Why, 35 years after his death, do so many music lovers still respect Glenn Gould above all oth­er pianists? One might assume that, since he played the work of such well-known com­posers as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms, he would have accept­able sub­sti­tutes among the most high­ly skilled pianists of each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion. But none have ever tak­en Gould’s place, and quite pos­si­bly none ever will. His dis­tinc­tive­ness owes both to sheer apti­tude, and to some­thing else besides: Leonard Bern­stein attempts an expla­na­tion of that some­thing in the clip above, from the CBS Ford Presents broad­cast of Jan­u­ary 31, 1960.

“Gould and Bach have become a kind of leg­endary com­bi­na­tion, in spite of Gould’s extreme youth and Bach’s extreme age,” says Bern­stein just before a 28-year-old Gould makes his Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion debut play­ing Bach’s Key­board Con­cer­to No. 1 in D minor. He goes on to explain the spe­cial chal­lenge of play­ing Bach, who “belonged to a time when com­posers weren’t being very gen­er­ous with infor­ma­tion about how to play their notes.”

Sim­ply play­ing the notes on the page would result in an “unut­ter­ably dull” per­for­mance, but “to what extent can the pianist sup­ply dynam­ic vari­ety?” Gould imbued the pieces he played with vari­ety, dynam­ic and oth­er­wise, all of it reflect­ing his own “judg­ments, instincts, and high­ly indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ty.”

In the years after this broad­cast (which you can see in full here), Gould’s per­son­al­i­ty would grow even more high­ly indi­vid­ual. Just two years lat­er, Gould and the New York Phil­har­mon­ic’s per­for­mance of Brahms’ First Piano Con­cer­to came pre­ced­ed by Bern­stein’s infa­mous dis­claimer: he found him­self not in “total agree­ment” Gould’s per­for­mance, one “dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that mat­ter, in its remark­ably broad tem­pi and its fre­quent depar­tures from Brahms’ dynam­ic indi­ca­tions.” Two years after that, Gould would retire from live per­for­mance entire­ly, keep­ing a safe dis­tance from his audi­ence in the stu­dio instead. We now remem­ber him as the first clas­si­cal pianist to tru­ly inhab­it the age of record­ing and broad­cast­ing; did that habi­ta­tion begin, in some sense, in the tele­vi­sion stu­dio with Bern­stein?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Famous­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Con­cert Where Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces Glenn Gould & His Idio­syn­crat­ic Per­for­mance of Brahms’ First Piano Con­cer­to (1962)

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

The Art of Fugue: Gould Plays Bach

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Nos­tal­gia gets a bad rap these days, and for good rea­son. Too many peo­ple who pine for the past seem to want the very worst parts of it back. Sad­ly, even fun retreads—8‑bit video games, 90s car­toon kitsch—became dark har­bin­gers, as the memes of “Remem­ber when?” lis­ti­cles turned into car­ri­ers of viral evil. What a bum­mer. Is there any pop cul­ture from the past that sur­vives untaint­ed by cyn­i­cism, sap­pi­ness, or troll­dom? Unequiv­o­cal­ly yes—that purest of arti­facts is A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas, and its per­fec­tion of a sound­track by the Vince Guaral­di trio. Noth­ing can touch its sub­lime mix of joy, inno­cence, melan­choly, and bossa nova-dri­ven cool.

The 1965 movie, an earnest explo­ration of the hol­i­day through the world­ly-wise eyes of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts gang, has affect­ed sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions since it first aired. But at first, the “unabashed­ly anti-con­sumerist sto­ry” met with dis­ap­proval from its spon­sors, Coca-Cola and CBS, who “had no choice but to air it,” writes Liz Pel­ly at Rolling Stone, “they had already adver­tised it in TV Guide.”

Guaral­di trio drum­mer Jer­ry Granel­li remem­bers that the cor­po­rate execs “real­ly didn’t like that a lit­tle kid was going to come out and say what Christ­mas was all about, which wasn’t about shop­ping. And then the jazz music, which was impro­vised.”

