Pianists From Canada

"On tour I'm so invisible to myself, it's just one task after another. In a way as much as I love reading autobiographies, I'm fascinated with them partially because I would have no sense of how to talk about my own life with any perspective. Like half of what I like about autobiographies isn't what happen in their lives, it's ... I'm so curious on how they remember things that happened. Then I think, oh maybe it's not accurate, maybe it's just the way they need to couch an event, they need to remember something that happened 30 years ago as a certain way in the present to make it, you know bearable, and so then half the adventure of reading an autobiography is thinking like, "oh, what does it say about them in the present that they need to think about the past like that," if they sound really altruistic or if they sound really benevolent and kind. Very seldom do you see someone say, "yeah, I was a real asshole," or if they do it's a charming asshole, it's not the mean spirited person, you know?"

"Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible."

"By nature of me being the one singing it and writing it there is always an innate bit of autobiography there ... but I think I learned years ago that you don't get songs that have that long stride and that pivot-hinge ability if it's too much diary entry."

"Bring all the spaces together And all the silences ever Bring all the spaces together Come close again Be my pause before the end I miss you, oh, like a fading dream And I have a feeling you know what I mean"

"I know I'm sane I don't give a care for the crown or the shield I will not protect you or happily yield To the one who makes me come undone"

"Helping the kids out of their coats But wait the babies haven't been born I'm unpacking the bags and setting up And planting lilacs and buttercups But in the meantime I've got it hard Second floor living without a yard."

"It may be years until the day My dreams will match up with my pay."

"Old dirt road (Mushaboom) Knee deep snow (Mushaboom) Watching the fire as we grow (Mushaboom)"

"I got a man to stick it out And make a home from a rented house And we'll collect the moments one by one I guess that's how the future's done."

"Don't you wish that we could forget that kiss And see this for what it is That we're not in love"

"The tragedy starts from the very first spark Losing your mind for the sake of your heart The saddest part of a broken heart Isn't the ending so much as the start."

"Ooh, I'll be the one who'll break my heart I'll be the one to hold the gun."

"I know more than I knew before I didn't rest I didn't stop Did we fight or did we talk."

"No one likes to take a test Sometimes you know more is less."

"The truth lied And lies divide Lies divide"

"One Two Three Four Tell me that you love me more Sleepless, long nights That was what my youth was for Old teenage hopes are alive at your door Left you with nothing But they want some more."

"Oh, oh, oh You're changing your heart Oh, oh, oh You know who you are."

"Sweet heart, bitter heart Now I can't tell you apart Cozy and cold Put the horse before the cartThose teenage hopes Who have tears in their eyes Too scared to own up To one little lie."

"One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, and ten Money can't buy you back the love that you had then."

"The cold heart will burst If mistrusted first And a calm heart will break When given a shake"

"She really poured it on. She always pours it on. That's Feist."

"Feist comes from an indie-rock world, where it's sacrilege to admit any kind of ambition. But I had 100 percent in my mind the idea that we should have as much material as possible that could be played on the radio or resonate with a huge bunch of people. We already have the built-in reflex not to get behind anything that's going to be hollow. And when you have an artist with this kind of credibility, the idea is to communicate to as many people as possible without doing something ridiculous."

"Apple has really done its job. I thought it was a cute but harmless song (I first heard the song when she performed it on Letterman this past summer, and thought the chorus part was fun. That was about it). But now? I'm at the point where I'm thinking, "the next time I'm on iTunes I should download that song." And there's a reason for that. If I don't hear the entire song, the thirty-second snippet Apple gave us in the ad will rattle around in my cranium for months. So it's either download the song or go out and yell at the college kid who's going to serve me my latte tomorrow morning. You can see that I have no choice."

"Feist's third album of new material, "The Reminder" is ... the album that should transform her from the darling of the indie-rock circuit to a full-fledged star, and do it without compromises. "The Reminder" is a modestly scaled but quietly profound pop gem: sometimes intimate, sometimes exuberant, filled with love songs and hints of mystery. ... In her new love songs Feist apologizes, confesses to longing, hints at betrayals and misunderstandings and wonders what might have been. Her voice is self-possessed yet unguarded, and it hovers in arrangements that are often modest — just a handful of musicians playing together in a room — but can also proffer gleaming instrumental hooks and nonsense syllables that invite singalongs. The songs find equipoise within heartache."

"It is as a Bach player that he will live and his recordings constitute his permanent legacy. Sometimes, as in the Partitas, he forced professionals, music lovers and critics to reconsider the music, throwing overboard all preconceived notions. It was not only that he had wonderful fingers and an ability to clarify the linear elements of the music. Other pianists — admittedly, not many — could do that too. But none had his particular kind of firmly centered sonority; a sonority that Piero Rattalino, the Italian specialist on pianists, compares to the sound evoked by the great colorists — Horowitz, Richter and Michelangeli. Above all, Gould's Bach interpretations made the music sound different — different in tempo, in phrase, in dynamics, in conception. Elements nobody previously had paid much attention to suddenly sprang into high relief. But there was nothing eccentric or mannered about the performances. The music was passing through a mind that took nothing for granted. It was an original mind that worked on a different set of premises and principles from other pianists. One could not describe it as traditional Bach playing, or romantic Bach playing, or neoclassic Bach playing, or modern Bach playing, or musicological Bach playing. Whatever it was, it breathed a life and spirit unique in the history of Bach performance."

