Love this. Thank you Glenn Gould, a man with the image of an eccentric genius and the heart of northern countryside. Watched a documentary today on him. His interpretations of Bach have significantly influenced me the last few years. Portions of Vespers were written with Gould’s vision of Bach’s fugues in mind. I can’t say his Goldberg Variations are my ideal recording, but they are the closest to how I desire to hear them played. What Gould accomplishes is a palpable touching of the sound quality of Bach. That’s not how I would play Bach (if I could do as I imagine), but I feel it’s very near to Bach’s heart.

Anyway, this song is a delightfully self-reflective picture of a fugue (composed by Gould), which is the very definition of what a fugue is. I cannot say enough about how I love Bach’s fugue form. I feel like a small boy running around in circles of agonizing delight hearing Bach’s fugues played with all the unornamentation of the deliberate Germany that catalyzed Göethe and Beethoven’s reaction of passionate informality. Such a passion against form fuels the form itself back into being. Bach and Beethoven are a fugue in themselves, just as Kant and Göethe give rise to Nietzsche and the loop returns eternally on itself. Perhaps Germany is as much a combination of passion and dispassion as a fugue is a free play of rules. Or maybe we select figures from the past to make a music of history. Either way, cultural patterns or selective interpretation, it is a creative act that cannot be avoided.