Re: [xmca] G. Gould

True in both directions! Love them both.
mike

On Nov 15, 2007 10:45 AM, E. Knutsson <eikn6681@student.su.se> wrote:

> Who told you that you "have to make a choice" between the two Gould's? Who
> am I
> to be a arbiter of taste? G was a gifted pianoplayer, S. J. was a gifted
> rhetoric. In both cases there's obviously a lot of noise.
>
> As Kent Blaser remarked in an article on S. J. Gould: "Postmodernists will
> think of him [as?] a hopeless traditionalist, while defenders of hard core
> legend science accuse him of relativism for undermining the objectivity of
> science. Perhaps this just means that Gould is as confused as the rest of
> us,
> and that looking to him for enlightenment is misguided."
>
> E.
>
> On 2007-11-15, at 17:04, Mike Cole wrote:
> > We have to make a choice between the two gould's? What a
> > shame. I so admired them both.
> > mike
> >
> > On Nov 15, 2007 2:32 AM, E. Knutsson <eikn6681@student.su.se> wrote:
> >
> >> For those who think that Glenn Gould is more interesting than S.J.Gould
> :
> >>
> >> "Glenn Gould was a quintessential 'McLuhanesque' figure, living as
> though
> >> technology was an 'extension' of himself. [...] Gould claimed that at
> >> night the
> >> hourly news sometimes provided the material for his dreams. Gould was
> also
> >> able
> >> to make use of his radio environment, to put it to work for him. His
> >> constant
> >> audio input, sometimes provided by more than one audio source, supplied
> >> Gould
> >> with a means of dividing his areas of concentration. 'Quite
> mysteriously,
> >> I
> >> discovered that I could better learn Schoenberg's difficult piano
> score,
> >> Opus
> >> 23, if I listened to them both at once, the FM to hear music and the AM
> to
> >> hear
> >> the news.' On another occasion Gould described how he began to master a
> >> particularly difficult passage in a Beethoven sonata by placing a radio
> >> and a
> >> television next to his piano and turning them up 'full blast.' 'The
> fact
> >> that
> >> you couldn't hear yourself, that there wasn't audible evidence of your
> >> failure
> >> was already a step in the right direction.' Gould's ability to divide
> his
> >> various levels of consciousness through the manipulation of his audio
> >> environment resembles the type of simultaneous awareness that McLuhan
> >> spoke of
> >> in relation to the 'field' experience of the 'oral-aural' person. ...
> >> Gould's
> >> notorious irrepressible habit of singing while playing the piano, which
> is
> >> clearly audible in many of his recordings, is perhaps another
> indication
> >> that,
> >> more than most musicians, Gould was indeed McLuhan's 'oral-audial' man
> -
> >> incapable of remaining silent, totally involved in an activity that
> >> required 'the participation of the whole body and the whole mind.'"
> >>
> >> (Paul Théberge, "Counterpoint: Glenn Gould & Marshall McLuhan";
> Genosko,
> >> G.
> >> (ed.).Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Vol.
> II.
> >> London & New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 49-50).
> >>
> >>
> >>
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>
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Received on Thu Nov 15 19:29 PST 2007