Individualism: Glenn Gould and Other Heroes

Individualism?


For context, you might need to look at Hardsleeper43.blogspot.com, Saturday, Nov. 14, in order for my comments today to make more sense. But I’m in the midst of paper-grading again, so I’m going to use my long-winded comment to him as the core for my post today. It makes for something like a follow-up to my Sunday thoughts about Maurice Manning’s poems in Bucolics.

Among many other intriguing comments about pianist Glenn Gould, Barbaro (at HardSleeper43.blogspot.com) says, " . . . after a few minutes you begin to wonder if everyone else is playing them 'wrong.'"

Here’s my reply, plus a bit more.

That's a great line and thought. I wonder if you've hit on the measuring stick for all greatness in the arts. There's only one Gould, one Mozart, and so forth. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good.

Of all the significant writers in the canon, how many sound exactly like a predecessor or contemporary? I haven't done my research, and this is not an objective test, but I bet the answer is "none." Apparently we value the new, the individual, or the unique that much. I’ve always thought something along these lines—haven’t we all, including authorities on the subject of art?—but saying it just then felt like a splash of cool water in the face. Refreshing cool or icy? Not sure--it does raise the bar, doesn't it.

Then, of course, there's a companion issue, one that's contextual and therefore bothers that quasi- and half-assed-New Critic in me: as the saying goes, "You have to get here to get there." Maybe this: could there be Whitman if there hadn't been Wordsworth? Academic scholarship might over-do the search for influences on any given artist, but exploring the question somewhat seems reasonable (or necessary?).

Don't people say we had to have Mozart before we could have Beethoven? So, in a related field, I wonder who had to come first in order to open the door to Gould. Or Coltrane. Or Willie Nelson.

I think it's widely accepted that bluegrass grew from Scots-Irish music in order to be re-born as Appalachian music. Yet the banjo itself was born in Africa, or so I read somewhere.

So when students or friends insist upon their free will or individualism, I think, and sometimes say, “Really?”

BACH, POETRY: BANALITIES FROM THE PROVINCES

I don’t know enough about classical music to declare much about it, but the power of all music intrigues me. So from my cultural outpost in the Midwest, I wonder: if Bach were composing today, would he be considered a wildly experimental guy—and at the same time a subtle, complicated genius? He feels remarkably modern to me.

I’ve heard that his method lies partly in the fact of his being confined to the harpsichord, before the booming pianoforte and its sustaining pedals were developed. Therefore, more notes are required, and variety arises from unexpected movements among the notes, rather than the big changes in volume and passion we know in Beethoven and the Romantics.

Whatever the case, I feel as if I’m hearing things from Bach that are as unpredictable as I would expect from Prokofiev or some avant-garde, starving composer who was writing just yesterday in Greenwich Village. But I like Bach better. I don’t enjoy him as much as some others—for example, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or the rollicking Johann Strauss. I suppose that means I prefer Romantic boom-boom; I need a bigger spoon to stir my soup.

My limitations concerning classical music (and the visual arts) remind me that a lot of people feel the same kind of unease about contemporary poetry. Usually lacking rhyme and regular meter, and with leaps of thought that might be more demanding than, say, nineteenth century poetry, contemporary verse causes many readers to feel adrift, baffled, bamboozled, alienated. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Emily Dickinson are often considered more modern than nineteenth-century because of the complexities of their perceptions and language, but getting into that now might lead to an eternal digression).

But I think what I’m hearing in Bach, without being alienated by it, is an understated complexity of the unexpected. To my unschooled ear and soul, it's rarely or never emotionally stirring, but it makes my brain shift around in my skull. I cannot listen to Bach, or any classical music, as a soporific or as background—it’s too interesting; it keeps me awake. But the written word, spoken aloud? Puts me right to sleep.