Compensations
In the last year I’ve been losing my words, evidenced at this site by my almost exclusive posts of one-liners by others (mostly by the saints and mystics). Rather than kvetch about this diminishment (…
Tag: J.S. Bach
Back to Bach
Listen to certain Preludes of Bach. They do not say much; there is a short motif repeated; then insistent variations in no higher relief than that of a medal by Roty. But what a level…
Today’s One-Liner (#63)
I believe in God—Bach’s God. –Glenn Gould, in Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
The Good News of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations
The 1955 recording The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. –Glenn Gould
The Beatitude of Playing Bach
Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006 Like the hundreds of other people who had gathered at Saint Pius V Church for Dan Horkheimer’s funeral last August, I was moving between despair and disbelief…
Profession of Faith
“I believe in God—Bach’s God.” —Glenn Gould
Another Yom Kippur
Reading Koheleth Listening to Rostropovich’s Bach Drinking Stolichnaya Writing a postcard to Bella Balaban
Bach/Gould/Said
Bach’s music was for [Glenn] Gould an archetype for the emergence of a rational system whose intrinsic power was that it was, as it were, crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us…