Celebrating Glenn Gould

Today would be the birthday of a musician who's nearly up there, for me, with john lennon and john coltrane. like them, he was a force of nature, complicated personally, and a man who left so much music behind i've listen to him every week -- sometimes every day -- for years.

part of what first interested me about pianist glenn gould (1932-82) is that he was a classical musician who rockers, literati, bohos and generalist intellectuals seemed to like: there are depths to him, for sure, but you did not have to understand the harmonic theory behind "the well-tempered clavier" to respond to its velocity and intellectual force.

i've also found, especially in my younger days, gould's treatment of bach to be the best hangover medicine i know.

HERE is my piece, "the cult of gould," from the LATimes. my goal was to round up people who loved gould from outside the classical world, so i found filmmaker john waters, the actress who played Flo on "Alice," and jazz musicians brad mehldau and jason moran. critic time page served as a kind of guide to the piece. (somehow i executed this piece without including a single canadian, which seems wrong.)

moran provided my favorite detail in the story: he went to see "thirty two short films about glenn gould," with a young woman he fancied. when she decided gould was too weird for her, he could never look at her the same way. it was all over between then.

Celebrating -- and Fearing -- J.S. Bach

THIS may jar some, but i think it's fair to say that the greatest composer in the history of western music -- all due respect to beethoven, mingus, lennon/mccartney, etc -- was johann sebastian bach... the old man's birthday -- born in 1685, you dont look a day over 300! --- is today.

those with a good memory for interplanetary expeditions recall that bach's music played a prominent role on the voyager golden record sent out with the pioneer spacecraft. in a more modest context, i sometimes use his piano music to cure hangovers: those strict contrapuntal lines really focus a blurred mind.

there are lots of reasons to love bach's work, as anyone who has heard glenn gould's stripped-down interpretation of "goldberg variations" can vouch... perhaps the first classical music i ever fell in love with was gould's very architectual treatment of "the well-tempered clavier." i also love andras schiff (whose live version of "goldberg" is a lifetime highlight for me), murray perahia (whose sensitivity is the opposite of gould's approach), and till fellner (lately my favorite WTC, almost liquid in its lyricism.) ian mcewan has turned me on to angela hewitt. and the emerson quartet does really interesting things with bach in their "the art of the fugue."

to some people, bach's music is scary -- literally. HERE is a piece i wrote for the LAT a few years back in which musicology scholar kristi brown looked into bach's place in cinema. directors often employ bach's music to suggest an insane or dangerous hyper-rational genius, including hannibal lecter.

but forget about all that. tonight, toast the great man with a nice weimar lager (is there such thing?)

Photo credit: Flickr user hotzeplotz