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29 November 2008
Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:55:21 GMTGlenn Gould: Variations, by Himself and His Friends
McGreevy, John, ed.
Short pieces, written by Gould and acquaintances of his, some before and some after his death. Makes me want to get a ratty old chair and start using it whenever I play piano, Gould comes off as far beyond amazing.
I took piano for a year or two when I was a kid, and hit all the mercilessly overplayed pieces (played through most of the Suzuki method if I remember, also Für Elise and Rondo Alla Turka plus others I’m sure). I couldn’t ever figure out how to read music, having relied mostly on my good ears, decent memory, and a willingness for both my Mom and teacher to show me how to do the things I couldn’t read. Pretty quick I got frustrated with recitals, in which I took very little joy either performing or observing, and that plus my frustration with those damn black circles that I couldn’t figure out how to read got me to give it up.
I started playing piano again maybe a bit more than a year ago now, motivated by a Gould recording of the Anglaise from French Suite 3 in b. I’d heard the tune and it was beautiful, so I learned it (the RH, ‘melody’) on my mandolin. One thing led to another and I eventually decided to pick out the upper voice on the family piano, at which point my mom realized what I was playing and went back into the closet with our piano music in it and pulled out its score. I was playing it surprisingly well, and somewhere in here resolved to make a copy of the 33 bars and take it back to school with me to try and pluck it out in the basement of the HFA.
Eventually I figured it out. I’ve always known which notes were which in the staff, but for some reason never been able to read anything fluently. It’s very much a stop–and–go process for me, and I’ll be dammed if I can read more than one note at a time, so forget left and right hand together. Truthfully, I can’t pretend to read any music at all until I’ve listened to it enough that it’s already there in my head, and I can almost just as well completely reconstruct it with my fingers and the keys—at least for the stronger of the two lines, picking apart Bach’s contrapuntal stuff this way isn’t something I’m much good at.
Since then I’ve picked up a few more of the movements from the same suite (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande; not in that order) and I’m now working on the Gigue. This fall I signed up for bonified piano lessons at school, got hooked up with the most experienced teacher and it’s been very good. Last lesson she had me play through everything I knew (although as it usually goes we get distracted and end up just talking about stuff) and after the second part she had to ask who it was on my recording. I mentioned Gould, and she said that’s what she’d have guessed. Which hopefully means that I’m playing it well; if my inspiration can show through that well I can’t be butchering the notes. But anyway, all that was to say that she went off into the room where she keeps her mountain of music and books and brought this one out for me, so I went at reading it.
Summary: Glenn Gould is awesome—and not in the trivialized popular sense of the word—but take it back to its roots: “Full of awe, profoundly reverential” (OED). In part it’s the Bach that has proved to be his touchstone. But there’s far more there than just the scored music. My teacher also gave me a disk of someone else playing through the French Suites so that I could compare. I listened to it on the drive home for thanksgiving. It was a beautiful drive, blue sky and a thin coat of wind–blown snow through the prairie. The music mostly sat in the background, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t have any issues with it until the third suite came up—my suite—and then I was pissed. I’ve listened to all of Gould’s recordings of the same at least once, but iTunes shows that I’ve mostly focused on the ones I’m working at learning. I’ve listened to the movements of the third suite 37, 22, 73, 13, 68, and 14 times, respectively. That’s for the 6 movements, totalling 8:58 as Gould interprets them. It’s also a lower bound, because when I do listen to them I like to repeatedly start back at the beginning without finishing the track, which doesn’t get counted as a ‘play.’ So they’re pretty well burned into my head. I can sit at a piano and play four of them from memory. I can sing the jig, which is what I’m working on figuring out right now.
When they played through my car speakers, coming from someone other than Gould, I could hardly listen. There’s absolutely a world of difference there. It probably shows a lot about how well I actually read music that I didn’t notice all the amazing things Gould had done with these scores, I had his version in my head and whenever I didn’t know where to put my fingers I’d check the music, but I’d always be trying to play what I knew from listening as opposed to the scratches on paper that I don’t really understand. The pianist in question is Andrei Gavrilov, not a man without his chops. But there’s not a measure that I’d listen to again. Midway through the third, without remembering who was listed as the pianist for these I decided they sounded all too ‘russian’—either pounding along or tinkling slowly, carelessly melodramatic while lacking any sense of fluidity; and holy god, the tempo was always wrong! Surely enough, I checked and saw a guy named Andrei on the case. Gould’s rendition strikes me as much more buoyant; I don’t know, but if you threw both Gould’s and Gavrilov’s recordings of these suites into the water somewhere the former would always be swimming along comfortably and gracefully, while Gavrilov’s would be stroking madly just to keep above water, and only partially succeeding.
Reading through this made me feel the same way I do when I listen to Gould’s works, and how I sometimes feel while playing the few that I can play myself, heavily grafted from Gould’s vision. There’s a bit of rapture, forgetting everything except for the feel of the keys under my fingers or the sounds snaking in through my ears. It’s such a pity that Gould went when he did. Even though he might have been well on his way to giving up piano entirely—in the same manner he gave up public performances—he was doing tremendous things outside playing with TV and radio, why do all the best have to die young etc. I finished up the car ride home listening to the first disk of him playing the WTC, feeling the need to wash Gavrilov’s Bach out of my system, and it was wonderful.
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