Das Buch mit Eigenschaften, ohne Titel

Attention all German-speaking GG fans. AROTL is going to be published in Germany in March by Schott Music, the renowned German publisher of all things musical.

The translation is nearly finished, but there is still no title.

In English, the title works beautifully (and it was actually Gould’s own description of his relationship with the piano). But it doesn’t translate well in German, in part because in German a piano’s legs are actually called Füsse, so “A Romance on Three Feet” would be strange indeed.  The literal German  translation would be “Eine Liebesgeschichte auf Drei Füssen,” which sounds like something written by a madwoman.

So we’re stumped. Which is why we (Stefan, the editor at Schott, Matthias, the translator, and I) decided to throw the problem out to the world of GG lovers.

Assignment: Come up with a German title for the book.
Deadline: December 1.
Reward: Your name in the acknowledgments of the German edition, a copy when it comes out, and the satisfaction of having done something truly creative — and helpful!

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AROTL is the November pick for “Whistler Reads,” a book group in Whistler, BC, a small town two hours north of Vancouver.

Whistler appears to be a community of serious readers, with an heavily-trafficked Web site called BookBuffet.

Paula Shackleton, the founder of Whistler Reads and BookBuffet, has interviewed hundreds of authors. We had a wonderful interview for a multi-part Podcast, which is here.

I had a wonderful evening on Thursday at the San Francisco Public Library, speaking to a group of classical music enthusiasts. I had the presence of mind to bring my little speakers with me, along with my iPod that I had loaded with the 80-CD Complete Original Jacket Collection. During the talk, I played Variation XX of the Goldberg Variations for the group so they could hear the unbelievable speed with which GG’s fingers flew, as well as one of the Brahms Intermezzi I love so much, partly because they are so uncharacteristic of Gould. Someone also requested a bit of Schoenberg, which I was only too happy to play.

A few other topics that came up:  the intriguing Disklavier re-performance of GG’s 1955 Goldberg Variations made by John Q. Walker of Zenph Studios; the Pygmy chair; and the reason GG stopped performing in public.

Last Wednesday, I gave a talk at Google as part of its ongoing series of author talks. It was, of course, a pleasure and an honor. Leave it to Google to do everything right.  I was very pleasantly surprised by the turnout, and delighted to see that very few people who showed up were multitasking on their laptops while I talked. In fact, they were rapt (or were making a very good show of seeming very interested).

The audience was composed of a lot of Googlers — and one young daughter of a Googler, a young pianist named Sara — who also happen to be accomplished musicians. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it turns out that there are quite a few musicians at Google (could they get a full orchestra together, I wonder? Now there’s a question worth pursuing). And their questions, again not so surprisingly, were quite technical — so technical, in fact, that one of them stumped me altogether. A software engineer who is also an avid amateur pianist said that, like Gould, he prefers a light action, and he asked if Verne did anything to the pedals. I had no clue. So, loath to try to stumble my way through an answer, I seized the moment — and my iPhone — and called Verne right then and there, and the Googler put his question to Verne directly.

Afterwards, a number of people came up to me to say how much they appreciated the sponataneous nature of the talk, especially the fact that it was PowerPointless. I said I appreciated their appreciation, and confessed that I’m actually completely hamfisted when it comes to PowerPoint, so there wasn’t much danger of my showing up with a bunch of slides to throw up on the wall.

I did, however, bring my iPod, and I used it to demonstrate the sound of Gould’s speed demon hands while playing Variation 20 of the Goldberg Variations.

Of course, Google sound and video engineers were on hand, and they put the talk up on YouTube.

On August 11, Bloomsbury in England will start selling the book in the U.K. This might have piqued the interest of producers at the BBC sufficiently to interview me on the Today Programme. Since I’m in England anyway, it made sense to do the interview sooner rather than later. So yesterday I ventured out to the vast BBC complex to talk briefly — and I mean ever so briefly — about the book.

The host was James Naughtie, who knows a lot about Gould in particular and music in general. We managed to cover a lot of ground in three minutes!

Saturday, July 5

Having never heard West Coast Live, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was invited onto this San Francisco-based, two-hour weekly NPR program. It turned out to be was of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in months.

