At age of 31 and at the very zenith of his powers, not to mention fame, pianist Glenn Gould walked away from live concert performance, giving his last public performance on April 10, 1964 at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles. His reasons for doing so were complex (and quite Gouldian). He had come to see the institution of the public concert as an anachronism and even a "force of evil." He argued that public performance devolved into a sort of competition, with a non-empathetic audience mostly attendant to the possibility of the performer erring or failing critical expectation, and that such performances produced unexceptional interpretations because of the limitations of live music.
Another of Gould's reasons for abandoning live performance was his aesthetic preference for the recording studio, where, in his words, he developed a "love affair with the microphone". There, he could control every aspect of the final musical product by selecting parts of various takes. He felt that he could realize a musical score more fully this way. Gould felt strongly that there was little point in re-recording centuries-old pieces if the performer had no new perspective to bring. For the rest of his life, he indeed never again gave a live performance—focusing instead on recording, writing, and broadcasting.
On Friday afternoon's Classical Music With Foley Schuler, we will, in honor of the anniversary of this historic event, recreate some of the elements of that final concert—which included works of Bach, Geethoven and Krenek—as later performed by Gould in his favored setting for musical exploration, the recording studio.
You can hear Foley Schuler's musical selections—and stories behind the music—every weekday afternoon from 1 until 4 on Blue Lake Public Radio.
