Yes. Especially now with the endless possibility of very niche audiences for exotic or eccentric forms - even for Mr Norfolk with his Bruckner symphonies.

It gives me great pleasure to share my collection. I'm glad you are enjoying it.

They're great, but my favorite is the whisper chorus from Moses und Aron.

@nicholas schroeder. Yet another fine example of how music can be motivational!

Ah those were the days😂🤣☯️😼

When I worked closing shift at Tower Classical, our clear-the-store go-to was the then recently released CD of Florence Foster Jenkins. Had we gone the Schoenberg route, we might have cleared the store, but the staff would have wanted to hear the music to its double bar.

I found his thoughts on composition and nationalism to be transfixing. On how creativity is moving away from various places of unavoidable isolation and into an accessible, ubiquitous electronic/information/recording age.

@@TrevorduBuisson Gould wrote brilliantly in essays entitled "The Prospects of Recording" and "The Well-tempered Listener" and others.

Not many people would speak out against Stravinsky because he has too many sycophants and yea Gould was probably silenced because of just that, Stravinsky's frail ego wouldn't be able to handle it.

@@stalavosvergrimm9664 At least Stravinsky never had to sue a major 20th century author because in the author’s novel he was being equated with a degenerate composer who sold his soul to the devil. At least Stravinsky never felt intense jealousy because another composer was getting more performances than he was. Talk about frail egos, Schoenberg was the World Champion in that field.

Gould the music critic, said here that the Rite of Spring was the work of a child and in another video said that Mozart became a bad composer. I understand why the CBC didn’t broadcast these opinions.

@@bb1111116 yeah, i think he just liked to play the excéntric rebel sometimes, no one (specially such an intelligent and erudite person like Gould) would Say that Mozart became a Bad composer for real, just to raise people's hair, or that the most influencial Work of the Century was a Childs Work, and then defend awful trash like schoenbers atonal piano music, he simply liked to trash the most famous and respected composers, like Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, chopin, etc.

When he rips on Le Sacre, I think Gould is doing exactly what he accuses Stravinsky of -- being an "enfant terrible" just to stir things up. I agree, I love listening to Gould talk about music.

For a time, CBC had it up on an archival web site, and I liberated it from there.

@@brucecross1164 That means you're awesome!

@@brucecross1164 ... Nice job. Thanks.

@@charlotterose6724 I agree 🙏

Great question, Charlotte; thanks for asking it.

If he really was a fabulous melodist etc you would not write the comments about need for repeated listening.

@@ncrean66 In fact the thing about this need for repeated listening is, that it applies also to other music. It's quite obvious, when you think of Max Reger. But it's also true for Brahms, Beethoven, Bach a.s.o.

@@Sulsfort Really ? Should we finally have said it - Beethoven may be the most misunderstood of all great composers. His music is thought of as inaccessible, uncommunicative and difficult. The exact opposite is true. Like Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven was a fabulous melodist and orchestrator and wrote some of the most emotionally available music of the century. It does need repeated listening, but once one does "crack" his style, it is tremendously rewarding..

Schonberg is most irrefutably difficult - to perform, and to hear. Berg admitted this in his essay, "Why is Schonberg's Music so Difficult?".It is often communicative, depending on the piece, but not generally accessible. Merely saying he is these things is not by itself persuasive.

I respect your viewpoint. But, his music goes over my head.

Priming

It is ironic, indeed, that Glenn Gould doesn't seem to recognize his own "enfant terrible" personality. It's sort of shocking that he would presume to say that Stravinsky's motivation for writing his music was objectionable. That's what many would criticize in Gould's career, and one needn't look farther than his recordings and essays of Mozart's piano sonatas. Gould was a brilliant genius. He was also a gas bag.

Gould admits he never had seen the Rite on the stage. Anybody with Gould’s musical acumen should have known that the Rite is a ballet and should be contemplated as such. A fine and interesting interview, despite the 30 year old’s shortcoming here.

Re: "indie rock is one of the worst genres on the planet". "Indie", as far as I can tell, means "independent of a recording contract" and thus, as a recording artist, unvetted. If you're never hired as, oh, I don't know, say, a waiter, does that make you an "indie waiter"? I suspect it more likely makes you unemployed. I may have never heard "indie rock" myself, so I don't know, but if it's lousy, that shouldn't be surprising. Re: "What he says about recordings, however, is extremely prescient ". I beg to differ here. Gould's ideas about recording were the opposite of prescient. They were cramped and constricted precisely because he couldn't see beyond the constraints of his own time. That makes them interesting as historical documents; it doesn't make them relevant.

@@sandrofazzolari8833 The ballet is a ballet; the suite is a suite. I've never seen the ballet either. I have seen the suite. Gould and I are both entitled to judge the suite. My feeling about the suite (other than that I love it) is that if were really just the epater-le-bourgeois gesture that Gould suggests, it would not have endured well past a century. It has endured, and it has flourished.

The contrast is truly striking, I could not agree more. Have you watched his bit on how Mozart became a bad composer ( kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gMelfKxiz6mrZoU.html ) ? The way his agile, but unagitated rhetoric keeps a lucid, overarching thought architecture clearly in his and our sights over a timespan no contemporary interviewer could be bothered to listen to is even more enriching and frankly pleasurable there. I sense the same disconcerting contrast in coherence of speech and thought between the past and the present in interviews in my native tongue, German, by the way. This phenomenon goes beyond the confounding effect of cruder, less patient interviewing techniques employed today, I think. Our standards as a civilization are palpably deteriorating.

I think the rhythmic innovations in the Le Sacre du Printemps were far more influential than anything in Petrushka, as great as Petrushka is.

@@muslit It's a close call and depends where and when one listens. Martinu, a much-performed composer in mid-C America, was accused of plagiarising Petrushka at an earlier stage and was hugely influenced by it (and other related works like The Soldier's Tale and Les Noces); Kapralova was independently, and with different effect, inspired by Petrushka, and these are 2 major Czech composers of the period. But the rhythmic ideas of Le Sacre are so easy to attribute in music, a child can spot them, whereas the Petrushka ideas are harmonic and colorant ones and it may not be so obvious that they entered the canon at such-and-such a time.

@@GeorgeHenderson For me the harmonies of Petrushka are far more obvious than the ones in Le Sacre. The rhythmic ideas in Le Sacre were revolutionary, for the first time raising rhythm to the same importance as harmony.

Think of the opening solo of bassoon and the first section with the remarkable and unique usage of wind instruments until the entry of the strings. That is revolutionary. Show me another example of wind orchestration to this extent before sacre. We all know the historical accounts on who was present at the world premiere of Sacre and what the reaction of the audience was and who were the composers to cherish the value and uniqueness of the work.

Muslit In western "classical" music: we have to consider, african, indian, japanese music, etc. (all rhythmically - and not only rhythmically, obviously - just unbelievable.)

You're actually spot on about Gould's drug use. He would literally self medicate (whether he was so during this interview I can't say). Although strictly a prescription drug user, never of illicit medications, it undoubtedly contribute to (and quite possibly caused) his death. Here's a quote from an McLean's article: "By the end of his life he was also ingesting a varied cocktail of pills for blood pressure, anxiety, sleep disorder and general unease. In addition to drugs such as Valium, obtained by prescription from various doctors, sometimes unbeknownst to each other, Gould took all manner of over-the-counter painkillers, sleep aids, vitamins and dietary supplements. His self-medicating cycles were idiosyncratic and unpredictable, involving drugs taken to offset the effects of other drugs, the addition of new drugs to counter symptoms that emerged from the last drug, and so on. " (Full Article) www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-key-to-his-genius/#:~:text=Since%20the%20early%201950s%20Gould,sleep%20disorder%20and%20general%20unease.

Gould took a lot of drugs, both over the counter and prescription. Including Valium. Is that a narcotic?

There is no doubt Gould was very eccentric. Wearing only winter clothes, humming, his obsession with his stool and so on. It has been suggested that he had Aspergers. I find his ideas thought provoking, but often illogical and often simply wrong. I dislike his Bach intently; I find it one-dimensional and cold: mannered and over-stylized, rather like this interview. The mind-blowing technique is not enough.

Yes and no to the drug usage. What I mean is that it's public knowledge that he took numerous drugs and even in interviews from the 70's, some you can see on youtube, he's clearly high but I wonder if his drug taking started this early. Also Glenn was extremely articulate naturally making it possible that he is sober. He also pre scripted interviews and much like his recordings did a lot of editing. I think he applied the same high standard to what he said that he applied to his music making.

"Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations" by Otto Friedrich. A book. I know it's unfashionable to read an actual book, but Gould read many. This one by Friedrich is a great work.

