If we're going by sheer musical talent, then perhaps Morton Gould was our Mozart. His contemporary Leonard Bernstein a genius who happened upon music as his metier, but Gould was the real thing: a musical genius, a great composer, great conductor, great teacher, child prodigy whom as a child could improvise at the piano in the style of any composer you could name. If we can find the profundity in Mozart and Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens, we can find the profundity in Gould, and if Gould at his populist best were still played in the concert hall, it would ablaze the ears.
Gould was every bit as talented a musician. Were the world slightly different, Gould might have been as great a conductor as Bernstein. But while Gould was an enormous success with women and possessed all the same narcissism, he was as homely as Bernstein was handsome, and had little of Bernstein's oracular charisma. To the end of his life he spoke with a working class Brooklyn accent so strong that the indistinctness of early television would render it almost unintelligible.
And there was one other, perhaps surprising, detail of Gould's life that prevented him from ascending to Bernstein's heights. Whereas Bernstein's domineering father did everything he could to frustrate his son's musical aspirations, Gould's father became his manager. A once-successful businessman who lost everything in the Great Depression, Mr. Gould knew a meal ticket when he saw one, and ran Gould's early life, steering him in the direction of as many lucrative musical contracts with mass media as he could win. Gould first cut his adult teeth on scoring radio shows, and whereas Bernstein became the purveyor in the American mind of serious music, Gould was a conductor who purveyed of various kinds of light classics alongside Andre Kostelanetz, Arthur Fiedler, Mitch Miller... Names hardly anybody remembers anymore because why listen to popular classics when you can either listen to popular music or classical music?
But Morton Gould was clearly so much more than just a light classics arranger and conductor. If you listen to his recordings of Ives, Nielsen, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Copland, even Miakovsky, you realize that this is a conductor who easily could have taken over one of the Big Five orchestras (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago) and given far greater performances over a far more diverse repertoire than a number of career 'maestri' chosen either for their photogenic flash or their ultra-traditional stolidity.
And then there is, quite simply, the music. If Mendelssohn were a Brooklyn Jew or the Art Deco era, this is how he would write, and just as Mendelssohn did, Gould was subsumed by the supposed waves of greater progress. As postwar American classical music gradually surrendered to Boulez, Babbit, and the atonal wave, Gould continued to evolve with light speed, assimilating new influences with the speed of a true genius. Here's something from wikipedia:
(click on link for the rest)
"Incorporating new styles into his repertoire as they emerged, Gould incorporated wildly disparate elements, including a rapping narrator titled "The Jogger and the Dinosaur," American tap dancing in his "Tap Dance Concerto" for dancer and orchestra, and a singing fire department titled "Hosedown" commissioned works for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. In 1993, his work "Ghost Waltzes" was commissioned for the ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In the same year, he received the El Premio Billboard for his contributions to Latin music in the United States.[8] In 1994, Gould received the Kennedy Center Honor in recognition of lifetime contributions to American culture."
The best music is neither high nor lowbrow, it is, quite simply, high, low, middle and all of it simultaneously. Gould, at his best, exists somewhere in that neither region between it all. The 1930's American 'Sinfonettes', mini symphonies (and also a 'Concertette for Piano and Orchestra') which my musical friend the critic Steve Schwartz notes is probably the musical equivalent of that very 1930's innovation: the kitchenette; are virtually perfect pieces of music. Light and vital, tuneful, but also kind of Whitmanian in how they capture all the different musical influences of American life, Jazz, Salsa, Merengue, Blues, Old Time, Folk Ballads, Spirituals, Ragtime, it's all there, mixing with Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok, Hindemith, and (of course) Gershwin, into work that instantly recognizable as Gould's alone. You find it in the Cowboy Rhapsody, in the Dance Variations for Two Pianos, in the ballet: Fall River Legend, in the Philharmonic Waltzes, in the American Ballads, in the Symphony of Spirituals, and of course, in the American fucking Salute which is the only piece. ofhis that gets played anymore, and only on the Fourth of July....
And like Bernstein (and like Mendelssohn) Gould could suffer from all the same gaucheries when his music became too serious and pretentious. And unfortunately, if Gould wanted to be played in his later years, he would only be taken seriously when he suppressed his fun. His symphonies, his piano sonatas, they are nowhere near as engaging, nowhere near as suffused with that joie de vivre we especially need so much in an era like ours which frankly looks more serious than in the 80s when serious people would not take Morton Gould seriously. When a composer like Gould suffered from importantitis, the work was almost never nearly so good. Very few American artists bring off the 'major statements' after the manner of all those ninth symphonies and thousand page Russian novels - maybe Walt Whitman, but Welles, Ellison, Melville, they all only got to do it once, and that turned out to be the only 'major statement' they had within themselves. That kind of epic magnitude in which the artist looms like a giant upon every horizon is not a particularly American thing to aspire to be, we are a democracy of equals, not emperors. But when the Gershwins and Bernsteins and Goulds tattoo the popular idiom with notated flesh and bone, the result is what a lighter American musical genius: an American Mozart or Liszt or Mendelssohn would sound like. There was something about America at its peak - its classical music, its theater, its novels, its high art of all kinds, never was better in the years just after World War II, and meanwhile its popular music and movies and graphic novels were never better than the years around Vietnam.
(click on link to get the rest of the piece)
So why is that? Well, if I can venture an answer, it's pretty simple; before 1970, two sides fundamentally regarded each other with mutual knowledge, understanding, sympathy, and respect. Their interplay infused them both, but once popular music was elevated to the status of high art, it became a monolith from which there was absolutely no escape - America has erased the whole historical tradition of culture from its entire lexicon with willful speed, and the loss is not just classical music but also to popular music. In the age of internet demotism, when democratic urge has grown us to chaos, none of us have any idea how to talk to each other anymore, and the result is painfully obvious. Everyone burrows further and further into their belief system, and the inevitable conflict is all around us.
(Here it is, the only fucking piece he's known for anymore...)
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