正文
Glen's 81version of Goldberg Variations.
Gould expressed himself at length on the subject of what one might call the "discovery of slowness": "I think that the great majority of the music that moves me very deeply is music that I want to hear played or want to play myself, as the case may be, in a very ruminative, very deliberate tempo...[...] Firm beat, a sense of rhythmic continuity has always been terribly important to me. But as I've grown older I find many performances, certainly the great majority of my own early performances just too fast for comfort. I guess part of the explanation is that all themusic that really interests me, not just some of it, all of it, is contrapuntal music [...] and I think [...] that with really complex contrapuntal textures one does need a certain deliberation, a certain deliberate-ness, and [...]that it's the occasional or even the frequent lack of that deliberation that bothers me most in the first version of the Goldbergs."
Quiet deliverately Gould avoided making his legendary old recording the basis for the new interpretation. He did not listen to it again until threee of four days before the first session in the studio. "I found thta it was a rather spooky experience. I listened to it with great pleasure in many respents. I found, for example, thta it had a real sense of humour, [...] and I found that I recognized at all points really the fingerprints of the party responsible. I mean from a tactile standpoint, from a purely mechanical standpoint my approach to playin gthe piano you know really hasn't changed all that much over the years. It's remained quite stable, static some people might prefer to say. [...] But, and it is a very big 'but', I could not recognize of identify with the spirit of the person who made that recording. It really seemed like some other spirit had been involved.
What, if anything, disturbed Gould even more in his earlier recording was that the overall structure was inconsistent. He now felt that the thirty variations on the theme were not just thirty independent miniatures, each with its own character and expression, which is how he had previously played them, but that they followed one another logically as organically interwoven progressions and elaborations of one and the same material. "I've come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long, ought to have basically one - I was going to say tempo but that's the wrong word - pulse-rate, one constant rhythmic reference point. Now, obviously, there couldn't be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that went on and on and on, indefinitely. [...] But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it - not necessarily on a scale of 2-4-8-16-32, but often with far less obvious divisions- and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a 'subsidiary' pulse for a particular moment." In each bar, in each variation, but also over the whole length of the work, in Gould's second recording of the Goldberg Variations, it is possible to sense this "basic pulse" which radiates that feeling which Gould, shortly before commencing the recording, defined :" I would like to think that there is especially in more recent years- a kind of autumnal repose in what I'm doing. [...] what we do in the recorded state could involve the possibility of some degree of perfection, not purely of a technical order but also of a spiritual order.
Gould expressed himself at length on the subject of what one might call the "discovery of slowness": "I think that the great majority of the music that moves me very deeply is music that I want to hear played or want to play myself, as the case may be, in a very ruminative, very deliberate tempo...[...] Firm beat, a sense of rhythmic continuity has always been terribly important to me. But as I've grown older I find many performances, certainly the great majority of my own early performances just too fast for comfort. I guess part of the explanation is that all themusic that really interests me, not just some of it, all of it, is contrapuntal music [...] and I think [...] that with really complex contrapuntal textures one does need a certain deliberation, a certain deliberate-ness, and [...]that it's the occasional or even the frequent lack of that deliberation that bothers me most in the first version of the Goldbergs."
Quiet deliverately Gould avoided making his legendary old recording the basis for the new interpretation. He did not listen to it again until threee of four days before the first session in the studio. "I found thta it was a rather spooky experience. I listened to it with great pleasure in many respents. I found, for example, thta it had a real sense of humour, [...] and I found that I recognized at all points really the fingerprints of the party responsible. I mean from a tactile standpoint, from a purely mechanical standpoint my approach to playin gthe piano you know really hasn't changed all that much over the years. It's remained quite stable, static some people might prefer to say. [...] But, and it is a very big 'but', I could not recognize of identify with the spirit of the person who made that recording. It really seemed like some other spirit had been involved.
What, if anything, disturbed Gould even more in his earlier recording was that the overall structure was inconsistent. He now felt that the thirty variations on the theme were not just thirty independent miniatures, each with its own character and expression, which is how he had previously played them, but that they followed one another logically as organically interwoven progressions and elaborations of one and the same material. "I've come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long, ought to have basically one - I was going to say tempo but that's the wrong word - pulse-rate, one constant rhythmic reference point. Now, obviously, there couldn't be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that went on and on and on, indefinitely. [...] But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it - not necessarily on a scale of 2-4-8-16-32, but often with far less obvious divisions- and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a 'subsidiary' pulse for a particular moment." In each bar, in each variation, but also over the whole length of the work, in Gould's second recording of the Goldberg Variations, it is possible to sense this "basic pulse" which radiates that feeling which Gould, shortly before commencing the recording, defined :" I would like to think that there is especially in more recent years- a kind of autumnal repose in what I'm doing. [...] what we do in the recorded state could involve the possibility of some degree of perfection, not purely of a technical order but also of a spiritual order.
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