Although each hol­i­day sea­son we’re sup­posed to believe there’s a war on Christ­mas, every­one, from every faith or none, loves A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas. Its plain­spo­ken piety is a big part of its appeal, but equal­ly so is the music: the unal­loyed delight of “Linus and Lucy” and its dance scene (top), the down­beat charm of “Christ­mas­time is Here” and its children’s choir…. The sto­ry of how the spe­cial came to be is a fas­ci­nat­ing one, a series of serendip­i­tous encoun­ters that begins in 1963 with pro­duc­er Lee Mendel­son at work on a doc­u­men­tary about Schulz.

While dri­ving over the Gold­en Gate Bridge, he just hap­pened to catch Guaraldi’s hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (above). “It was melod­ic and open,” he thought, “and came in like a breeze off the bay. And it struck me that this might be the kind of music I was look­ing for.” He tracked the pianist and com­pos­er down to score his Schulz doc­u­men­tary. While that project fiz­zled, Coca-Cola liked it enough to enlist Mendel­son for the Christ­mas spe­cial, and some of Guaraldi’s orig­i­nal music—including “Linus and Lucy”—migrated over, writ­ten, notes Der­rick Bang, to “reflect Char­lie Brown’s gen­tle, kid-ori­ent­ed uni­verse.” The whole sound­track was laid down in three hours in the stu­dio. “That’s just the way jazz records were record­ed,” recalls Granel­li.

“Christ­mas­time is Here” was orig­i­nal­ly an instru­men­tal (above), but at the last moment, Mendel­son had the idea to “put some words to this.” Unable to find a lyri­cist in time, he penned those words him­self. “We rushed it to the choir that Vince Guaral­di had been work­ing with in San Fran­cis­co. And he record­ed it, and we got it into the show about a week before it went on the air.” Guaral­di “prob­a­bly would have loved to recy­cle much of the music from the nev­er-aired doc­u­men­tary,” writes Bang, but the Christ­mas spe­cial called for a slight­ly dif­fer­ent tone, so he wrote two addi­tion­al com­po­si­tions, includ­ing the boun­cy “Skat­ing,” below, “a lyri­cal jazz waltz high­light­ed by sparkling key­board runs that sound­ed pre­cise­ly like chil­dren ice-skat­ing joy­ous­ly on a frozen pond.”

The com­bined tal­ents of Mendel­son, Schulz, Guaral­di, and ani­ma­tor Bill Melen­dez have made A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas an endur­ing­ly beloved clas­sic, so crit­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful at the time that the four col­lab­o­rat­ed on sev­er­al oth­er Peanuts films. In fact, Guaral­di com­posed music for a total of six­teen Peanuts movies, includ­ing the 1969 fea­ture film A Boy Named Char­lie Brown. Guaraldi’s com­po­si­tion­al and instru­men­tal skills will be for­ev­er linked to Charles Schulz’s icon­ic char­ac­ters, per­haps no more so than dur­ing the win­ter hol­i­days.

But he should by no means be sole­ly remem­bered as the Peanuts composer—any more than the sim­i­lar­ly bossa-nova inspired Burt Bacharach should be for­ev­er tied to his film themes. Guaraldi’s work stands on its own, or as jazz writer Ted Gioia recent­ly tweet­ed, “I’ll say it straight: Vince Guaral­di was a bril­liant, under­rat­ed jazz musi­cian. No one need feel any embar­rass­ment about enjoy­ing (or prais­ing) his music.” If, for some rea­son, you hap­pened to feel you need­ed per­mis­sion to love Guaral­di, there you have it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

The Vel­vet Under­ground as Peanuts Char­ac­ters: Snoopy Morphs Into Lou Reed, Char­lie Brown Into Andy Warhol

How Franklin Became Peanuts‘ First Black Char­ac­ter, Thanks to a Car­ing School­teacher (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It’s depress­ing­ly easy to rile up mil­lions of peo­ple these days with the click of a mouse. Bil­lion-dol­lar indus­tries and polit­i­cal cam­paigns are built on such tech­nol­o­gy. But before the empires of social media, there was tele­vi­sion, a one-way medi­um and, pri­or to cable, an extreme­ly lim­it­ed one. In those bygone days, you real­ly had to put your back into it if you want­ed wide­spread atten­tion. The Sex Pistols—including their man­ag­er and pro­mot­er, vision­ary huck­ster Mal­colm McLaren—worked hard to cul­ti­vate infamy, using tele­vi­sion as a pri­ma­ry means of gen­er­at­ing shock val­ue.

