Gould by Cloudland Blue Quartet

Pianist Glenn Gould was a musical supernova

He blazed briefly in the late '50s and early '60s with pop-star magnitude but, driven by his convoluted personality, the Canadian native retreated home, as far as he could get from the painful demands of fame

His lasting legacy can be found in stunning recordings, particularly of Bach, which showcase the hypochondriac's uncanny contrapuntal abilities, matched by a roving and incisive mind that showed itself in his writings and radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

He has been gone since 1982 but we still have a fascination with anything in his musical life, even a failed work like his String Quartet - his first and last opus as a composer

He wrote it in 1955, at age 23, just around the time his landmark recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations brought worldwide fame. Whether Gould's burgeoning performing career put composing on the backburner isn't known but it seems likely

An extended single movement work lasting more than half an hour, its model is not Bach or Mozart, or any of the British music that was prominent in Canadian musical life, rather it is a brooding backward-looking piece which reflects Gould's interest in the early works of Schoenberg and the New Viennese School (specifically, "Verklärte Nacht"), as well as Brahms and Richard Strauss

There are fugal elements, as we would expect from someone who spent his life immersed in the work of Bach. For the most part, though, this is a dark and at times troubling piece

While the lyricism is genuine through much of the 33-minute multi-sectioned single movement, tunnel vision in the writing pervades, the strings playing almost constantly within a narrow range of resource, the discourse rambling away with nowhere near the coherence that was so characteristic of his playing. The piece is interesting if you know and care about Gould's ways; unsatisfying if you don't

More a mosaic of styles and obsessions than a fully realized work, the quartet offers a peek into the surprisingly romantic musical tastes of this highly original (and, some might say, schizoid) personality


Diary Entry, 29 June, 2024

"Are Saturdays the best days? Probably...

I was about my business early on, creating another new CBQ record, "Gould", as the sun came up...

How on earth did that happen Dave? (not the sun coming up, you creating a new record!), I hear you ask...

Well, on ripping the new CD acquisitions from yesterday, I collected together the four performances I now have of Glenn Gould's Opus 1, his string quartet, and it occurred to me that I could perhaps somehow combine the four to create something new with Mr Gould's DNA remaining intact in the piece...

I painstakingly edited each of the four performances of the 33 to 36 minute piece (depending on which quartet is playing it) to obtain the maximum slowness available...

Then, I combined them. With each being a slightly different rendition, I achieved the strangeness I was seeking...

And, of course, I treated them CBQ-esquely to add to create something completely new...

And so, this project became the 9th in my "composers" or "classical" series...

Which was celebrated with a nice breakfast..."

Over a year later, just two days before the release date, on final playback, I felt something was missing and decided to add some CBQ ambience to proceedings

Accordingly, on the morning of 31 July, 2025, field recordings were treated to create said ambience and this was added to the mix. And so, a new version of the piece was produced, along with new mixes of the eight parts as previously conceived. The original "Quartet Only" mixes are now included as bonuses, as is the stand alone ambience.

A quartet in name only, initially influenced by Fripp & Eno's "No Pussyfooting" and The Velvet Underground's debut, songwriter & soundscaper David Reilly started musicking in 1977 by creating drones using sellotape on the keys of his dad's Bontempi Organ. The subsequent junk shop purchases of an electric guitar & fuzzbox and the acquisition of an old Beatles songbook, led him into songwriting...

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