From a theorical point of view, art critics in general, across history (I refer here to the "Ancient" versus "Modern" quarrels that, in many ways, are as redundant, since the Renaissance up to know, as the biological generation phenomenon itself) can be distribute and tell apart following two types of argument intrinsically linked to each opposing and corresponding standpoint : whether an artist has to strive in order to reproduce a traditionnally given model, a somewhat dogmatical state of things, only justifiable by refrence to a timeless necessity of confirming one mind to this "already there" good and ideal state of things simultaneously related to a fondational will (Nature, God, the Composer, the Master, etc.) , or whether, at the opposite (or nearly so), artist (and, by extension, ordinary man who lives by some aspects in the wake of avant-garde artists), can, or even must, in order to achieve great works of beauty and imagination, appropriate, transform and re-invent given state of things (including previously inherited artistic forms and medias), integrating to it a new, or different, way of living, of appearing, of expressing - for those now-living at least - the world itself, the human's passions and desperate will to last in this human-made world itself.
The first rather stiff, static, rigid picture of the Classics (the "given states of things") which appeared as a premise and as a end of the orthodox (A.Brendel...), pro-Ancient and other neo-platonicists looking back to an original, motionless, merely castrating, selfsufficient purity of the start (the Score, the Book, etc.), this picture strongly contrasts with the one given by the second standpoint : works of art's lives and length both depend on the posterity's hability and availability to invest creativity and imagination in the dynamic, transformative, reciprocal receiving of these works, whoever this posterity and these works are, and precisely because of such an indetermination...
Simply stated, such is the background from which I used, since years now, to think and to understand the polemics surrounding Glenn Gould (but also James Joyce) as a 20th century artist, as one of the first artist to engage himself, systematically, in active reinvention processes toward great composers, toward the reception, rendition and transmission of their works, and to go further and further in this reappropriation, recreation of sacro-saint musical canons, over-reproduced in a rather austere, stale and narrowmind posture up to then.
At least, the very spirit of baroque art is, in anticipation of the clear-cut, phallic and uncompromising Classical "paradigm" that unfortunately came later, refractory to the docile "reproduction of the same" for which numerous musicians so often wasted their talents while playing (or refusing, for some stupid reasons, to play) Bach in particular.
In that sense, Gould's unexpected, unforeseeable appearance with the 1955 Goldberg notably, in the musical history (not less), was, and is still (in the form of a dazzling, fireworking declaration of spiritual freedom relating to the process of receiving and reintroducing life into works that, especially in Bach's case, where widely open at their very inception for such creative, transformative rendition) a powerfull wake-up call for contemporary and succeeding pianistic generations, barely incapable since then of doing as if such an event had not happen, had not transform their way of seeing and doing things now.