Gould is SO wrong about Stravinsky. I can't tell you how many people I know from so many walks of life who loved La Sacre on first hearing and still consider it their favorite piece. They certainly don't love it for its shock value, which it doesn't have anymore. How shocking can it really be if Disney thought it was great for one of his cartoon movies? Beethoven had 3 very different style periods, does this mean he just didn't know what he was doing? Beethoven was probably more shocking for his time than Stravinsky was for his.

Ludwig Diehn. I have another video in which Gould discusses Ludwig Diehn some more: "Glenn Gould: Dialogues on the Prospects of Recording". kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i65_jMyUnLeUh6M.html

What Gould says about Scheonberg's later realization to use "the system" could be used in a way to create semi-conventional tonal sonorities - and these techniques he taught quite successfully to Webern and Berg - and they indeed, in some of their works, really made that "flexibility" of "the 12-tone system" quite apparent. (Although they both wrote some very "challenging music" as well, along the way - the pointilistic pointillism of Webern, for instance). Other composers also learned how to do this - Krenek is one of them - his first Piano Sonata, does not sound like it used a 12-tone system as it actually sounds rather romantic, for instance. With respect to the notion of "Schoenberg's Theories", one has to not make the mistake that Gould talks about, and mistakingly observe the 12-tone theory was an end in itself. Schoenberg's template, in his early 12-tone works, he still considered thinks to be in the Tonic form; and the Dominant form, and so forth. And Op. 31, Variations for Orchestra, sounds like Brahms with some very wild notes, despite its construction via the 12-tone techniques. But overall, as a teacher, he also was quite aware of the enormity of remarkable methods that had been at the heart in all the great works of the centuries of common practice, and even extending back to the renaissance. As such, Schoenberg's insight into compositional process, are quite remarkable - for instance, his books on Fundamentals of Musical Composition, and especially "The Musical Idea - it's Logic and Presentation", which was largely written, but he passed away before getting it published. Fortunately, his protege Dr. Patricia Carpenter, an extraordinary woman in her own right, along with her colleague and protege, Severine Neff, took it upon themselves to take the manuscript and translated it from German into English, and present Schoenbergs most remarkable insights about "compositional craft". This work remarkably and practically deals with the interrelationship of the parts to the whole, and stems from the tradition of the 19th century of Musical Organicism. And it makes it clear that Schoenberg was one of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century, to be sure, and yes, truly devoted to teaching - to transmitting the massive understanding of the largely tonal period of 3 to 4 centuries of musical composition, from the European tradition, and presenting it in such a way, that it could be passed on to future generations of composers - and yes, it's not a popular notion these days, but he felt that one must master the techniques that came before, so that one became in full control of the musical materials...and anyone who has spent time composing knows that without that kind of exhaustive training, it's very easy to find oneself boxed into a "compositional corner", where it feels very much like the materials are in control of you! His Harmony text is also extraordinary, as is his innocuous "Structural Functions of Harmony: - all of which were the consequences of his teaching in Los Angeles to Composers as well as "non-composers" the basic skills and concepts of composition so as to understand the "backside of the musical tapestry" of a work of common practice for a "performer" to come to a much deeper and less superficial understanding, and just playing "on auto-pilot" without wondering why does Beethoven break the sequence at such and such a point and go this way, as opposed to that way? And he would have his students explore trying the other alternatives to see what the consequences were or would not be - and reveals a great mind of the great composers that make up the large majority of music that the "modern" performer plays. The books he wrote on composition, he was strongly insistent that "weren't theories", but rather guidelines - not rules - but principles to come to understand how we got from Fux to the edges of tonality in the Liszt/Wagner era - and his immersion to explore "dodecaphonic" music, and devising a system, as Gould says, that later in his life, Schoenberg himself that "there were many more pieces to be written in C Major" Also, extremely useful is the similarly "innocuous book" titled "Models for Beginners in Composition", which was specifically designed for the "non-composer" musician, to understand all the elements of form and musical process that had been tried and true for centuries - and he thought it important that performers of standard repertoire (and not so standard rep as well!), should have a "hands-on" understanding from undertaking a certain minimal but essential amount of compositional training and developing those "muscles" - which truly take some time to develop and strengthen. What he says about Stravinsky was terrific - I have long felt similarly about much of the superficiality, and as John Waters might say, the "shock value" of his "approach", which is based on the converse of Schoenberg's approach - to use "familiar-sounding materials" (chords/sonorities/drones/melodic fragments/cells), in "unfamiliar ways" (superimposing two dominant seventh chords a step apart; or doing a rhythmic ostinato that has deliberately random sounding irregular accents, so as to "break" the sense of a familiar time-signature, and so-forth. And he not written The Rite, he likely would not have had the profile that that one work did create for him; the other works, written very much similar ways, were, I think Gould is right here, sort of meant to be obnoxious and garish and to get under one's skin, of course, with a few wonderful exceptions along the way. And the observations others have mentioned about "the future of music" - with electronics and media - were remarkably prophetic, as 6 years later, he would hear Wendy Carlos' "Switched-On-Bach", which he did an entire show on it, and unhesitatingly called it the greatest record ever made - because as he talks about, there was tape music, and music concrete, and some rudimentary use of lab-equipment for "electronic music", but it wasn't until Wendy Carlos' SOB, and it going platinum, and still is the best selling classical record of all time, she put Moog's instrument on the map and changed the course of music and electronic music forever - and not for nothing, he wrote an entire full page of liner notes for her follow-up album, The Well Tempered Synthesizer, where he extols her performance of the 4th Brandenberg as the best performance of the work, "Live, canned, or intuited..." - look up Gould and the Moog - someone has put that radio documentary he did online as well....it's really astounding as well. This "interview" is a remarkable treasure, thank you so much Bruce for sharing it with us all!

