used to resist the extremely harmful and suffocating canon of the concert hall. Gould said this could enrich the idea of "progress" and deserve to be done forever.
Another implication of this approach, if it is more acute, is an attempt to break the biological and gender basis on which human performers depend. For musical artists of the late 20th century, recordings would be immortal, immortal not only for non-composers (19th-century composers are rare today), but also for the era of mechanical reproduction as described by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin.
As the first great musician of the 20th century to choose to embrace this destiny, Gould did not hesitate. Before Gould, Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977, British conductor) and other lubinsteins and other performers consciously lived in a world of wealth and romantic clichés, a world co-created by audiences, theater managers, and ticket sales. Gould saw that no matter how much the two great men enjoyed and admired such a way, such a choice was not suitable for him after all.
Although Gould was self-aware, he never reflected on his role in working with large corporations. Gould inevitably became an accomplice to business, and his success ultimately depended on big corporations, an anonymous pop culture ecosystem, and advertising touting.
He has not confronted and scrutinized the mechanisms of the market—to some extent, he himself is a product of the market—and the reason why he avoids talking about it may be because of his cold-eyed wisdom to protect himself, or because he cannot integrate it into the performance. Gould's counterpoint techniques are inherently incapable of digesting certain things, and the real-world social context of his work seems to be one of them, and no matter how attentive and amiable the mechanics of market operation may seem, the two cannot be reconciled.
Although Gould is closely associated with the tranquility and loneliness of the North, he is far from being a "low-energy eccentric". As the critic Richard Poirier (1925-2009) commented on Frost (1874-1963), Lawrence (1885-1930), and Mailer (American writer), Gould's career was a self-ego performance, an extraordinary talent, careful selection, Elegant urban style and considerable self-sufficiency are the result of a combination of factors that form a distinct polyphonic structure.
Gould's last recording, the re-recording of the Gothenburg Variations, is a tribute to the artist in almost every detail: he rethinks and plans a complex musical work in a unique and completely new way, but still makes it clear from Gould that it was a voice (such as the first recording).
As the son of the mechanical copy era and a close companion of the mechanical copy era, Gould gave himself the task of shutting himself in a room and studying what Thomas Mann called "two armies against each other". Despite its limitations, Gould's work was far more interesting than all the performing artists of his time.
I think that only Rachmaninoff has qualities comparable to Gould's, a unique combination of brilliant intelligence, wonderful sharpness, and perfect and concise lines, and Gould can produce this effect almost every time he plays. Technique serves a constantly exploring understanding, complexity is solved rather than tamed, and witful wisdom without philosophical baggage: this is gould's piano.
【New books on the shelves】
The Ultimate State of Music
Edward P. W. Sayyid
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