Here's who I - and quite pleased to be such:
You’re St. Justin Martyr! You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers! |
Terry Teachout wrote this interesting essay on Glenn Gould. In the essay, He highlights Gould's favorite authors:
ReplyDeleteTT: Reading habits of highly neurotic people
I'm reading a new biography of Glenn Gould, Kevin Bazzana's Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, which will be published in the U.S. this April by Oxford (it's already out in Canada). Two passages caught my eye. The first is a list of Gould's favorite books and writers:
He read classics of every denomination, from Plato to Thoreau, with a particular fondness for the Russians—Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular, but also Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev. He was widely read in modern literature. His professed favourites included T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Franz Kafka, though he gave time to Borges, Camus, Capek, Gide, Hesse, Ionesco, Joyce, Malraux, Mishima, Santayana, Soseki, Strindberg, and much else....And at the head of the pack was Thomas Mann, especially Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and the early story "Tonio Kröger," which he read around age eighteen and with whose title character, a passionate and excitable young aesthete described as "foreign and queer," he identified throughout his life. Just as his repertoire included no fluff, his concert tours no pops, Gould's reading included no murder mysteries or adventure stories. He liked books with a strong message, books that dealt with weighty ethical or theological or aesthetic ideas or espoused a philosophy of life with which he could engage intellectually. And he was disapproving of books in which ideas were sacrificed to aesthetics or ironic detachment. Among the Russians, for instance, he did not like Chekhov, or the dazzling Nabokov, whom he thought immoral. He read a little Truman Capote on the advice of friends, but could admire only his technique, not his ethics. He found Henry Miller's writings "ponderous," Jack Kerouac's "flaccid."
Eeuuww. The man behind that reading list sounds a perfect bore to me, and humorless to boot—just the sort of person who'd dislike Chopin, all French music, and most Mozart, as Gould did. And yet his way with Bach, the only great composer whose music he played consistently well, was nothing if not light-fingered. To hear Gould play the Goldberg Variations (the 1955 recording, of course) or the A Major English Suite is to feel the cares of the world slipping from your shoulders.
All of which leads me to ask: is the performance of classical music an intellectual activity? Did the breadth of Glenn Gould's culture make him a better interpreter of Bach? I wonder. I've known a lot of musicians in my time, some of whom were damned smart and some of whom were (ahem) less so, and I rarely noticed any clear-cut relationship between what went into their heads and what came out of their fingers or mouths. (In my more limited experience, the same is true of dancers and painters.) I'm not saying that a stupid person can become a successful musician, but I'm not so sure that having read T.S. Eliot equips you to play Beethoven's Op. 111 well. It certainly didn't help Gould, whose recording of that miraculous masterwork borders on the preposterous.
Those of us who write about music, needless to say, would like it if there were a direct positive correlation between intelligence and musical talent. Intellectuals always take it for granted that theirs is the highest form of life. If they had a bumper-sticker slogan, it'd be "Intellectuals do everything better." In fact, there are all sorts of things they do spectacularly badly (though they're rather good at conniving at mass murder), and it's almost always hard for them to accept the fact that Big Ideas get in the way of the making of great art.
I am, alas, a bonafide intellectual, but I'm pretty well inoculated against that particular strain of error, perhaps because I started out as a working musician. Early and intense exposure to a non-verbal art form gives you an abiding respect for the non-intellectual aspects of art. In my case, it also made me an equally bonafide aesthete: I like talking about ideas almost as much as I like reading about art, but I never need to be reminded that (as C.S. Lewis put it) if we have to choose, it's always better to re-read Chaucer than to read a new book about him.
Oh, yes, I mentioned two passages, so here's the other one. It's something Gould told an interviewer in 1980:
I can only say that I was brought up as a Presbyterian; I stopped being a church-goer at the age of about eighteen, but I have had all my life a tremendously strong sense that, indeed, there is a hereafter; and the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which, indeed, one must attempt to live one's life. As a consequence, I find all here-and-now philosophies repellent. On the other hand, I don't have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter, and I recognize that it's a great temptation to formulate a comforting theory of eternal life, so as to reconcile one's self to the inevitability of death. But I'd like to think that's not what I'm doing; I'd like to think that I'm not employing it as a deliberate self-reassuring process. For me, it intuitively seems right; I've never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter. It is simply something that appears to me infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be oblivion.
Surprised? I was. Maybe I shouldn't have been. It's hard to imagine anyone immersing himself so completely in Bach without acquiring a sense of the transcendent. And though the famously logorrheic Gould wasn't much given to pithy utterances, he made one on precisely that subject: "I believe in God—Bach's God."
Six words. Not bad. Here's two more for the road: me, to
About the church father's question, that's a fun little quiz. I put it on my blog too.
ReplyDeleteTertullian, because i think the church would be better if I were in charge.
ReplyDeleteAmen.