Comments on: Bookends

By: mir

mir — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 01:10:50 +0000

dude

write another entry

DO IT

By: Lewis

Lewis — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:01:02 +0000

If yer interested in what the man himself has to say on the subject, check out his articles "The Prospects of Recording" and "Music and Technology". Both are reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984

By: nick

nick — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 21:11:11 +0000

hey MK,
Great post. Curious, repetition is a feedback process. Each time we repeat the task we enter with more experience, but each journey alters our frame of mind, and our intent in repeating the activity next time round. No single moment is definitive, rather many pockets occur where our skill, passion, self-awareness and the task are perfectly matched to give rise to moments of beauty. Perfection I believe occurs once we abandon our search for it, while remaining committed to the task.

I also find it fascinating that Gould gave up live performing, when it is often regarded by musicians as the best part of the job. The audience provides energy and instant feedback. Gould’s choice somehow reminds me of working creatively with technology, which involves at least one degree of separation from the medium (electricity). I wonder why so many artists are choosing this method when it is so abstract, and intangible? There must be a joy here somewhere? I get off on coding. It’s a kind of meditative state where the body rests and the mind becomes focussed and language is reduced to a small set of expressions. Coincidentally, on coding-days I tend to repeat one tune all day.

By: hugh

hugh — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:44:37 +0000

hey mk, i’m doing the tour of the blogs I read, and leaving this message about a new project, perhaps of interest:

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (day?)…

for more info check:
http://librivox.blogsome.com

cheers,
Hugh McGuire
http://dosemagazine.blogsome.com

By: MK

MK — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 01:17:47 +0000

Hi Beth,
thanks for your comment. I like the Russian-doll metaphor.
Something I was thinking of after I had posted this was how obsessed Gould was with the process of recording, and how he favoured it over performing live, eventually giving up performing entirely, and retreating to the solitude of the recording booth. There’s something in that stance he took that interests me in terms of how fixated on perfection it is – and how he rejected the concert stage because he felt it was circus-like and that people were waiting for errors to surface that they could criticize.

So the retreat into the recording booth seems to crystallize this theory that what performers are looking for (ones like Gould anyway) is perfection and creating renditions of work that are definitive, at least for a moment, which may not always be possible in a "live" situation. What’s doubly interesting and perhaps a little contradictory is that though Gould was quite involved in the recording process and did many takes looking for the "right" one to cut to record, he couldn’t resist humming along and the sounds from the creaky chair he insisted on using creep into the final recordings as well. For some people, that spoils the recording – for me it’s a wonderful sort of sub-soundtrack that reveals something of the man who made the recording and the cirucumstances under which it was made. Meta-data, of a sort.

By: beth

beth — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 01:37:49 +0000

Nice post on Gould and the Goldbergs, which fascinate me too. I’ve played the easier ones off and on for years; they’re really very difficult but he makes them sound effortless. Your comments about repetition in art are also really interesting to me, and the Goldbergs represent a kind of Russian-doll metaphor, since they are themselves variations and explorations on a single theme. I agree – I don’t think it’s about practice-makes-perfect as much as about what you learn about yourself by sticking to, or returning to, a theme, and seeing yourself and your ideas evolve and change over time.