Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana

Author:Kevin Bazzana
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781551992877
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

“I saw myself as a sort of musical Renaissance Man, capable of doing many things.”

Gould was not a piano machine, the kind of performer whose life is the practice room and whose thinking is bound up with his instrument. “Anyone who is really interested in music should combine as many fields as possible,” he told a reporter when he was sixteen. “A Canadian writer, composer, and broadcaster who happens to play the piano in his spare time”–that was how he once described himself. It was never quite true, though he did spend an increasing amount of time away from the piano after 1964, even as he was becoming more prolific as a recording artist. He saw his mission as far broader than that of a performer: he wanted to make statements, about music and culture and life, and to this end the piano was just one of many means.

Had he not been a musician, he said, he would like to have been a writer, and after 1964 he worked more and more with his pen. (And it was a pen: this prophet of the electronic media hated typing, preferring to draft writings by hand and then dictate to a secretary.) He produced a flurry of magazine and newspaper articles, liner notes, reviews, lectures, scripted interviews (including self-interviews),*62 and texts for radio, television, and films, as well as private letters that sometimes amounted to dissertations. He recycled a lot–reprinting articles as often as three or four times in different forms, reusing radio pieces as articles (and vice versa), stealing the odd phrase or sentence or paragraph from himself–but the quantity of his output was still impressive: well over fifteen hundred pages of written and spoken material by Gould have been published to date. Not even counting public lectures and his vast output for the CBC, he published some forty pieces in the decade beginning in 1964, liner notes as well as pieces in periodicals like Saturday Night, Saturday Review, Toronto’s Globe and Mail and Star, the New York Times, and particularly High Fidelity/Musical America.

In his concert days he wrote mostly about composers and works, but from the early sixties he cast his net wider; just about the only subject he refused to write about was “the trials and tribulations of piano playing.” Those forty pieces cover an impressive range of subject matter: composers including Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, Byrd, Gibbons, Grieg, Hindemith, Ives, Korngold, Krenek, Mahler, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Strauss; Yehudi Menuhin and Petula Clark; rare Romantic repertoire and Canadian music of the twentieth century; the performance of early music on the piano; the nature and history of fugue; the role of the imagination in interpretation; the art of piano transcription; conductors; recording; the Moog synthesizer; his innovative approach to radio documentary; music on television; musical competitions; the National Youth Orchestra; the ethical underpinnings of his aesthetic positions; musical ephemera that struck his fancy (the British musical psychic Rosemary Brown, the fictitious P. D. Q. Bach); and his baby steps as a Leacockian humorist.

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