g.g.: Mr. Gould, I don’t feel we should allow this dialogue to degenerate into idle banter. It’s obvious that you’ve never savoured the joys of a one-to-one relationship with a listener.

G.G.: I always thought that, managerially speaking, a twenty-eight-hundred-to-one relationship was the concert-hall ideal.

g.g.: I don’t want to split statistics with you. I’ve tried to pose the question with all candour, and —

G.G.: Well then, I’ll try to answer likewise. It seems to me that if we’re going to get waylaid by the numbers game, I’ll have to plump for a zero-to-one relationship as between audience and artist, and that’s where the moral objection comes in.

g.g.: I’m afraid I don’t quite grasp that point, Mr. Gould. Do you want to run it through again?

G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public — and let me get on record right now the fact that I’m not at all happy with words like “public” and “artist”; I’m not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology — that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with — or, better still, unaware of — the presumed demands of the marketplace — which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of “public” responsibility, and his “public” will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay!

G.G.: No, they’ll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level than that which relates any stage to its apron.