My appearance on the Year of Bach podcast
From J.S. Bach to AI music
We talked about Bach, Austen, Shakespeare, the expectation of astonishment, AI, and some more. 40 mins long. I enjoyed it all.
Here’s an extract from our discussion of Glenn Gould where I discuss what I love and what I hate about his work.
I'm a big Glen Gould obsessive. I have never loved his Well-Tempered Clavier. Don't like it at all. Can't listen to it. It's, it's weird.
I hate his Mozart recordings. I was offended. I have to turn them off. It's just, it's dreadful. And I think he has, because he was obviously, I don't know if troubled is the right word, but he was an intense person. He was a person of solitude and interiority.
Maybe he was troubled, he was taking anxiety medication and other things. This is what eventually killed him. And I think, there is, that's very Bachan, right? Whereas Mozart is a composer of the world. He's a composer of social life. , people say the great waste of his talents when he was, when he had patrons and they made him write mints and little dances and some stupid little things, and this guy could be writing you the best operas the world's ever seen, and you are getting little party music. What the hell are you doing? But it's remarkable how good these, silly little pieces are that he's forced to write. And I think that's because he's naturally comic, he's naturally joyous.
There's a certain happiness that only exists when you're listening to Mozart. He's an extrovert, right? He's, his music is, is part and parcel of, of the commerce of life. Gould's not that at all.
When you watch those documentaries on YouTube, which are fabulous, everyone should watch them.
You see him in the recording studio at the piano shop in the cafe with the taxi driver, and he's doing great and he's interacting, I'm not saying anything, but it's not his milieu. It's not his natural state. And when he's back home, by the lake, or in his house, he, he visibly becomes much more at ease and much more attuned to his surroundings.
And I think that really is a temperamental affinity with Bach. And so that's why the piano music, the solo piano music, the partitas and stuff, that's why it's so fantastic.
There’s a transcript of the whole thing at the link.