Although the band mem­bers, at least, nev­er made any mon­ey, they were high­ly paid in noto­ri­ety on both sides of the Atlantic. Their image as vio­lent junkies who couldn’t play their instru­ments owed main­ly to Sid Vicious, who replaced com­pe­tent bassist and song­writer Glen Mat­lock in 1977, a move that boost­ed the band’s abil­i­ty to freak peo­ple out while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly set­ting them on a course for cer­tain demise with­in the year.

The spec­tac­u­lar self-destruc­tion occurred, as every fan knows well, on a tour of the US South that McLaren booked with the wickedest of inten­tions, spring­ing the band on cow­boy bars in Texas, for exam­ple, for the sake of sheer provo­ca­tion. Their final show at San Francisco’s Win­ter­land Ball­room was caught on film, com­plete with the last song they ever played togeth­er, a cov­er of the Stooges “No Fun.” After the one-song encore, John­ny Rot­ten sneered “ever get the feel­ing you’ve been cheat­ed?” and dropped the mic, dis­gust­ed with the whole “ridicu­lous farce,” he lat­er wrote.

Before embark­ing on their com­i­cal­ly dis­as­trous US tour, the Pis­tols got a heavy dose of free pub­lic­i­ty from an Amer­i­can news media as eager then as ever to chase after a sen­sa­tion. In the vin­tage Today Show clip above, see how US view­ers were intro­duced to British punk. “Whether nat­u­ral­ly or cal­cu­lat­ed­ly so,” says NBC’s Jack Perkins after report­ing on Vicious and drum­mer Paul Cook’s refusal to grant an inter­view unless they were each paid $10, “the four young men are out­ra­geous. They’re also vile and pro­fane.”

Perkins then walks view­ers through the hard­ly shock­ing details of rude­ness to hotel staff and bit of a mess left in their room, shak­ing his head sad­ly. No band could hope to top Led Zep­pelin when it came to this most cliched of rock and roll stunts. But Perkins pre­tends it’s the first time any­thing like it had ever hap­pened. McLaren could not have script­ed bet­ter fin­ger-wag­ging out­rage to inspire Amer­i­can gawk­ers (some of whom give brief post-con­cert inter­views) to come out and see the Pis­tols flame out on their final tour.

Then there are the record execs Perkins gets on cam­era, includ­ing A&M’s Kip Cohen, who sized up the sit­u­a­tion astute­ly: “There’s a case of an act and man­age­ment and intel­li­gence behind an act, bril­liant­ly uti­liz­ing the media, cash­ing in and cre­at­ing a whole hype for itself.” Cohen, a sea­soned indus­try man who had pre­vi­ous­ly man­aged the Fill­more East, pre­dicts great things for the Sex Pis­tols. But he express­es some skep­ti­cism about whether their savvy media manip­u­la­tion was a new phe­nom­e­non, cit­ing the Bea­t­les and the Stones as hav­ing already bro­ken such ground.

One could go back even fur­ther to Chuck Berry and Elvis, who pushed many of the same out­rage but­tons for what con­sti­tut­ed “clicks” in old­en times. But as Perkins points out—shaking his head in dis­ap­proval, before cut­ting back to a snick­er­ing Jane Pauley and very seri­ous Tom Brokaw—the Pis­tols pulled it off by look­ing like they could­n’t pos­si­bly have cared any less about being good at what they did, which took an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of tal­ent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

The Sex Pis­tols Play in Dal­las’ Long­horn Ball­room; Next Show Is Mer­le Hag­gard (1978)

John­ny Rotten’s Cor­dial Let­ter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Next to the Sex Pis­tols, You’re ‘a Piss Stain’

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness