“Theory and play of the gouldian dilemma” takes the form of a fragmented scripted interview with an unspecified musician. The script deals with matters of presence, exposure, expression and mediation against the backdrop of digitalization. The “digital presence/physical presence” binary is explored here in analogy to the “studio recording/live performance” binary through the “musician” metaphor, in an effort to uncover the complicated interrelations between essentializing views on physicality and popular idealistic understandings of cyberspace and digital communication (mostly as free from material constraints or identity constraints). As the dialogue unravels, a fluctuation between fear and liberation becomes apparent in the “musicians” ambivalent relation to onstage presence, emotional expression and audience communication.
The script draws from material transcribed directly from recorded interviews of various contemporary musicians (found on youtube and other easily accessible platforms), that is then recomposed to reach a certain level of generality. Matters of spontaneity, banality and simplicity, traditionally related to everyday direct speech, are here brought to the fore.
The piece employs Glenn Gould’s aesthetics as a possible theoritical model for the examination of digitality. At the age of 31 Gould gave up on live performance to pursue what he saw as the advantages of recording technologies; private research and experimentation on the formal aspects of music. For the classical pianist and theorist, music was primarily mental and only secondarily physical. In this idealist position music was an abstract entity that could be fully comprehended in the mind, in the absence of performance so that structural analysis was given priority over the sensual, dramatic or emotional properties of a musical piece [Kevin Bazzana, 1997]. Whether Gould’s practice was really coherent to his aesthetic premises or his aesthetic premises were a result of severe stage-fright and various psychosomatic symptoms that prevented him from further pursuing a career in the concert hall, is an ambivalence explored here as an emotional and ideological dilemma.
The script has not yet been officialy performed; it has been displayed in printed form within a larger installation of text-based work.
It is rehearsed to be enacted by two to five performers as a multimedia presentation of spoken word and audiovisual material.
Let me suggest to you that the strongest motivation for the invention of the lozenge would be a sore throat. Of course, having patented the lozenge, one would then be free to speculate that the invention represented the future and the sore throat the past, but I doubt that one would be inclined to think in those terms while the irritation was still present.
from Glenn Gould, Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould, 1974
theory and play of the gouldian dilemma, 2020
(detail, Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould Silver Jubille Album (1980), vinyl record)
your body changes everything, 2020, tank top hand embellished with swarovski crystals