Quotes
“For this listener is no longer passively analytical; he is an associate whose tastes, preferences, and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention, and upon whose fuller participation the future of the art of music waits. He is also, of course, a threat, a potential usurper of power, an uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts, one whose presence threatens the familiar hierarchical setting of the musical establishment.”
“In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.”
“The public concert as we know it today would no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by electronic media.”
“Perhaps skepticism is the necessary obverse of progress.”
“Whether we recognize it or not, the long-playing record has come to embody the very reality of music.”
“In a quest for perfection, he sets aside the hazards and compromises of his trade. As an interpreter, as a go-between serving both audience and composer, the performer has always been, after all, someone with a specialist’s knowledge about the realization or actualization of notated sound symbols.”
“That the judgment of the performer no longer solely determines the musical result is inevitable. It is, however, more than compensated by the overwhelming sense of power which editorial control makes available to him.”
“My idea of happiness is spending 250 days a year in a recording studio.”
“The performer is inevitably challenged by the stimulus of this unexplored repertoire. He is also encouraged by the nature of studio techniques to appropriate characteristics that have tended for a century or two to be outside his private preserve.”
“But most important, this archival responsibility enables the performer to establish a contact with a work which is very much like that of the composer’s own relation to it. It permits him to encounter a particular piece of music and to analyze and dissect it in a most thorough way, to make it a vital part of his life for a relatively brief period, and then to pass on to some other challenge and to the satisfaction of some other curiosity.”
“Of all the techniques peculiar to the studio recording, none has been the subject of such controversy as the tape splice. With due regard to the not-so-unusual phenomenon of a recording consisting of single-take sonata or symphony movements, the great majority of present-day recordings consist of a collection of tape segments varying in duration upward from one twentieth of a second.”
“The recording debate centers upon whether or not electronic media can present music in so viable a way as to threaten the survival of the public concert.”
Glenn Gould on Musical Competitions: [they leave their] “eager, ill-advised supplicants forever stunted, victims of a spiritual lobotomy.”