So just mentioning that if—for whatever inconceivable reason—you might read and enjoy this particular site, you should direct your attention there for a while. Because I’m planning on letting this here site languish for a bit. We’ll see how everything turns out.

Short pieces, written by Gould and acquaintances of his, some before and some after his death. Makes me want to get a ratty old chair and start using it whenever I play piano, Gould comes off as far beyond amazing.

I took piano for a year or two when I was a kid, and hit all the mercilessly overplayed pieces (played through most of the Suzuki method if I remember, also Für Elise and Rondo Alla Turka plus others I’m sure). I couldn’t ever figure out how to read music, having relied mostly on my good ears, decent memory, and a willingness for both my Mom and teacher to show me how to do the things I couldn’t read. Pretty quick I got frustrated with recitals, in which I took very little joy either performing or observing, and that plus my frustration with those damn black circles that I couldn’t figure out how to read got me to give it up.

I started playing piano again maybe a bit more than a year ago now, motivated by a Gould recording of the Anglaise from French Suite 3 in b. I’d heard the tune and it was beautiful, so I learned it (the RH, ‘melody’) on my mandolin. One thing led to another and I eventually decided to pick out the upper voice on the family piano, at which point my mom realized what I was playing and went back into the closet with our piano music in it and pulled out its score. I was playing it surprisingly well, and somewhere in here resolved to make a copy of the 33 bars and take it back to school with me to try and pluck it out in the basement of the HFA.

Eventually I figured it out. I’ve always known which notes were which in the staff, but for some reason never been able to read anything fluently. It’s very much a stop–and–go process for me, and I’ll be dammed if I can read more than one note at a time, so forget left and right hand together. Truthfully, I can’t pretend to read any music at all until I’ve listened to it enough that it’s already there in my head, and I can almost just as well completely reconstruct it with my fingers and the keys—at least for the stronger of the two lines, picking apart Bach’s contrapuntal stuff this way isn’t something I’m much good at.

Since then I’ve picked up a few more of the movements from the same suite (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande; not in that order) and I’m now working on the Gigue. This fall I signed up for bonified piano lessons at school, got hooked up with the most experienced teacher and it’s been very good. Last lesson she had me play through everything I knew (although as it usually goes we get distracted and end up just talking about stuff) and after the second part she had to ask who it was on my recording. I mentioned Gould, and she said that’s what she’d have guessed. Which hopefully means that I’m playing it well; if my inspiration can show through that well I can’t be butchering the notes. But anyway, all that was to say that she went off into the room where she keeps her mountain of music and books and brought this one out for me, so I went at reading it.

Summary: Glenn Gould is awesome—and not in the trivialized popular sense of the word—but take it back to its roots: “Full of awe, profoundly reverential” (OED). In part it’s the Bach that has proved to be his touchstone. But there’s far more there than just the scored music. My teacher also gave me a disk of someone else playing through the French Suites so that I could compare. I listened to it on the drive home for thanksgiving. It was a beautiful drive, blue sky and a thin coat of wind–blown snow through the prairie. The music mostly sat in the background, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t have any issues with it until the third suite came up—my suite—and then I was pissed. I’ve listened to all of Gould’s recordings of the same at least once, but iTunes shows that I’ve mostly focused on the ones I’m working at learning. I’ve listened to the movements of the third suite 37, 22, 73, 13, 68, and 14 times, respectively. That’s for the 6 movements, totalling 8:58 as Gould interprets them. It’s also a lower bound, because when I do listen to them I like to repeatedly start back at the beginning without finishing the track, which doesn’t get counted as a ‘play.’ So they’re pretty well burned into my head. I can sit at a piano and play four of them from memory. I can sing the jig, which is what I’m working on figuring out right now.

When they played through my car speakers, coming from someone other than Gould, I could hardly listen. There’s absolutely a world of difference there. It probably shows a lot about how well I actually read music that I didn’t notice all the amazing things Gould had done with these scores, I had his version in my head and whenever I didn’t know where to put my fingers I’d check the music, but I’d always be trying to play what I knew from listening as opposed to the scratches on paper that I don’t really understand. The pianist in question is Andrei Gavrilov, not a man without his chops. But there’s not a measure that I’d listen to again. Midway through the third, without remembering who was listed as the pianist for these I decided they sounded all too ‘russian’—either pounding along or tinkling slowly, carelessly melodramatic while lacking any sense of fluidity; and holy god, the tempo was always wrong! Surely enough, I checked and saw a guy named Andrei on the case. Gould’s rendition strikes me as much more buoyant; I don’t know, but if you threw both Gould’s and Gavrilov’s recordings of these suites into the water somewhere the former would always be swimming along comfortably and gracefully, while Gavrilov’s would be stroking madly just to keep above water, and only partially succeeding.

Reading through this made me feel the same way I do when I listen to Gould’s works, and how I sometimes feel while playing the few that I can play myself, heavily grafted from Gould’s vision. There’s a bit of rapture, forgetting everything except for the feel of the keys under my fingers or the sounds snaking in through my ears. It’s such a pity that Gould went when he did. Even though he might have been well on his way to giving up piano entirely—in the same manner he gave up public performances—he was doing tremendous things outside playing with TV and radio, why do all the best have to die young etc. I finished up the car ride home listening to the first disk of him playing the WTC, feeling the need to wash Gavrilov’s Bach out of my system, and it was wonderful.

Started it monday, finished it up on the soccer bus ride last night. That gives me a good burn rate of about 200 pages a day.

Stephenson’s bent here is almost spiritual. Where in his earlier books it was more techno–social (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond age; at least as I remember them, rereads are now under consideration), and where the System of the World was historical and philosophic, here Stephenson takes his compelling and marvellous storytelling and wraps it around systems of existence and belief. There’s a very Emersonian transcendentalism (Emerson is even mentioned as an aside somewhere late in the book.)

Which is great, I love it when a book comes along that meshes with my insufficiently explored innate feelings towards some subject, here that of ‘god/religion/whatever.’

Nothing is more important that that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hum you in and come at you in so many ways. Fraa Orolo, 109

Why is religion such a universal in societies throughout history?

That’s right, people have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there’s more than one way to get it. We may not think much of the sline subculture, but you have to admit it’s stable! Then the burgers have a completely different kind of stability. Orolo in dialog with Erasmus, 205

I also love the formalized system of dialog, where it’s an objective of the theors to regularly argue with each other. If only people would actually do that! I’m generally a fan of arguing, and tend to do it just as often as I don’t. If only everyone else did as well…

I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. 231

Why do I hate politics? Why does going to church make me feel catatonic? It’s not that I hate democracy or that I think that believing in god in some unforgivably–backward and primitive notion; it’s more that both systems have steadily devolved in their lifetimes, leaving them (and their devotees) at the point where they garner at least as much of my disdain as they do my respect.

…the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 573

I like the notion of introspectionist. 697

Stephenson posits the idea that google should ensconce itself as useful to the web by generating endless amounts of crap in different places on the internet, thereby requiring people to use it to actually find anything worthwhile:

Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into The Reticulum. But it had to be good crap. Samman, 795

(Maybe google already came up with this, and that’s why they bought out blogger.)

Mystic vs. Poetic (Laterran):

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

“Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxational nature of symbols and meaning.”
“Okay, but what’s the pessimistic side telling you?”
“That the poet’s way is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.” Erasmus and Quin, 883-4

And in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, Stephenson nails exactly and precisely they way I’ve tried to see the world for a few years now:

Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle—not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters use the term, for he considered it altogether natural. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it. Erasmus, 889-90