To my ear Alban Berg was the one who reconciled that technique with common emotional experience.

@@scottryanjohnson5145 thank you for your comments.

You obviously haven't listened to much Schoenberg! There's quite a bit of variety in his music. Check out his serenade, a largely neoclassical which contains a distinctly not neoclassical (and gorgeous!) Song without words. Also one of his early masterpieces, Gurrelieder.

Ludwig Diehn, apparently. Can someone track down his music? It seems KZfaq is exactly what he was planning for. I love Bruckner's music, and I love obscure music.

@@brucecross1164 wow, he evidently funded the music school at Old Dominion? Just looked him up, that’s a very touching story. Thanks so much, you are a treasure with these rarities!

I have another video in which Gould discusses Ludwig Diehn some more: "Glenn Gould: Dialogues on the Prospects of Recording". kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i65_jMyUnLeUh6M.html

@@GoldenScarab45 I was interested to read that his music did indeed receive performances. Gould was a bit selective with his portrayal, I think, in order to support his argument.

@@michaelowens5394 I haven't been able to find any recordings of his music. There is a sample in the background of the other video of mine I mention above.

What are some of his serial works, if I may ask?

@@alejandrosoza9574 Concerto for Violin, Variations for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano, String Quartets no. 2 and 3, The String Trio, Woodwind Quintet, and others.

The rite of Spring also demonstrates incredible technical command over orchestration and harmonic relationships, and has many memorable melodic ideas(many which are actually russian folk tunes, but he gives them his own treatment)

@@alejandrosoza9574 look at the works composed after schoenberg’s death. Requiem canticles an similar works of the period

@@muslit these are 12 tone works but not serial. Can they be considered serial as those of the post wwii era?

thank you Michael! I agree 100%. Worth listening tho

I suppose Schoenberg is playful in a fairly dark way. Rhythmically certainly, using the rhythm minuets and gavottes in an ironically serialist way. The Ode to Napoleon is rather sarcastically playful for instance

Why?

Nope. Petrushka is.

I’d like to know too.

He (meaning Gould?) was extremely prescient. Looking up the word, it is an adjective, “having or showing knowledge of events before they take place.” Okay, I’ll bite. How was he prescient?

@@robkunkel8833 The OP was probably referring to Gould's predictions of future music, etc. Apparently, he believes his predictions were accurate.

I remember once reading how In the 1920s it was fashionable to say you understood Einstein and enjoyed Schoenberg.

It is an object lesson that applies to culture in its entirety. The difference with Schoenberg was that he had no access to materials (such as the Renaissance ones referred to) and his limitation, such as it was, was not one born of arrogance or intellectual incuriosity. This contrasts with the very stupid confidence of so many people in so many areas of current culture that their insights - if they can be so called - represent eternal verities, based on very narrow - and voluntarily so - references.

I agree with you.

He understood it only too well, the frolicking of a rich child who never was touched by the real suffering of life.

