I just heard a short segment on NPR that stopped me in my tracks and sent me straight to the computer. It was about a collaboration, in 1962, between Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic and pianist Glenn Gould.
I first encountered Gould in the 1993 film "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," and then again when I found his Goldberg Variations. If you know Gould's work, you know that he often approached music like...well, I think of him like a monk, a contemplative, someone who treats music as a kind of meditation. Bernstein, well...he was a fixture in New York for decades, the first American born and trained composer to reach international acclaim...and...the guy who did the music for West Side Story.
It would be fair to say that their styles weren't an obvious match.
It would be equally fair to say that their week-long rehearsal period, preparing to bring the Brahms D Minor Concerto to the stage, was...fraught. Gould wanted to play it like a contemplative, Bernstein wanted to lean into the piece's virtuosity, both men were stubborn and both men thought they were in charge. In fact, the process was SO fraught that Bernstein stood up in front of the audience and gave a speech about the week's disagreements, and says "distinctly different from any I've ever heard or even dreamt of...I cannot say I'm in complete agreement with Mr. Gould's conception." "I'm conducting it because Gould is so....serious an artist." Gould, Bernstein, and the Philharmonic then gave a piece that sounded like a musical wrestling match -- a "musical argument," says Sara Fishko of NPR -- sometimes Gould's interpretation was winning, sometimes Bernstein did, sometimes their interpretations melded beautifully, and sometimes it sounded like an unholy mess. Or at least that's what the (very critical) critics said the next day.
I ran to the computer because...well, because I thought the piece, as played by the two of them, was beautiful, full of tension, dynamic.
My first thought was: "see? COLLABORATION doesn't always mean AGREEMENT -- SUCCESSFUL collaboration has room for disagreement between creators!"
The concerto felt like a validation. Here are these two brilliant men at the top of their game, spending a week arguing and then bringing that unresolved argument in front of a paying audience, framing it for the audience, and then showing them where they are with it. Isn't that art? Isn't that part of what art is here to do? Start conversations that don't have easy answers.
Maybe I should have stopped there. But I kept thinking. And I found myself thinking, first, about the musicians (who were likely sitting there torn between who they should follow, or who knew it was their job to follow Bernstein even if, secretly, they preferred Gould's ideas). And I thought about the THIRD lead collaborator in that 1962 endeavor -- Brahms. That's right, the guy who wrote the thing. The dead guy, who didn't get any say, beyond his notation, in how the piece played out.
And I started to think about the massive, massive difference in collaboration on an EXISTING piece, a piece that has been judged and found worthy, a piece that has, in and of itself, stood the test of time, versus a piece that is getting its first, second or third performance, a piece that hasn't yet joined the ranks of "timeless," or "enduring" work.
No one was going to walk out of that concert hall in 1962 and say "well, that Brahms piece was sure a stinker, wasn't it?"
There are different stakes for a collaboration on new work. Because that piece just might live or die, based on the strengths of the collaboration. Now, I'm not saying agreement=strong collaboration, in fact I've seen plenty of love-fests where the results suck...I just wanted to flag that there are stakes for COLLABORATORS on a project, and there are also stakes for the work ITSELF.
Dietz says "your work isn't fragile -- you might be fragile, but your work isn't," and I've always found comfort in that. But I wonder, now, thinking of the Gould-Bernstein, if there aren't limits to that lovely idea.
Also, nota bene: Gould stopped all live concert performances at age 31 -- from then on, he chose to work in the controlled (conductor-free) environment of recording studios.
He turned 31 in 1962.
So there's that.
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