Glenn Gould: Schoenberg The Man Who Changed Music Part 1

It’s such a revelation. His thinking of Schoenberg doesn’t fade a bit even 60 years later.

Gould, talking about a giant, Schoenberg, while cementing his own gigantism "in his own quiet way." 34:52 "the reaction to pain, to suffering, is such a personal thing. . . It can be depicted by an attempt to invoke an artistic order, to compensate for distress."

The captions are immensely helpful. Thank you, Mr. Cross.

Muchas gracias!!!!

His mention of Kandinsky is profound on a few levels yes they both essentially accomplished the same break with tonality or representationalism but they were pals and both respected each other UNTILL Kandinsky published a blatantly antisemitic piece in an Art Criticism magazine to kowtow to the changing political nature of Germany in the 30s. When Schoenberg called him on it he responded that of course he hadn't intended to include men of greatness like old Arnold. Schoenberg was of course Jewish. They never spoke again.

grazie

thank you so much for sharing🙏 Evening plans altered.👌🏻

37:03 "No more 'exorbitant' than that which always has occurred in the history of music." 47:06 "I called this: working with the tones."

Listened to this in the car, nope, didn't understand a damn word, I'll go and find someone with crayons and patience instead...

With hindsight almost anything can be made to have seemed to evolve -- Eliot and Gould both disavow progress in art

Tempered tuning let the chromatic cat outa the bag. J.S.Bach invited said cat to live at his place. Established many many advanced harmonic precedents in musical expresivity with said cat purring in his ear. Subsequent composers "all" silently agreed this was the path forward. So the entire trajectory of western art music could accurately be characterised as a high speed power dive into higher and higher levels of chromaticism that made the 20th century crisis in tonality inevitable. Ta dah the end. Schoenberg: No not quite.

38:05

The issue I have with Gould is not that he wasn't smart (he very much knew his stuff, and was moving artist of the 20th century), but that he didn't speak in a way that was practical. It's almost this mid-20th century idealistic artistic language of philosophy and art: that is, almost a stereotype of what true "serious" musicians should sound like. However, it isn't really necessary. It's superfluous, quick, vaguely-specific, something not many care to understand but rather sit back and think "Well, he's using large words and he's saying them quickly. He must know his stuff." Again, no disdain against the man, but I have always found him to be a bit annoying for this. Always serious, never reachable.

Tonality is not nerdy. Atonality (for its own sake) is. Schoenberg tried to defend his very nerdy system, an impossible and unworthy task. If there is value here, it is the exposure of worrisome aspects of the psyche (nerdiness, for example), which is possibly what Gould appreciated. Note that Gould had a very nerdy discomfort with Mozart, hard as that is to believe, but understandable when contrasting his own psychology with Mozart's. One can safely conclude that Mozart was not a nerd, and that nerdiness was no impediment to Gould's commanding genius. But genius does not guarantee that it will result in the overarching greatness of Bach or Mozart or Strauss or Gould (and so on). It seems to me that Schoenberg's stubbornness kept him on the level of a petulant child, one unable to control his tantrums and compelled to continue them at all costs.

Schoenberg was a disaster for western music.