Glenn Gould (15 page)

What kind of argument? The answer to that is, I think, very hard to put into words without making music the servant of some master other than itself, which will never do. Perhaps it is best to proceed negatively: this is not an argument with a conclusion, though there may be resolution in the performance; it is not an argument with a point, though we may find it inspiring to hear; it is certainly not a normative argument, though we may decide, hearing it, that we must change our lives.

So then what? In a sense, it may be understood as an argument with time itself. The essential paradox of music is that, as a medium, it holds time open. Most media of communication are premised on the nullification of either time, or space, or both. Formerly it took a month for a letter to reach Europe from America; now an email is there in mere seconds. Time shrinks in communication just as space shrinks with speed: the commonality between communication and technology is that both are driven, in almost every instance, by the imperatives of speed. Speed closes distances, we say, because it allows traversal of space in less time: velocity is no more than distance divided by time. Like all divisions, there is no theoretical limit to it. The asymptote of all speed projects is the state in which time and space are so fully collapsed that all points are the same point, and therefore no interval stands between them.

Music resists this: it draws time out, holds time's obliteration at bay, with its deployment of artful sound and silence. We say that music communicates grandeur, or sadness, or elation, or wit. Strictly speaking it can do none of that, since it is not a medium of communication. We are speaking metaphorically: music suggests these emotions or ideas, arouses in us a response we characterize in that fashion. I argue that it performs these suggestions, or allows their entertainment in
audiences, precisely because it is not communicative, because there is no proposition or truth-value in play. Whatever else it does or may do—arouse emotion, tickle the intellect, satisfy the sense or the soul—music refuses the obliteration of time.

That, finally, is the only argument music can make. Gould, performing the argument, knew that it was enough.

Gould argued that a musical recording was like a film; that he was akin to both the players and the director; that the final result was a kind of artful deception, a recorded aural transcript that could smoothly, over and over, create the experience—the illusion—that one was hearing the music as it was composed, in the moment. In a succession of moments. What kind of deception, what species of illusion, is this?

The mistrust of appearances is deeply felt in human experience, an evolutionary advantage surely at or near the heart of our success as a species. No wonder it has been thematized by philosophers East and West from antiquity to our own day. Our apprehension of the world is suspect because, again and again, we discover that things are not as they seem. We wake from real-seeming dreams. We pull bent sticks from water to find they are straight. We ride close enough to a tower to see that it is square, not round. We reach for a coin upon the floor and find that it is merely painted there.

The last technique, called
trompe l'oeil
, expresses the stakes with rare forthrightness:
the trick upon the eye
. We are fools for semblance, and our only hope lies in recognizing our folly as a first step to its remedy.

And what lies on the other side of this wall of mirages? The philosophers say: the thing in itself. True knowledge. Ultimate reality. Transcendental Forms. Essences. Foundations. Noumena, not phenomena. Originals, not copies. Objects, not images. Plato's well-known hostility to the distortions of
mimesis,
mere imitation or reflection, shadowy mirroring, is not lately given the sort of free rein the Greek philosopher favoured, when such suspicion is elevated into an elaborate system of epistemological hierarchy. But the basic orientation remains, possibly hard-wired into our problem-solving, adaptive consciousness. We want to punch through appearances to find something more reliable. We won't get fooled again. Except, of course, we will.

Gould's polemics about recorded music must be seen against this fundamental context of thought, as well as in the contemporary cultural surround. As the concert died its slow death, the once primary vehicle of music supplanted even if not destroyed by the long-playing record, the compact disc, and the digital computer file, the idea of the single-take performance lost its presumptive authority. Early experiments
in recording, which simply captured a single performance so that it might be replicated anytime, at any distance, gave way to techniques of recording that created an illusion of single performance out of the raw material of multiple takes, overdubs, splices, and even electronic tempo manipulation. The question is, Does it matter?

To answer, we must specify what kinds of false appearances are possible. The most common cases are ones of simple perceptual or cognitive error, such as the optical illusions and dreams just mentioned. These errors are dispelled by a change of frame. But what of
intended
deceptions in appearance? Here we can distinguish at least two common types, of which Payzant offers a vivid example: an automobile without an engine is, to all outward appearances, no different from one with an engine.
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Because the motive force of the car is invisible under ordinary circumstances, those circumstances give us no means of judging the presence or absence of that force. We only discover the false car's lack of functionality when we attempt to operate it. No amount of looking will do the job. So the appearance is misleading but in a manner dependent upon the project of future use. By contrast, a copy of an Old Master painting passed off as original is deceptive in one step: it wears its deception all on the surface. Either we see through it at the
level of looking, or we do not; there is no function test, no second step. The forged painting
pretends;
the engineless car
hides
.

A person, meanwhile, being capable of active deception, may
dissemble:
that is, he or she can pretend as well as, and perhaps precisely in order to, hide. I wear a false smile to cover my falsehood, say, or dress as a businessman as part of my campaign of sociopathic serial murder. At the same time, the complexity of consciousness means that we are capable of deceiving ourselves as well as others: the
delusions
of false consciousness, bad faith, or repressed desire.
⁹⁰

Which of these—pretending, hiding, dissembling, or deluding—describes Gould's idea of the fiction of a recorded musical performance? None, I think, though we might at moments be inclined to say one or more of them. Instead recorded music offers a clearly distinct kind of appearance, that of the achieved whole constructed of discrete parts
whose material origin is made irrelevant
. This form of appearing is not hiding, pretending, dissembling, or deluding. Music is just exactly what it appears to be, no more and no less, in two important respects.

