Glenn Gould (18 page)

The serious part of Gould's “private fantasy”—itself a phrase straight out of the adult-bookstore lexicon—is that which also concerns himself: namely, that the most interesting results in art may derive from a play of personae rather than the disciplined deployment of some unified aesthetic standpoint. The central irony of art would then be that unity is an emergent property rather than a precondition, an enacted but not intended distillate of crazy multiplicity.

From many takes, one recording. From many voices, one speaking. From many personae, one person.

Even more plausible is that, like Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes, Gould was lost inside the mirror-house of his own images, a prisoner of sprawling self-conception. Or that, like James Dean or Bobby Fischer, his fracturing was a function of the nascent late-century mediascape, an incandescent talent burning brightly and then out under the harsh light of
public fascination. Perhaps we must say that Gould enacts elements of all these sick mini-narratives—the talent and paranoia of Fischer, the dark beauty of Dean, the creepy withdrawal of Hughes, the tortured self-medication of Presley? In any event, it is clear that he joins them as one of the first clear casualties of postmodern life, shattered remains of the cult of celebrity hastened by the very technology that made his success possible.
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But, but—there is only one voice, not many, in the playing. The playing is not fractured and the playing is, finally, the thing.

Gould lived not only in his music, but as his music. The busloads of Japanese pilgrims, the academic conferences, the panel discussions, the mounting scholarly paper trail, the coffee-table books, films, commemorative stamps, devotional tattoos, and a bull market in personal relics—the whole apparatus of Gould's cult of personality, his posthumous iconic existence—amount to nothing except a puzzle. And that puzzle is, How did a performer of other people's music, however brilliant, a person who in another era would have been considered little better than a court hostler or an able cook, achieve a status of almost mythic dimensions?

The eccentricities always helped. They were the signs of Gould's exchangeable identity, the tics and tropes of talent, if not genius. We recognize them instantly, and so they constituted a large part of the assumed identity of Gould as
it passed from hand to cultural hand. Humming, hunching, finicking, bundling up. Gloves and scarf and cap. Voices in the head. Seclusion, isolation, hermitage. Later, as we learn more, hypochondria, complaints, phantom illnesses, pharmacological free fall. The real Glenn Gould, whoever he was, is replaced by a loose assemblage of odd traits and strange behaviours. These stand in for the real person. No, we can go further than that: they
are
the person insofar as that person is thought about, wondered at, revered.

Hence these non-narrative takes on Gould, this forbearance from the resolved explanatory account. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about Gustave Flaubert, said that the central issue in any biography of a creative mind is this one: how did this man become this great artist? But any such account one could offer for Glenn Gould would be finally in vain, because the name
Glenn Gould
is less a stable signifier of a person and more the call-sign of a blooming simulacral economy. Glenn Gould is everywhere and nowhere. He enacts the initial disappearance of self, priming the pump of this spectral transaction system, and then it acquires a growing energy of its own generation. Gould fascinates in part because he is so fascinating to so many. And it is of course beyond my power to hold the present book above this economy, in which it is inevitably implicated. There is nothing outside the text of Glenn Gould.

There is more to it even than this. To appreciate the full force of the issue, I hazard a cautious return to the idea of
the formative moment
. Cautious because we must not overestimate our ability to explain, even as we seek illumination of the life lived. So—we may first distinguish this category from that of defining moments, of which there are several. Gould noted the instant when he fell in love with the microphone, and so with recorded music, in 1950. He expressed his feelings of exaltation in solitude during the month-long sojourn in the Hamburg hotel room in 1958. He defended articulately at length, if sometimes contradictorily, his withdrawal from the concert stage in 1964. The turn to radio documentary in 1967 may be regarded as almost as significant. But he also hinted at a moment when his love for music—his peculiar version of it, I mean—was excited. The moment takes us back to Mr. Gibbons, who emerges as his kindred spirit and something like his occupying muse.

