Last Word On The Topic - Stupid Mail

Oh, for fucksake, I don't want to talk about Glenn Gould anymore.  There is nothing for a musician to learn from him except what not to do - don't get hooked on pills, among those - and why the recordings of almost any of the pianists of his generation who didn't become household names and icons of the middle-brow cocktail party college grad set are more worth listening to now.   Pianists largely unknown to the geezers who people such blogs as Eschaton, now.

He had his good points but he had many more really bad points.  I have a feeling I'd have liked him but he would have been the kind of friend who gave you endless worries and frequently had you tearing your hair out.  You don't have to take my word for that, there is this article in the Guardian, where a number of fine pianists gave their assessment of him on the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

A few months back, I listened to a long segment on a radio program in which the host and some classical music DJ went over the box set that the company which has the rights to them issued of all of the takes that weren't used on Gould's legendary first recording of the Goldberg Variations.  As if the world needed even more of those.  I listened to it largely because I was doing chores and I didn't want to touch my computer with wet hands.  About twenty or twenty-five minutes into hearing them gleefully remarking like the cocktail party crowd as a means of impressing themselves over short clips of different variations, I realized that they had not mentioned the name of the composer, J.S. Bach even once.   They hadn't talked about the overall structure of the Variations - it is one of the most completely structured and masterfully planned sets of variations made to create an overall effect in the history of variations.

That's what Gould and far more the publicity machine created around him did. As one of the pianists in the Guardian said, everything he touched turned to Gould.  Well, J. S. Bach is infinitely more interesting and worth thinking about than Glenn Gould was but he's harder to really talk about intelligently for that reason.  No wonder the middle-brow geezers babble on about Gould.