"Glenn Gould, 'the greatest interpreter of Bach'. Glenn Gould has found his own approach to Bach and, from this point of view, he deserves his reputation. It seems to me that his principal merit lies on the level of sonority, a sonority that is exactly what suits Bach best. But, in my own view, Bach's music demands more depth and austerity, whereas with Gould everything is just a little too brilliant and superficial. Above all, however, he doesn't play all the repeat, and that's something for which I really can't forgive him. It suggests that he doesn't actually love Bach sufficiently."

"Glenn brought an extraordinary awareness and imagination – he had a very plastic mind - and he was capable of growing, of changing too. Bach offers a very rich field for differentiation of approaches because he was so unspecific about what he did, in terms of performance. But every time one plays a piece, it’s an opportunity not so much to go where the composer didn’t, but to come closer to what one conceives of as being the experience of the composer or the intention of the composer."

"Among pianists, Glenn Gould was the ultimate line guy. He didn’t view the piano as a homophonic instrument, but as a veritable counterpoint machine, from which he coaxed Bach fugues and de-orchestrated Strauss tone poems with remarkable clarity: x-ray vision, some might say. When it came to less polyphonically inclined compositions, like early Mozart sonatas, Gould simply spruced up the left hand accompaniments to give the music a more “Baroque” contrapuntal flavor. And if the results sounded more like Brecht than Gould’s beloved Bach, well, that’s another article!"

"Don't be frightened, Mr. Gould is here. (audience laughter) He will appear in a moment. I am not — as you know — in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception. And this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" (mild laughter from the audience) I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist, that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith, and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too. But the age-old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter) — the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder) The answer is, of course, sometimes one and sometimes the other depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together, by persuasion or charm or even threats (audience laughs) to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (audience laughs loudly) But this time, the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist who is a thinking performer; and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element" (mild audience laughter) — that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week (audience laughter) collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto; and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you."

"And I think that this is something that we must all do in this day and age: I think if one is going to pursue performance at a time when the greatest performances of the past and of the present have been made permanent in the record catalogues where anyone can hear [them], one must indeed recompose it or find another way to make a living. I don't think there is an excuse for a performance that simply duplicates what's been done before."

"I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud."

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity."

"I wasn't motivated to do it [re-record Bach's Goldberg Variations] until rather recently, when it occurred to me, on one of my rare relistenings to that early recording, that it was very nice, but that it was perhaps a little bit like thirty very interesting but somewhat independent-minded pieces, going their own way, and all making a comment on the ground bass on which they are all formed and to which they all conform. And I suddenly felt, not having played it in, well, since I stopped playing concerts, about 20 years, having not played it in all that time, that maybe I wasn't savaged by any over-exposure to it, and that if I looked at it again, I could find a way of making some sort of almost arithmetical correspondence between the theme and the subsequent variations, so that there would be some sort of temporal relationship, I don't want to say just exactly 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, that kind of correspondence, but, you know what I mean, there would be a sense in which, substituting for the fact that Bach had absolutely no melodic design that is continuous but rather a base harmonic design that is continuous, there would be at least a rhythmic design that is continuous, and the sense of pulse that went through it. And that seemed to me sufficient justification [...] to do it all over again."

"I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

"The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system."

"The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile."

"Never be clever for the sake of being clever For the sake of showing off."

"The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes."

"My motto has always been “If you love animals, don’t eat them”. ... the moment I began to understand what was going on with the treatment of animals, it led me more and more in the way of the path I am [on] now, which is a complete vegan."

"I bring out an engineer, everything fits into a suitcase and we just record. I have so much spare time during that day that it makes sense to utilize it to do something creative like that, as opposed to just sitting around the hotel and sightseeing or something."

"To really love a woman, To understand her, you gotta know her deep inside. Hear every thought, see every dream. And give her wings, when she wants to fly. Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms, You know you really love a woman."

"There's a road, long and winding. The lights are blindin', but it gets there. Don't give up, don't look back. There's a silver linin', it's out there somewhere. Everybody wants an answer, everybody needs a friend. We all need a shinin' star on which we can depend."

"I love the way you look tonight With your hair hangin' down on your shoulders. N' I love the way you dance your slow sweet tango, The way you wanna do everything but talk. And how you stare at me with those undress me eyes, Your breath on my body makes me warm inside."

"The only thing I want, The only thing I need, The only thing I choose, The only thing that looks good on me...is you."

"Do I have to say the words? Do I have to tell the truth? Do I have to shout it out? Do I have to say a prayer? Must I prove to you how good we are together? Do I have to say the words?"

"Baby - thought I'd died and gone to heaven; Such a night I never had before. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven, Cause what I got there ain't no cure for."

"You might stop a hurricane, Might even stop the drivin' rain. You might have a dozen other guys, But if you wanna stop me baby - don't even try. I'm goin' one way - your way. It's such a strong way - let's make it our way."

"Oh this heart's on fire. Right from the start it's been burnin' for you. Oh this heart's on fire. One thing honey - this heart's true."

"When your heart has been broken, Hard words have been spoken. It ain't easy - but it's only love."

"I'm gonna run to you. Yeah - I'm gonna run to you. Cause when the feelin's right, I'm gonna stay all night."