Classical music recordings are usually straightforward snapshots of live performances. Sometimes recordings are spliced together from multiple takes or overdubbed, but this practice is considered by classical musicians to be highly shameful. Glenn Gould had a very different attitude toward the studio. He loved working there, and viewed it as a more valuable creative outlet than the concert stage. At age thirty-one, he stopped performing live altogether to focus on recording and writing. He was outspokenly in favor of tape editing and other “artificial” studio techniques.
Gould liked the studio better than the concert hall because he felt that recordings created more opportunities for a two-way conversation between performer and listener. From the book Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana:
He extended his belief in creative freedom to its logical limit, advocating the direct participation of the listener in the creative process, through the intercession of technology. He believed that the modern listener had the same right to tinker with the recording artist’s work as the performer had to tinker with the composer’s. “Dial twiddling is in its limited way an interpretive act,” he noted, and the hi-fi listener was by nature a creative force: even to adjust volume, tone and balance on a crude home stereo of the 1960s was to impose oneself creatively onto the work. “I’m all for the kit concept,” he said in 1968. “I’d love to issue a series of variant performances and let the listener choose what they themselves most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices, rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy — make them participant to that degree.” […] But even without the “kits” he envisioned, recording, Gould said, “compels the performer to relinquish some control in favor of the listener, a state of affairs, by the way, which I find to be both encouraging and charming, not to mention aesthetically appropriate and morally right.”
I’m totally on board with this idea. Classical music concerts are soul-deadening, even when the music is exciting. You have to sit silently and motionlessly. The performers’ faces rarely register emotion, much less their bodies. You can’t even clap between movements. Alex Ross tentatively proposes a relaxation of rigid concert etiquette to make the experience less tedious. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the basic fact of the forbidding cliff between performer and audience. I’m not suggesting that classical concerts need mosh pits, but it flies in the face of our basic humanity to ask us to not participate in music bodily.
Glenn Gould was prescient in his insistence that music is all about participation, not spectating. There’s a direct line from Gould’s kit recording concept and musicians who release remix-friendly a capellas, instrumentals and separated stems. I’ll bet Gould would have been delighted to play around with Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stems. I’m hoping he would have approved of my mashup, too:
Gould Lockdown
[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Ethan_Hein_Gould_Lockdown.mp3]Me vs Glenn Gould vs Kanye West
Speak it!
from the same bit of Gould quoted above:
“At the center of the technological debate, then, is a new kind of listener — a listener more participant in the musical experience. The emergence of this mid-twentieth-century phenomenon is the greatest achievement of the record industry. For this listener is no longer passively analytical; he is an associate whose tastes, preferences, and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention, and upon whose fuller participation the future of the art of music waits.”
“He is also, of course, a threat, a potential usurper of power, an uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts, one whose presence threatens the familiar hierarchical setting of the musical establishment. Is it not, then, inopportune to venture that this participant public could emerge untutored from that servile posture with which it paid homage to the status structure of the concert world and, overnight, asssume decision-making capacities which were specialists’ concerns heretofore?”
Yup.