A child prodigy fĂȘted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and the rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of an American musical legend who was born eighty years ago tomorrow.
Child prodigies, anniversaries and even executive summaries are the common currency of classical music today. But there are several reasons why the story that is going to be told On An Overgrown Path over the next two days is important. The first is that the legendary figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. The second is that she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today. And thirdly, despite her legendary status, until the second part of this feature appears tomorrow h
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With regard to the main question, I picture most people listening to the computer playing the Goldberg out of curiosity and then moving on. If it did indeed play the work like Gould, the point would escape me altogether, though they did well to constantly invoke Gould's name, for his obsession with the perfect recording suggests one performance fixed in time, which I take it is what the computer 'performance' would also be.
That brings to mind those artists -- Curzon, Serkin, et al. -- who had to be dragged to the studio, or Celibidache, who wouldn't record in a studio at all, because the idea of a fixed performance was alien to them. And so, we have fixed performances from Gould and a computer, but I think there are few of us who would not turn to Perahia, Hewitt, Tureck et al. for greatly varied performances, and the concert hall where inspiration of the moment (notable with Arrau, Cherkassky, though I'm straying from the Goldberg again here) may make for magic moments.
So, no, we don't NEED genius robots. But I was delighted that your blog was mentioned and given due credit in the discussion, Bob, and in tones of such well-deserved respect.