Reviews for Music Pathways - Ensemble 3

The average rating for Music Pathways - Ensemble 3 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-12 00:00:00 Joshua Jones HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION! A personal favorite, and an absolute classic of its kind, though, as an example of musical essay-biographical-philosophical-dialectical treatise there simply aren't many of its kind. Glenn Gould: Music and Mind attempts to dissect and identify its artist not by conventional external biographical events but by a fundamental, scrupulous, detailed and very deep analysis of its subject's art. In doing so, it becomes more than an analysis of Gould--the unconventional Canadian pianist, writer, composer, radio producer, etc.--but a multifaceted rumination on musical aesthetics, what music is, the mechanics of how it can be played, the merits and demerits of live versus recorded music (an issue that preoccupied Gould his entire life), the nature and limitations of musical instruments in realizing the abstract ideals and impossible enigmas inherent in music, the perceptions of music listeners, the thought processes of musicians and much more. And this doesn't even begin to describe how deeply this book goes into the mechanics and psychology of music-making. My fascination with Gould goes back at least 30 years, and near the beginning of that interest I watched a PBS music series in the late 1970s called The Music of Man, in which another great musical philosopher, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, led the viewer through a series of thematic episodes on the evolution and nature of music. In at least one of those episodes, Menuhin--a great humanist, teacher, and outgoing lover of humankind--takes on Gould (the hermetic, antisocial and arguably misanthropic introvert) in a debate on the merits of live versus recorded and edited performances. Gould--a great champion of studio recordings as superior and more valid as an intimate form of transferring music to the listener than live performances--eschewed concert performing early in his career in favor of "engineering" and perfecting ideal performances at the sound board. Gould's essential premise is that imperfections as well as the distracting aspects of live performance are actually detriments to music-making and perception, whereas Menuhin believed the polar opposite. Their debate made for thought-provoking viewing, and I have to say that reading this book made me consider an entirely new angle on this debate. And it is one that author Payzant touched upon a few pages after I'd begun to formulate it on my own. Gould's rationalizations for the superiority of studio engineered musical performances (including heavily edited ones often spliced from numerous takes) are ample and sometimes Byzantine in their elaborateness. But for each valid point he makes there is a counterpoint (appropriate perhaps, since we are talking about music) and rather than take them point by point I began to consider the source. Was all of this philosophizing and all of Gould's rationalizations and claims about the superiority of isolated music making simply a function of who he was? Were they all possibly just the rationalizations of a sociopath trying to justify a non-public form of music-making? Whatever the case, what Gould had to say, and what he did, and how Payzant parries and spars brilliantly with all of it in his prismatic analysis, makes one think anew about many aspects of music. This book unlocks Platonic forms in your brain awaiting exploration. The book does what some of the best of the unconventional biographical works do, like the documentary film on Antonio Gaudi by the Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara or the Chronicles autobiography of Bob Dylan: reveal more about the truth and beauty of their subjects than a conventional journalistic "facts"-based approach can do. This book was mind-massaging and exalting, and achieves on the subject of Gould what Gould sought in every note he played: ecstasy. A great, great work. (KR@Ky, reposted with minor modifications in May 2016)

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-03 00:00:00 John Grace Very nice book, which I suspect any scientist attracted to Glenn Gould's music will enjoy. The book goes in depth on Gould's philosophy about music, or life/being at large. I'm not quite into the sound of piano in general. But once I listened to Gould's Bach, there's no going back. I never knew why until I read this book. To him, music is the "backbone" structure and a subjective state of ecstasy rather than physical events. Why would it be good for scientists? That has to do with how I found the book. I've been going through a stressful year of, inter alia, dissertation writing. To pull myself through this, I had to listen to one of his album on repeat: "A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 & 1981". I didn't understand why it's called "a state of wonder" before I came across a quote of Gould from this book "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." I immediately felt that perhaps a scientist (a budding one like myself) needed this even more than an artist (if we have to make a dichotomy). What would be a deeper drive for a scientist other than a state of wonder about the world, self, and existence? I ended up quoting it in my dissertation and adapted it for my defense, which reads "The purpose of *science* is not the release of a momentary ejection of *technical sophistication* but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." Only after my defense, I got the time to read the whole book and found that Gould would actually agree with my adaptation: on page 121, he said "Stravinsky claimed that the business of art is technique; I do not agree. Nor do I believe that the business of technology is the rule of science [...]". Listening to Gould reminds me of why a scientific career worth pursuing at all.