Glenn Gould (10 page)

Divisibility in timekeeping should therefore be understood as an emergent property of our lived experience of time, not a necessary condition for that experience, as it may retrospectively appear. In other words, we pause and consider our feeling of time having passed and then reckon that feeling into the units of some reliable metric. We find this useful and even
necessary. But this division, like measurement in general, is performed via abstraction—another
post facto
illusion, however necessary. And naturally, once achieved, such abstractions offer immensely powerful instruments in the service of our varied human purposes. But they remain just that, instruments, and they rely on the unspoken presuppositions of their practices. Measurement and division are possible because of what philosopher Michel Foucault provocatively called the “contingent
a priori
”—not Kant's synthetic
a priori,
that is, but the non-necessary but assumed conditions of practical possibility. We can divide time not because of some unit-based essence of time, but because we assume the overlay of structure—simultaneously a form of violence and freedom, like all grids—on our suspension in the temporal.

There is an abyss between every note; a void looms in every interval. Measured time, musical time, is a wispy suspension across those voids. And then consider Count Basie: “It's the notes you don't hear that matter.” Or Gould himself: “It [great music] is an ultimate argument of individuality—an argument that man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.”
⁵²

One is forced to wonder whether Gould, in the throes of his evident passion, actually enjoyed playing music. Not in
concert, I mean, but at all. The question is not idle. In Bruno Monsaingeon's studio film of Gould recording the 1981
Goldberg Variations,
one of the most impressive displays of genius in one medium caught by the deftness of another medium, we see a man lost in the music, lost in time, the supple fingering—he is forty-nine years old!—a sort of fine-grained climb across temporality. Transported, yes. But happy, exalted? Or, perhaps like the addict, a kind of willing prisoner of his own desires? Caught and freed at one and the same moment, at once controlling and driven, not taming time but pleading with it . . .

You may have heard this claim:
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
. In fact, you have heard it more than once, for this sentiment has been attributed to at least the following: David Byrne, Steve Martin, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Lester Bangs, Gertrude Stein, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk, Brian Eno, Louis Althusser, Woody Allen, and Clara Schumann. Some dinner party that would make!

The sentiment itself is nonsense, though possibly forgivable nonsense. Few musicians like critics. Gould himself excoriated critics even while visibly craving the right sort of intellectual appreciation—one motive behind his creation of parody characters who would opine about his work. The nonsense extends along two fronts: first, that one should not want to write about music because writing is a medium distinct from music. In this view, the only appropriate reaction to music is more music, an absurd position if taken literally. Second, that the pointlessness of music writing is proved by analogy to the presumptive silly activity of dancing
about architecture. But what, we may want to ask, is so silly about dancing about architecture?

Architecture has been defined as
frozen music,
a fanciful description but one that captures an essential insight. Architecture and music are alike in being extensions of structure across time; they are means of inscribing time in space. Kant's forms of sensibility are really no help here. Consciousness is the mysterious ability to spatialize time, to move a “self ” through a metaphoric space. These metaphors are what make us human: metaphor is connection, it is the world-covering linkage of mind. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre, speaking in 1967, made the crucial point about the linkage between mind and world that is achieved through built forms: “Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world,” he said, “spaces are the realizations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times, the rhythms of the city, the rhythms of the urban population.” Space, when experienced and shared in the form of public places, streets and buildings, is revealed as actually a form of
time
. “I suggest to you the idea,” Lefebvre went on, “that the city will only be rethought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time.”
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The spatiality of built forms can sometimes obscure or overpower their enacted temporality, their gathering of time into shape. Most basically, we must exist with them moment
to moment, day to day, even as we perceive at the complex, permeable margins how the building argues with its surround, its site and urban context. But a built form does more than this; it orders time-cradled consciousness into direction, movement, and use—what architects called
program
. A building is not like a painting, which seems to offer itself up
in toto
all at once, set off from the rest of the world by its obvious frame— though even this appearance is misleading, given how we must linger on the painting in order really to appreciate it, or how a given painting may work to subvert and overflow its frame. At the same time, music's apparent temporality, its being experienced in successive moments, can work to obscure
even as it delivers
our sense of the plan of the piece, the way it is built.

This last feature of music is what is meant by the architecture of a work, and the usage is not at all idle.
Arché
—the Greek root for arch—means “first principle,” the beginning of the world. Architecture, the fashioning (
tekton
) of basic forms, is thus the most primordial of the arts, prior even to philosophy, at least in etymology. Without a first principle, there is no beginning; without an ordered beginning, there is no organization going forward. The same sense of necessary order is expressed in other places where architecture makes a metaphorical appearance: computer architecture, systems architecture, bureaucratic architecture (an ironic usage, perhaps).

Music itself, unlike built forms, is invisible in its architecture. That is one reason why an interpretive artist like Gould is no mere docent to a sort of tour of the musical building but instead a co-creator, almost an architectural partner. Music relies on the positive quality of sound, the audible punching of notes through vibrating air, for its realization. In this sense, we do not hear music. What we hear are sounds, notes in scattered progression, such that an underlying structure is somehow made evident—though not to the senses, rather to the intellect.

