Randallopry

merlin:

“…in the bathtub the other night…”

Warning: For deep music nerds only.

Studio outtake from Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations, in which he describes and performs a mashup of “God Save the King”1 and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I’ve tweaked the levels to make Gould’s voice more audible, but otherwise this is just Gould dicking around between takes.

If you’re as simple and musically unsophisticated as I am, it’ll help to listen a couple (or 50) times in order to really get what he’s doing here,2 but the payoff is wild.

This man’s work alternately hurts and blows my mind.

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1. aka, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” ↩

2. Hint: try singing along ↩