On Late Style

My recollection is that this idea—writers’, musicians’, and other artists’ “late works,” “late style,” “Adorno and lateness,” etc.—became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s. He had begun to be interested in this phenomenon and was engrossed in reading about it. He discussed it with many friends and colleagues and began to include examples of late works in many of his articles on music and literature. He even wrote specific essays on the late works of some writers and composers. He also gave a series of lectures on “late style,” first at Columbia and then elsewhere, and in the early 1990s he taught a class on the topic. Finally he decided to write a book and had a contract in hand.

Gould is doing the difficult and surprisingly ambitious task of stating a credo about striving for coherence, system, and invention in thinking about music as an art of expression and interpretation.

Music is a rational, constructed system; it is artificial because it is humanly constructed, not natural; it is an assertion against the “negation” or senselessness of what everywhere surrounds us; and most important, it depends on invention as something that involves venturing beyond system into the negation

I think, really outlined his own program as a performing musician. He spoke to the young graduates of the need to realize that music “is the product of the purely artificial construction of systematic thought,” the word artificial signifying not a negative but a positive thing, “that it does relate to an obverse” and is not at all an “analyzable commodity,” but rather that “it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation that surrounds it

was, he said many times, his way of escaping precisely the kind of artificiality and distortion

the narrow confines of performance and display into a discursive realm where performance and demonstration present an argument about intellectual liberation and critique that is quite impressive and radically at odds with the aesthetics of performance as understood and accepted by the modern concert audience.