The guest host was Mike Greensill, a pianist (aka “the man who knows the white keys from the black keys”) who wanted me on this wacky and wonderful show because he loves the book (lucky me). The regular host, Sedge Thomson, was on vacation and apparently listening in from Paris.

When I arrived at the second floor of the Ferry Building, I walked into a scene of delirious chaos. The first hour was to proceed as (relatively) normal, but the second hour was to be devoted mostly to the wedding of Asa de Matteo and Tom Brady, who have been together for more than 30 years and were making it official. The wedding was to be officiated by the Rev. Sam Barry.

In the green room with me were: Miriam Goodman, who has a new book about retirement; Amy Tan (with her two peanut-sized Yorkshire Terriers stowed in her handbag), there to talk about her new opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter; and Larkin Gayle, a singer/guitarist/songwriter who just wrote “I Do,” a same-sex marriage song.

The wedding ceremony was incredibly touching. The S.F. Gay Men’s Chorus sang, and Larkin performed her song, and we all raised a glass of champagne to the happy couple. It reminded me of all the reasons I love living in the S.F. Bay Area.

I was the first guest up, and the interview went really well. Mike put me at ease, and vice versa– the best way for an interview to flow. And the audience seemed amused, especially when Mike read aloud one of his favorite parts of the book — a sentence about urine content in the wool used for hammer felts. Go figure.

Afterwards, the authors were invited to sign books, which were being sold by Booksmith on Haight St. (Speaking of which, I’ll be there this Wednesday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m. for a booksigning.)

Alameda, July 2

On Wednesday evening, a nice crowd gathered at John Callahan’s piano restoration shop in Alameda for a   book reading and a couple of hours of piano playing. The occasion was the sendoff of a beautiful 1910 flame mahogany Steinway Model O owned by the Cornland family and refinished to perfection by John’s team. The piano was to be sent off to Sweden the following day. Booksellers from Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley came to sell books, John and Nancy put out some delicious food, served some lovely wine (including a beautiful Callahan cabernet) and everyone settled in for an evening of beautiful music and readings from the book.

As it turned out, it wasn’t merely a lovely evening. It was magical.

I was up first, with a brief talk about the book, during which I described what it was like to have John come over to my house to interview Verne on the speaker phone, in order to try to understand what, exactly, Verne had done to CD 318 to make it so responsive.

To my delight, I noticed that the group included several piano fetishists — the opimal kind of crowd for the book. People were buying copies of the book not just for themselves but for others as well: the pianists, teachers, tuners and Gould fans in their lives.

Then three frighteningly talented young pianists — Rachel Breen, Christine Xu and Chloe Ma, ages, 12, 13 and 7 –sat down to the Cornland piano and flew through a breathtaking array of Bach, Brahms, Chopin etc. You name it, these squirts could play it.

The most adorable part was watching seven-year-old Chloe, in her pink dress, almost stand up in order to reach the pedals.

 On Wednesday night I did a reading at Faust Harrison Pianos on  West 58th Street in New York. Erica vanderLinde Feidner, a fine  pianist who for years was Steinway’s top salesperson, was the  primary force behind setting up this reading. She is friends with  Michael and Marina Harrison, who very generously kept their  store open past business hours for the event. It’s a lovely store,  at once intimate and grand, with pianos everywhere. The pianos at Faust Harrison are scattered all over the showroom, but not in a way that feels in any way crowded or intimidating. 

The chairs were set up on one side of the room, with a chair for the reader — i.e. me — directly in front of one of these gorgeous instruments. 

 The audience was small but intensely attentive. There  was something very magical about the reading, too,  because my Bloomsbury editor, Annik LaFarge, was  there. It was a treat to read aloud from the book —  our book — while being aware of her presence. The  composer Raphael Mostel was also there,  which  made the evening special indeed.

 After I rambled a bit, then read, I invited people to  ask questions. It was singularly gratifying to know I  could ask Annik and  Raphael to join in with answers.  When a question was asked about why I chose not to  mention the now-popular notion that Gould had  Asperger’s Syndrome, I was able to turn to Annik and  ask her for her thoughts on why we chose to leave that out (the short answer: a posthumous diagnosis like that seems, at the very least, unfair to Gould). Similarly, when describing the scene in which, near the end of his life Gould defects to Yamaha, I could ask Raphael to fill in a few details, as he was the one who was there when it happened. Also, the pianist Carol Montparker was in the audience, and she livened up the discussion with her description of receiving one of Gould’s trademark late-night phone calls.