The first concerns origin. We might think that recorded music is a sort of dissembling, since it feigns an appearance of sequential creation. Except that there is nothing
concealed beneath the surface, since music is all on the surface. A closer analogy in interpersonal relations would be not dissembling but role-playing or self-presentation. Now, there may be considerable complexity in the deployment of a given social role or roles (good son, flirtatious partygoer, dependable professional), but there is no intention to deceive and no structure of concealment. There is, instead, what we recognize as play—in persons as well as in art. The materials of a painting, the pigment and oil or water or tempera, create an appearance of a face or a landscape, or just of forms; the earthly elements are fashioned in such a way as to play at looking like something, but we do not
distrust
them for that. The material elements of music, which are arranged sounds and silences, are all the more cleared of the charge. They simply are whatever music is; no suspension of disbelief, however minimal, is requested.

The second concerns originality. Unlike a forged painting, which is parasitic on the copied original, there can be no false pretense in music's presentation, since no claim of originality or authenticity is advanced. To think otherwise is, in effect, to imagine that all art is crudely mimetic, as if every representational painting forever longed to achieve the executed deception of
trompe l'oeil,
to be so indistinguishable
from the thing itself as to fool the bird who tried to eat Zeuxis's painted grapes. Music and abstract painting, not being representational even in outline, should be especially immune from this odd charge, and even representational painting is ill-served by the thought. To judge paintings on their mere fidelity to nature or sitter is naive. As one of the characters in Gould's “The Latecomers” remarks, great art aims to articulate ideas—universal themes—by means of particular details that do more than merely represent, that maybe surpass representation altogether. “Well, let me put it this way,” he said. “Perhaps
The Last Supper
is the greatest abstract piece of art ever produced.”

A critic might object that there
is
a claim of originality and authenticity in recording, made by implication. That is, we listen to a recording with an unstated presupposition that the performer is executing the performance as we hear it, captured as if by accident on the microphones and transferred to vinyl or digital code. But such naïveté is hard to maintain with a straight face. Gould's film analogy is solid here: only a child imagines that the two hours of a film are captured in exactly two hours of filming (the actress Tatum O'Neal once confessed to this illusion). And even a child understands that there is willing suspension of disbelief involved in the execution of the simplest cut or pan, the
skilful framing of action and sequence. Narrative art, unlike life, can skip time. Why should music not, in its execution of time, compress and rearrange time? Moreover, this attention to honesty is aesthetically misplaced from the start. Wilde: “In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”

A more controversial version of the appearance/reality debate comes in Gould's claim that his studio manipulation actually offered a
better
version of a given piece than could be achieved in single performance. But this, too, survives scrutiny. The sound editor's art consists in drawing out the most compelling interpretation of the composition, aligning the elements seamlessly so that the whole unfolds not only without gaffe—even the most accomplished performer will make a mistake now and then—but without aesthetic defect. Editing serves the performer's vision; and, if we trust his thought and skill, this art in turn serves the composer's vision. The appearance is the reality, now in both superficial and deep senses: there is nothing beneath the audible surface, and therefore no gap to be suspicious of. The music is all we hear, but it is also all that we are meant to hear.

Which leaves just the nagging worry that the illusion will fail, that so far from being seamless, the construction of the appearance will intrude upon our awareness and so
destroy the aesthetic moment. Gould's own experiments in this field are convincing. In 1975 he gathered a group of professionals and amateurs into a CBC studio and set them the task of detecting splices and other editorial interventions in various recordings. Among other results, in some cases false positives outnumbered true hits by three to one—possibly an artifact of the structured suspicion in the experiment, but nevertheless indicative. And guesses tended to sort by expertise: musicians tended to distrust colouristic effects, such as sforzandos, pedal changes, or instances of rubato; sound engineers were drawn to ambient-volume dips; while laypeople favoured paragraphic thinking, hearing splices in movement shifts or at the end of passages.

In short, even the trained human ear cannot reliably detect the presence of edits. “The tape does lie and nearly always gets away with it,” Gould asserted; and in this quarter “a little learning is a dangerous thing, and a lot of it is positively dangerous.”
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Conclusion? We should abandon for good the habitual appearance/reality dichotomy.

Conversion may take only an instant. Looking back over a quarter-century of studio recording in 1975, Gould recalled the day in 1950 when he was presented with a soft-cut acetate of his radio network broadcast, of works by Mozart
and Hindemith. At that moment, he said, “I realized that the collected wisdom of my peers and elders to the effect that technology represented a compromising, dehumanizing intrusion into art was nonsense.” That was “when my love affair with the microphone began.”
⁹²

There is no reality beyond what appears. You really can believe your ears. What else?

Not the least of the many tensions or paradoxes in Gould's thought concerns the notion of progress.

On the one hand, he was deeply suspicious of, and even sometimes openly hostile to, the logic of supersession that is implied in typical narratives of progress, especially in art, where the new is presumptively judged the better. This was especially true of the avant-garde/traditionalism energies of his first years as a professional musician, when he saw his own fleeting enthusiasm for musical modernism subject to the dreary mechanics of fashion. Case in point: in 1951 the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez published an essay in
The Score
in which he declared “
Schoenberg est mort,
” a once-revolutionary artist swallowed up by his own attempts to merge twelve-tone technique with romanticism. Gould recalled this polemic as “a singularly nasty little temper tantrum,” but it was clear that he, in a very different way from Boulez, was also dismayed by the arc of Schoenberg's career. Reviewing a biography of Boulez a quarter-century later, in
1976, Gould noted with obvious relish that Boulez, in turn, had become “a victim of the zeitgeist,” subject of a logic of displacement that saw him supplanted in the cultural moment by Karlheinz Stockhausen or John Cage.
⁹³