[‘Tis Sunday … and our thoughts turn, as ever on such occasions,
to Glenn Gould ….]
While I was but a tad of a lad, I began drum lessons. Ours was a most unmusical household, and this, alas, was the highest to
which I might aspire.
Anyhow, once a week, I trudged off after school to the lessons,
which took place in the basement of a (very) modest house, far off down a treelined lane.
(Back then, parents didn’t ferry kids everywhere; we walked.)
Being young, I was completely earnest, as young lads
are. And the teacher
encouraged me, saying that I was his best student “since Buddy Rich”.
(We pause to allow the reader to laugh, weep, or snort,
according to taste.)
Later, and wiser, I realized, that:
(1) He probably said that to all the girls.
(2) He probably never taught Buddy Rich in
the first place.
But one counsel of value he did give me:
That the point of the drums, was not to simply make a lot of noise, but
to achieve …. Coordinated Independence
-- an uncharacteristically fancy phrase (for he was not otherwise a fancy man)
for that unabhängige Selbstständigkeit, whereby the dexter and the
sinister overcome, not only their
contraposition, but their unity:
self-guiding, yet united
towards a common goal.
[Update re Buddy Rich]
I finally got around to looking the guy up in Wiki, to see if my
drum-teacher’s claim was even geographically possible. It was not; but worse, according to Rich himself,
He received no formal drum
instruction, and went so far as to claim that instruction would only degrade
his musical talent. He also never admitted to practicing, claiming to play the
drums only during performances and was not known to read music.
~
I never came close to that.
The shortfall did not materially hamper my brief
professional career as a drummer,
but the question re-arose acutely when,
many years later,
I attempted (belatedly)
to master the piano.
True, you never reach the fluency, the facility, that you might if you started on the instrument as a
child -- but it was more than that.
My parents could have sat me down (Schroeder-like) at a
piano, in my very most tender
years, but it would have been a waste of time. The kind of proprioceptively asymmetric right/left DOE required by the guitar (and
all other non-keyboard instruments), where a single effect is aimed at, I could handle; but the split-brain-requiring
interconnected parallel worlds of the left and right hands of a keyboard, must
be forever beyond me. The piano now decoratively gathers dust.
~
The excellences of Glenn Gould, are too numerous to mention. So let us mention just one. The man has two (interrelated) brains, much as he has two hands.
Gould is no slave to the treble clef. He passes the baton imperceptibly between the left hand and the right -- following and
bringing forth the underlying
melodic interest -- now here, now there -- wherever it might reside.
If Gould were a string quartet unto himself,
the first violin would not hog the limelight;
he would allow, as well, the viola
at times to find its voice ..
~
Here is a truly humbling factoid I just stumbled across:
While sitting at your desk, lift
your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this,
draw the number "6" in
the air with your right hand. Your foot will
change direction and there's
nothing you can do about it.
I wonder if Gould had the same problem.
~
[Update] My violist friend Cap’n Mike writes in:
Nice of you to notice that the
viola does get a shot at the melody now and then. Dvorak and Brahms,
Mozart (quintets especially). And I practice those nasty bits so that if
someone pulls the music off the shelf ("how about Brahms Op67?"), I'm
more or less ready for it. But to me the true glory of the viola is as a
unique inner voice that blends it all together. I love the occasional
passing tone that shifts the harmony without much ado, but so satisfying to
hear and play.
As for that fantasy of Gould/Bach for string ensemble, turns out it’s a reality:
As far as Gould's amazing playing,
yes he is able to bring out any line at will. Are you familiar with the
re-working of the Goldbergs for string trio by Sitkovetsky? There are
some YouTube videos. I'm partial to the recording by Matt Haimovitz and
friends. In his transcription, Sitkovetsky was influenced by Gould's
early recording and captures some of that idiosyncracy. I have the music
and can tell you they are difficult.
A lovely trio version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uli8fXrrlc
Here is a live performance by a Japanese trio:
Nice.
And you can listen to a recording by chamber orchestra here:
Apart from the aria,
I frankly couldn’t stand it.
Similarly a recording I once heard -- a Beethoven quarter performed by
the 101 Strings. Sort of
impressive for ten seconds, then nauseating.
Similarly, “Jesu der Du meine Seele”, rescored for the
six-hundred-lunged Bulgarian Soldiers & Steamfitters Chorus, while
doubtless supplying a new take on the piece, would take place invitâ Cecilia.
 |
| Preee-cise-ly |
~
Many years ago, when I was but seventeen, and unfamiliar with the
literature, my friend Frank Freeze
commended Glenn Gould especially to my attention.
What distinguishes him from other pianists? I naively
inquired.
“He’s just … better,”
he replied, with something of a splutter.
Time has amply ratified that critical judgement.
Gould is clear, crisp, analytical -- secco -- but above all, just, better.
Compare this bracing playing of the Bach French suite #5 by
Glenn Gould,
with the weepy, drippy, limp-wristed bowl of boiled mush
from Emil Gilels:
Or this, from András Schiff:
Here the fingerwork is fine, but he seems to have left a
brick on the sostenuto pedal.
In one sense, my inglorious drumming career did somewhat
steel me against the florid acoustic excess that deforms Gilels’
performance. For as I began
lessons, it was quickly brought home to me that -- to my mortification -- I
would not be permitted to begin on a trap set (and I owned no drum), but must
make do with a much humbler instrument:
the practice pad. This consisted of a wooden frame, the
size and shape of a loaf of bread, topped with a slab of rubber. It mimicked the bounce of a drumhead,
but with none of the resonance.
The resulting sound you couldn’t even call ‘crisp’, really: it was simply devoid of all
reverberation or show. To
begin with this preliminary instrument, was to take a vow of humility. (Cf.,
mutatis mutandis, the Blechtrommel
of Oskar the Dwarf.)
In this manner, one was forced to pay attention to the
precision of the triple-paradiddles, and to exact reproduction of the music as
scored. It was an early
inoculation against the temptation of intoxication with one’s own sound.
Decades later, when I took up the piano, I did not heed
this; and was duly punished. For I eventually developed an
excruciating plantar bursitis, which put me on crutches at one point. Of mysterious origin, it baffled
my podiatrist (and fellow-student of the same Princeton piano teacher, as it
happens); but I eventually
discovered the cause: sostenuto abuse -- a repetitive-stress injury against my (often bare or
slipper-clad) foot against the pedal.
~
To return to Coordinated Independence.
Such blended bilaterality has little to do with simple
manual dexterity. It is, rather, as though Gould has one mind, but two brains -- like Steve Martin in the movie, or
like our big friend the brontosaurus, who (so I learned as a lad, and never
unlearned it) was endowed with an
auxiliary brain (the basal ganglion) at the base of his tail.
It is quite an accomplishment. After all, though our eyes
act in concert, and yield more than the atomistic sum of their parts (namely,
integrated stereo vision), yet they cannot (unlike those of the iguana) roam
independently.
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