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Good Day, Everyone,
Something that’s not so unlikely to happen to many of us happened to me just about one year ago, and this ezine is a revisit of those moments of “Surprise!” that took me off guard.
Artistic Creatives
The story began while visiting in the home of another pianist, an artistic creative, whose library of piano and choral scores, music and art history books, and dictionaries are resources dwarfing most home archives. After mentioning one of my ezines was planned for music only, my friend loaned me three books, all of which probably weigh a ton.
After arriving home, collecting the mail, and serving myself a cool water in the kitchen, I landed stomach first onto the bed with the three books, and switched on the bedside lamp. My spectacles had slipped down, resting where the nostrils flare a bit. I began with the thickest book, looking through the back matter, scanning the index, appendices, glossary, chronology, notes, and bibliography before returning to the front matter and the first chapter. The same routine was finished in the second of three books.
Then, I opened to the back of the third book, perusing the back contents, but rather than flipping to the front as usual, I began flipping from the back toward the front. Maybe halfway into the history book, three pages snipped out of what seemed an old music program showed up; a date of reference was no where to be seen.
The program pages (here in pdf format) were an essay authored by Harlow Robinson on the book A New Shostakovich, a more succinct essay about the Russian composer’s tolerations than any book review I’ve read before sending this ezine to you.
Off and on for months, I had been wondering when I would feel enough curiosity for researching artistic creatives’ troubles during times of despotic regimes pimped by tasteless toadies.
The “Surprise!” discovery of Robinson’s essay had at once fulfilled an unspoken want for information the essay contained. The “Surprise!” moment was so stunning, I wept.
Unspoken Want
Still, I couldn’t stop asking myself what possibilities I was trying to connect. The next day, my pianist friend and I supposed the program was gotten when entering a theater for an evening of symphony around 1980. He had slipped the essay into the history book for safe keeping.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, a premier Russian composer, and his family had lived through one of Russia’s repressive regimes. Reading again Robinson’s essay, an unspoken want turned into another “Surprise!” moment rushing through me so that I nearly sprinted into the office to watch a documentary on Glenn Gould, a Canadian classical pianist, who had spoken quite clearly on behalf of Russian artists.
Profoundly Extraordinary
My university piano instructor and coaches were fascinated with Glenn Gould in the 1970s, and admitted we must keep our eyes on that man: he was especially talented but in ways the musical world had yet witnessed. We were astounded at the listening of Gould’s pianistic precision; he was like a metronome with a consciousness that illumed from his fingertips every instant into the wood of the keys—his music plays an unspoken want already hearing another rapturous melody.
Glenn Gould is especially known for his remarkable technical proficiency eliciting wonderment heard in recordings of keyboard compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach (b 1685), a prolific German composer of contrapuntal music.
Profoundly extraordinary piano performances of Bach’s music and Gould’s polite eccentricities created together a most charming and savvy enigma that catapulted his celebrity. Many people have admired Gould to such an extent they’ve suspected he was a visitor on Earth—an alien; pianists simply cannot play like him. One Russian pianist granted he couldn’t play Bach as Gould had, because he’d have to work too hard.
Gould eventually won admiration from Russian citizens and scholars following his recital in the great hall of Moscow Conservatory in May, 1957.
In 1964, Gould removed himself from concert appearances, lasering his musical performance energies and capabilities in recording studios. He recorded television and radio documentaries in which he expressed his philosophical points of view on various types of music, their interpretations and histories. Glenn Herbert Gould, born September 25, 1932, in Toronto, Canada, died October 4, 1982.
Too Unaware
We serve our purpose for having read this far to realize Gould’s listening of the political: truth voiced through Glenn Gould was a mesmeric truth not threatened by ideological depression. He was free. Gould was free to imagine and speak, to move and perform, as he wished.
Imagining the courage Gould took as his own brings memories of his freedom to have empathized with artistic creatives who were too aware of life on the dark side of an iron curtain while he disparaged the Russian totalitarian ideological control over media, publishing, and academia.
Flanked side by side were fascists peering over shoulders of Russian artists, listening to their words, monitoring works of art, made to order, by elites lavishly subsidizing cultural establishment. Freedom from paranoia had disappeared; substance and truth did not matter. All things were dominated by the political doctrine of the time, expressed in the documentary Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey.
By reading the available pdf here and listening to Gould speak in the video below, we become even slightly cognizant of performing artists’ belief in music’s power, and its seriousness of purpose in the imagination. In the 20th century, revised cultural histories unconceal distortions that forced compromises onto artistic creatives who are aware the same distortions are occurring again in the 21st century; this time, globally.
North American and possibly United Kingdom citizenries are presently too unaware of overt dominations of politicians by numerous kleptocracies, which, operated by corporate banks’ seizures of national treasuries and mainstream media, dominate global advertising thusly dominate public opinion via convoluted corporacratic propaganda. ¹
Without USA sustaining ongoing beastly wars, bully corporations’ systematically vigorous public relations campaigns would be superfluous.
Ironically, the public appears too unaware and cares too little about corporations’ subtle yet myriad crippling projections of guilt and shame in advertisements, which undermine citizens’ collective cultural psyché with preponderant fascistic consumerism. ²
The 60-minute documentary, which inspired this ezine, begins here at YouTube, and each of the six sections of the documentary are under ten minutes. Below is the video that shows Gould speaking clearly of artistic repressions in Russia at the time; the next section continues here to the end including production credits of Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey © 2002, Atlantic 4 Productions Inc.
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