{"id":127618,"date":"2018-07-18T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127618"},"modified":"2018-07-18T16:42:30","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T20:42:30","slug":"glenn-gould-is-always-on-fast-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/18\/glenn-gould-is-always-on-fast-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Glenn Gould Is Always on Fast-Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revisited<\/a> is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Katharine Kilalea revisits Glenn Gould playing\u00a0Bach\u2019s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Glenn Gould in the studio in 1978.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Driving home from the swimming pool one day, I listened to famous people on the radio describing themselves as either happy or unhappy. They preferred, on the whole, to say, \u201cI choose to be happy,\u201d which irritated me, so I switched to another station, which was playing Bach\u2019s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major<\/a>. The partita\u2019s gigue\u2014meaning jig\u2014had a kinetic energy about it. I danced with my head. It seemed, while listening to it, that everything was dancing. A cricket match was on in the local park and the Bach infected the game with its rhythm, giving the throwing and catching of the ball, the umpire\u2019s gestures, and the batting an elegance and coordination.<\/p>\n

My fingers drummed along on the steering wheel, or tried to, because Gould was playing, and Gould is always on fast-forward, his hands skipping so quickly over each other it was hard to say which was which. The outlines of the sounds were unclear, also, because despite having poured olive oil into my ears for several days, I had swimmer\u2019s ear, which gave even the smallest noise an unrefined booming quality. Perhaps I could play this myself, I thought. Perhaps I could order the sheet music off Amazon. The piano would appreciate the company. It hadn\u2019t been touched since New Year\u2019s Eve when a friend\u2019s new boyfriend\u2014who would commit suicide shortly after\u2014subjected us to a performance of Rachmaninoff. It was odd, most people play Rachmaninoff with feeling\u2014because Rachmaninoff is full of feelings\u2014but he just played it very loud and very fast. Impressively fast, really, but hard on the ear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In South Africa, on the highways, you drive so fast that there\u2019s not enough time to take control if something goes wrong. Some days I\u2019d get into the car and just drive around all day listening to music. The driving produced a kind of lightness in me, a strange freedom, a powerful powerlessness, maybe, like being drunk, a sense that life\u2014my life\u2014didn\u2019t matter that much (which echoed the sense I had generally, in South Africa, of living in close proximity to death). Driving in London is awful, everyone is in traffic all the time. But still, it gives me back a part of myself that I lost by leaving South Africa.<\/p>\n

I tried while driving to think about what it was about the piece that I enjoyed, but it was hard to register what I was hearing because I didn\u2019t have a score to which I could refer, so the patterns were fleeting and disappeared too quickly to analyze. So I stopped thinking about the music and started thinking about myself. I remembered a piece I\u2019d played as a child in a piano recital at Johannesburg\u2019s Great Hall. Not this piece, but something very similar, whose energy or excitement\u2014or sheer volume of notes, maybe\u2014caused my fingers to race until they lost their bearings and had to stop. \u201cSorry,\u201d I said to the audience. \u201cCan I start over?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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