Bach

5.     Johann Sebastian Bach. If you have been listening to a composer in church, at home, and everywhere else from the year when you were born, then that composer has formed your musical taste. When we listen to Mozart we are Mozartians. What do we hear listening to Bach? We are told we are hearing the formation of a whole musical language, that there is before and after Bach. We know we are listening to the early eighteenth century. The keyboard is a mechanism but country and city co-exist with an unmechanical ease and productivity. Community is at work, with opportunity to speak solo or share new harmonies given all the time in the world. One could go on saying more, as Bach was aware. Then, there is Glenn Gould. Here he is on the plinth (construction: Charles Anderson) in the form of 38 CDs and 6 DVDs in a box. I have Susan Southall to thank for this gift, she seeming to have decided it was time to move this amount of information someplace else. I am eternally grateful, as I can now listen to any amount of Bach from the Canadian prodigy, aware that this music only came to my attention (it had already all happened) after his death in Toronto in 1982. Exits and entrances. The photograph shows him “choosing a piano at Columbia’s 30^th Street Studio, New York City, April 1957.” Piano being the operative word and the operating instrument. Gould does things with Bach we were never warned about. The works of Bach are the university, the testing ground, the fresh canvas for him to try new things. It’s like listening to someone like Keith Jarrett stretching the standards, the standards in this case being the keyboard works of Bach. One moment we question if two hands can go that fast, the next moment find ourselves somewhere so slow, yet familiar, we don’t know when he will or will he won’t he strike the next note.