Mozart was clearly not as smart either he died when he was 35.. Opinions are what make people into individuals and not sheep....Having said that there is a big difference between performers and composers.Just a thought :)

You complain about his sense of self- assurance by daring to say the less than great Stravinsky but then go in a similar fashion towards Schoenberg. As if he wasn’t either critical to the latter in the interview

And yet, Stephen, there are many, myself and some of my friends included, who maintain that Schoenberg was one of the great composers of the century. I deeply love, not just respect and find fascination with, Schoenberg's music for its power, human communicativeness and emotional and spiritual message.

And if one sets aside initial prejudices and listens at first repeatedly, works like the First Chamber Symphony, Pierrot, Five Pieces, the Serenade, Moses und Aron und the Variations for Orchestra will surely make a very deep impression.

Stravinsky is one of the greatest musical minds of a century, and is among the most influential musicians of all time. Greatness is not a fitting term for such a master, he is beyond that and not even Gould is in a position to claim anything else!

I can't agree with a so broad a generalization, though it would be interesting to hear you defend it in the specific case of Schoenberg.

A wonderfully provocative thought

sorry for the question since i'm still watching the video, and i am curious which composer are you referring to?

@@Dancingjulien can only refer to Stravinsky

@@Dancingjulien yes. Igor.

Gould is speaking of Ludwig Diehn. There is further discussion of this composer in another video "Glenn Gould: Dialogues on the Prospects of Recording". kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i65_jMyUnLeUh6M.html

@@brucecross1164 Wow, thanks! I hardly expected an answer to this!

I can’t find any of his music. Just a school named after him which is quite ironic.

I don't necessarily agree with his evaluation of Stravinsky, but the way he interprets the various phases of Stravinsky's career is fascinating, and his aesthetic judgments are too well informed to be dismissed as "absolutely foolish" simply because we happen not to share them.

He likes to be very direct with his judgements. Think of him as an artist in his own time in the center of the Cold War, not far from the end of the Second World War. Same way as he looks upon the turn of the century (19-20.)

Yes, I think so. Someone else suggested that rather than picking a random date, Gould might have chosen that very day of the interview.

Gould is mostly expressing ideas he’d formulated before, and to a significant extent, articulated publicly before. I would be more impressed with his ability to think on his feet if in his characterization of Schoenberg’s compositional intent he’d been able to summon the term for which he kept fumbling but which kept eluding him, the term “didactic”.

@Christiaan Baron It is called “brilliance.”

No, I don't think so.

@@brucecross1164 It's Patricia Moore. She interviewed GG for the Radio-Canada International (RCI) Russian section, broadcast in Moscow around Jan/Feb 1965. Recorded Nov. 27, 1964

Unfortunately, the second-guessing of the word program inserted Italy (after 'definitely') making my sentence sound nonsenacle. I as has happened before not become apparent until I Sent it.

Alas the music of Ludwig Diehn is still unknown.

I was scouring the comments hoping this guy was real

@@brucecross1164 do you happen to know where to find any info/recordings of his? I kmow theres another gould brodcast where he mentions him and plays a bit of a recording but thats all i could find

I have looked, without success. I'd be happy to hear from anyone who has found recordings of his music.

@@brucecross1164 as far as I could tell there is an archive of recordings at the school he founded in Virginia. Also an archive of scores there too. I may have to look into what kind of access us granted to the public, as I'm not too far from Virginia myself

Why should he necessarily be a "pioneer" specifically? He didn't say that he wasn't brilliant, or that his work wasn't profound, just that Prokofiev hadn't pioneered anything himself. There are stark similarities between even Firebird and Rimsky Korsikov's works. I don't have any fondness for Gould in particular, but saying that someone was not a pioneer is not a slight, but rather a categorical distinction. He is an important, highly influential, and unique composer in all of history. But he was in fact highly adaptable to his life circumstances. Which if you know the biography of Stravinsky, seems like an objective description of the man.

There's more Schoenberg music that, not being 12 tone, and being very good indeed, can be listened to for pleasure than there is "difficult" Schoenberg 12 tone music. Be that as it may, much of Berg's 12 tone music can be listened to for pleasure, even if you can't stand Schoenberg's; the Lulu Suite and the Violin Concerto are a good place to start.

I do not agree. I have played his piano music to audiences regularly and performed his orchestral works as well. Always with a positive reaction of the audience. 100 years or more do count. Works of music need to age, like wine and cigars.