Glenn Gould records Scriabin

Glenn Gould records Scriabin Désir (Op 57 No. 1): Part 1

Here Gould is experimenting with recording technologies by miking the stage and piano in various places as he plays Scriabin’s Desire. As was often the case, his manner is agitated and slightly manic but his playing is graceful and ecstatic. I am intrigued by the ways he insists on acknowledging the experience of music in a mediated form. (Can’t recall what year he stopped performing in public but I know he was engaged with recording technologies for much of his career.)

This gets me thinking about publishing as a way that writing and art are mediated in order to reach a reader. While it is obvious in most cases that a reproduction of a work is not the work (save for certain conceptual works), one has the sense upon reading the words that one has experienced “the work” and yet the reception is affected by the physical form — the qualities of the book or manuscript, the typography, the paper, or even the different ways a text can look on computers with different monitors.

Even in live performance, music makes room for variation; one does not often expect a song to sound exactly like the/a recording when it is performed live. And many musicians can play a given composition or “cover” a song. Does thinking about this yield anything meaningful in the realm of writing and/or art? I suppose Fluxus scores would be an example of something similar (see Alison Knowles Newspaper Music in an earlier post) but they reference a form of musical notation in order to accomplish this.

Another thought comes to mind: what would it be like to choreograph a dance based on his gestures as he plays? They are exquisite.

If you click and watch it on youtube you can see Part 2, where he “engineers” the recording. And here is a great article from the LA Times on Gould’s prescient experiments with technology and music.