As a result, the musical experience is a complex entwining of sensible and intelligible, of (crudely) body and mind, as perceived sounds are organized by the hearer to replicate—or should we say embody?—the invisible structure that gives the piece its line. As Gould noted in the essay that accompanied the 1964 release of his “So You Want to Write a Fugue?” in an issue of
HiFi/Stereo Review,
“the persistence of fugue is evidence of the degree to which, acoustically and psychologically, certain devices peculiar to its structures—devices of subject and response, of statement and answer—are embedded within the consciousness of modern man.”
⁵⁴

It would be a mistake to think, on the basis of these insights, that music is therefore entirely intellectual, or that simple or primitive sound-structures are insufficiently complex to deserve the label “music.” Even patterned basic
rhythms and song structures have contrastive elements to which embodied human consciousness responds; otherwise there would be no way to explain the enduring appeal of simple drumming, the three-chord progression, or the undemanding verse-chorus-bridge plan of much popular music.

Gould was especially drawn to musical architecture, as many highly intelligent musicians are. The mathematical beauty of baroque style, especially fugue, involves a refined intellectual pleasure. Or he sometimes was pulled by what was hinted at but not realized in the music. Gould said of Gibbons, for example, whose keyboard composition he labelled “half-hearted virtuoso,” that “one is never quite able to counter the impression of a music of supreme beauty that somehow lacks its ideal means of reproduction.”
⁵⁵
Or he hinted at the existence of an idealized Bach lying behind its merely factual clavichord composition, waiting for the piano to draw it out. Gould spoke at many points as if he believed the ultimate reality of music to reside in its idea, the structure conveyed by the line. Hence one of the defences of his notorious humming: hearing the music in his head, he then transferred it to the airborne sensorium via the keys. But this expression was only a physical reflection of something mental, and the humming was likewise. At other moments, he was firm that music's reality is tactile and sonic, not ideal, that it does not exist apart from the playing. But what, exactly, do the tactilia of music reveal?

Praise of musical architecture can work to confuse a basic point about the reality of music. Unlike a built form, which realizes a plan in a solid and unarguable manner, the relation of a piece of music to its score, and of its score to its idea, is under constant review. That dynamic is entailed by the nature of performance, and the inextricability of music from performance. When we speak of the architecture of a piece, then, we are speaking both metaphorically and transcendentally. The metaphor is powerful, but the transcendentalism is misleading. Unplayed music is not really music, and however much we might admire the intellectual beauty of Bach's counterpoint structure, we cannot allow the reduction of music into mere thought.

The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz's definition: “Music is a hidden architectural activity of a mind that does not know it is counting.”

Arthur Schopenhauer's counter-definition: “Music is a hidden metaphysical activity of a mind that does not know it is philosophizing.”
⁵⁶

Music may be mathematical, but it is not mathematics. It may be metaphysical, but it is not metaphysics. Play is not everything that music is; but without play there is nothing to hear. The thought of music is stillborn; the line of its composition goes unlimned.

I have argued:
Gould played the silence
. I have also argued:
Gould played the structure
. I have even argued:
Gould played time itself
. But what, in all this, do I or anyone mean by “play”?

“A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of
Homo Sapiens
,” the social theorist Johan Huizinga wrote in 1938. “In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, thought us.” Other labels suggest themselves as a result:
Homo Faber,
man the maker;
Homo Economicus
, man the trader. Huizinga suggested
Homo Ludens,
man the player.

Play is found in every human culture, and in each one it is understood as that element that cannot be assimilated to any end other than itself. “The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation,” Huizinga claimed. “We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”
Irrational, but not without reason, for play satisfies epistemic and physical needs that cannot be met in any other fashion. Play is voluntary, disinterested, endlessly renewable, and clearly set off from the other interests, categorical or utilitarian, that otherwise delineate human life. “Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here.”
⁵⁷

Play is distinct from games, though it may well, and often does, form a central part of them. Games are structured forms of play and as such can succumb to the other valuations, especially virtue—the notion neatly captured in the bright line of difference between sportsmanship (virtuous) and gamesmanship (suspect).
⁵⁸
Games themselves can be divided between
finite
games, those with a definite desired outcome, and usually some kind of time limit (including non-temporal limits like outs and innings); and
infinite
games, where play continues for as long as the engaged parties choose. Most sports, all competitive and professional sports, are finite games. Most children's games, some card games, and some forms of conversation are infinite games.
⁵⁹

Music occupies a special place in the world of play. As Huizinga notes, the verb
play,
denoting the manipulation of
musical instruments, is found in both the Arabic language family and in the German-Slavonic family, a relatively rare East-West convergence that suggests the notion's deep roots in human culture. Music and play are alike in being impractical, transcendent, intangible, and ritualistic. In the ancient Greek world, the Muses governed far more than just the instrumental expression of harmony and rhythm; they were the inspiration for all forms of creative activity, including dancing and poetry, and the combination of order invoked by Apollo, Lord of the Muses, and Dionysus, guiding spirit of inspiration, made for the perfection of musical creation. For Plato, this meant the special vision—unruly and dangerous but also holy—which attended the divinely inspired; music might then have an ethical function, outer harmony encouraging the inner sort, but it was a volatile property. For Aristotle, musical perfection meant the privileged form of idleness that music marked: when playing or listening to music, no other activity is possible or indeed desired. Aristotle's notion of such contemplative idleness as the point of life, with work relegated to the realm of mere necessity, is scarcely retained in the spectacle of the weekend concert, the commodity of debased consumer leisure.
⁶⁰