The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians.... After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.
--from J. Jones's wonderful 'Wild Ones'
C, I was listening to G. Gould the other day and although the music itself didn't move me the playing of it did seem incredibly fresh, a miraculous coming together of spontaneity and structure. Have you read Otto Friedrich's biography?
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Well, b, the subject of Glenn Gould provokes more questions than answers. I sometimes fear that my enjoyment of his performances has much to do with the fact that I'm fascinated and intrigued by everything about him. I'm not sufficiently musically educated to make any useful musicological comments, just to say that you sense his total commitment to his own understanding and interpretation of the music - particularly in the Bach recording,enthralling in their absolute clarity and truthfulness. I'm not in the least disturbed by his habitual 'humming along'- it just enhances one's experience in knowing that there's a real, fully engaged human being playing.
No, haven't read Friedrich's biography but will obtain it asap. Have you read it? What I HAVE read, and thoroughly recommend, is The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page, published in 1984. Leonard Bernstein described it as 'One long series of delightful shocks.'!
I'll end with a quote from Gould himself, writing about the Goldberg Variations:
It is, in short, music which observes neither end or beginning, music without real climax or real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.' It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency.'
Gould said that if he hadn't been a musician he'd have been a writer. I see what he means.
Greetings, as ever,
C
nope, haven't read it , but I do think Gaddis highly recommended it. And Otto Friedrich was, apparently, a musician himself -which might help. Hmm. the book I really want to get, though, is Barenboim's new one on music.
btw, Matisse finally arrived (second volume only). Still, at 550 Rs , I'm not complaining.
got to rush.
Keep well,
b.
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