Last night’s reading at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble was mind boggling. There was a line snaking out the door — at least 250 people, maybe more. It was like a miniature rock concert, only more intense (once you get a bunch of book lovers in one small space, there’s no predicting what they’ll do). Once they got in the door, people were jostling each other for a better view of the author, and a half dozen panicked staff members at Barnes & Noble, fearing they would run out of books, were sending vans at the last minute out to other B&N branches to fetch more books. After I finished reading a few passages, the crowd stomped their feet and began the rhythmic clapping reminiscent of what happens in St. Petersburg when the audience is demanding an encore from the Kirov Ballet. They wanted more!

Wouldn’t that have been nice? Here’s what really happened: A small, familiar and familial group, composed mostly of my favorite colleagues — Denise Grady, Erica Goode, Kevin McKenna, Neil MacFarquhar, Steven Levy — scattered themselves around the room. I’d say there were about 30 people, if you count the very nice woman, Jennifer Stark, from Barnes & Noble, who was my host for the evening — and if you count the three eccentric and tattered elderly women carrying tattered shopping bags who planted themselves in the front row and insisted we turn up the microphones. “We’re almost deaf!” said one. The echo in the room, enhanced, unfortunately, by the microphones, was absorbed in part by the warmth coming from my friends in the audience, who seemed to be genuinely enjoying what I had to say.

At one point, two guys in nice suits showed up and sat in the back row. After about ten minutes, however, they left. Clearly, they had shown up by mistake. Or they might have been from Steinway. Or Yamaha. Who knows? The three women in the front interrupted occasionally with questions as they popped into their heads (why bother waiting!), and I stopped what I was saying to answer them.

The most lively part was the question and answer period. The three women in the front asked more questions, of course, all of them good. We covered a lot of ground, and everyone seemed very happy to have come. Afterwards, I signed a few books for my friends. Keith Pinter, a fellow camper from the Sonatas in Bennington, and a true inspiration for me, bought four. That was extremely nice.

The nicest capper to the evening was hearing that a review was coming out in this week’s Newsweek from Malcolm Jones, the magazine’s long-time critic. And The New York Observer has weighed in as well.

They are both raves, and I couldn’t be happier.

Gilles St-Laurent, the musician and conservator from the Library and Archives Canada (and a lovely Canadian in his own right) who helped so much with the book, came to the hotel this morning and together we set off for Quebec (just across the river, that is), to see the special Glenn Gould exhibit at the Museum of Civilization. A number of Gould’s personal effects are on exhibit there: his eyeglasses (eyeglasses, Gilles pointed out, seem so painfully personal); the famous black felt tip pens; marked-up scores; LP’s; various books on the topic of Gould; and films of him playing.

At first, Gilles and I were denied access to the exhibit because there was a special event happening in the general hall. But I took the book out of my bag and showed it to the guard, who, being a lovely Canadian, allowed us special access to the Gould exhibit. We had the entire thing to ourselves. Once we had made our way past the displays of shoes and jackets, grade school reports, scores covered with Gould’s scrawl, and dozens of random keys (many from hotels around the world), we came upon both CD 318 and the Chickering. The piano looks more war-torn than ever. The lid and case have been scraped and scratched to within an inch of their lives. Gilles said that conservators will be refurbishing the case in a way that doesn’t violate the integrity of the piano as Gould knew it (there is a strict rule against altering the instrument excessively, as the Gould Estate folks want it to remain in the condition Gould left it in).

The more recent dings notwithstanding, it was still wonderful to see the piano up close once again. And there was a bonus: Gould’s faithful Chickering was there, too, cheek by jowl with 318. The two instruments were in such close proximity of each other perhaps for the first time ever. And between the two pianos, of course, stood the pygmy chair. I’d seen it before, but it had been in an elevated in a display case. Now it was on the floor, more truncated at the legs than I had even imagined. It looks like a stout child’s chair. I could only imagine now how low Gould sat to the floor when he played. We lingered at the exhibit, luxuriating in having the place to ourselves. We stayed so long, in fact, that I came close to missing my plane to New York.