In the 1972 self-interview, Gould queried himself about his famous likes and dislikes. He expressed doubts about Beethoven and most of the later Mozart, works which he played often and recorded. To understand this, the interviewing Gould suggested a distinction, namely that “such performances simply provided you with tactile rather than intellectual stimulation.” The interviewed Gould resisted
this, saying he “tried very, very hard to develop a convincing rationale” for a given Beethoven performance. The operative word is
tried,
and the first Gould did not hesitate to jump on this: there is a resistance there, an argument; the rationale may have been developed, but it was a chore—uphill work. By contrast, if the second Gould were to play a piece by his favourite composer, Orlando Gibbons, “then every note would seem to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.” That is, there would be no need to try to rationalize, still less to
try to like,
Gibbons's “Salisbury” Pavan. And so, were the second Gould to sit down late at night, just him and CD 318 alone in his room, to play some Gibbons rather than some Beethoven, no “schizophrenic tendencies” between thought and deed would be in evidence.
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The self-analysis here gives way to a larger theory of musical history, just the sort of thing that Gould enjoyed sending up. Interviewed Gould cannot reject Beethoven, interviewing Gould argued, because that is to abandon a logic of historical progression that moves music more and more into an expressive mode. Post-Renaissance art “achieves its communicative power,” he said, by creating a sort of tune-bath into which the listener is invited to sink. The player may massage an
interpretation to his own ends, but the larger ideology cannot be evaded. And this is what the second Gould resented, and so has formed a pattern of hatred and rejection.

Of course, Gould did not reject the post-Renaissance composers at all, but this schizophrenic conversation about schizophrenic tendencies in his playing allowed him to communicate that idea even while not enacting it. He acknowledged he was not prepared to assert, as John Cage famously did, that “Beethoven was wrong!”
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That is, he did not believe linear motivic development in music was at a dead end, in need of replacement by Zen not-quite-silences such as Cage's composition
4'33”
. But he did want to say, in effect, that Gibbons was right. And that rightness, properly understood, combined with the memory of a formative moment, makes for a revealing insight about Gould the thinker, Gould the musician.

Recall the memory Gould shared two years before the self-interview of the Deller Consort rendition of anthems and madrigals by Gibbons, chosen as his no-contest first choice of desert island discs. Alfred Deller, a counter-tenor who died in 1979, had formed the Consort in the years after the Second World War in order to revive and celebrate the polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance, in particular the many pieces featuring that ethereal male range equivalent to contralto,
mezzo-soprano, or soprano. This singing and its music have enjoyed a deserved vogue in the years since Deller's (and Gould's) death, but at the time Gould was growing up it was decidedly out of fashion. On this evidence alone, a teenager of 1948 or 1949 who found counter-tenor-led polyphonic Elizabethan church music the most moving thing he was ever to know would have been a very strange creature indeed.

What was it that drew Gould so profoundly to the music of Gibbons? First, I think, the felicitous combination of complex counterpoint and accessible melody: Gibbons's music has an easy grace that belies its intellectual heft. The results are structurally beautiful, rich in the congruent incongruities that please the listener—here consciousness, engaged in active pattern-recognition, is stimulated over and over again. The themes of the vocal compositions are mostly devotional, given the times, but the other works follow the conventions of dance, the pavan, galliard, and allemande styles imported to England from Italy and France. All of this combines in a small but glittering oeuvre by the leading court musician of his time, and so it exactly answers to Gould's stated preferences: clear line, contrapuntal depth, and melodic sweetness but without overbearing or predictable motives. This is music of “direct and emphatic” cadence, with “an amazing insight into the psychology of the tonal system.”

But there is also a problem waiting to be solved, at least in the non-vocal works. “Gibbons is an artist of such intractable commitment that, in the keyboard field at least, his works work better in one's memory, or on paper, than they ever can through the intercession of the sounding-board.”
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In other words, there is a tension even here between the tactile and the intellectual, but one that calls out for an intercession: work still, but this time downhill work.

As we have seen, Gould the philosopher struggled, as most do, to articulate the being of music even as Gould the performer made music almost without pause. Does music lie in the mind, or in the fingers? Neither, really. Arguing with Geoffrey Payzant in his review, Gould wrote that “the mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is
not
related to the striking of the individual keys but rather to the rites of passage
between
notes.”
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But what lies between the notes is of course nothing, the silence of music's possibility. Negotiating that space, performing that rite of passage—what a telling phrase that is—is just where mind meets music, and vice versa. The striking of the keys is in a sense no more than a means to that end. No more, but also no less.

What a wonder, then, for a performer to find a composer whose mind is so affinitive to his own that playing his music feels exactly like making it up as he goes. And what a wonder
for us to hear playing of a score that is so seamlessly inhabited that it sounds just as it feels. Unfolded in time, it somehow manages at once to surprise us and to tell us exactly what we already know. Great music, like a will in law, is self-proving: its rightness lies precisely in its demonstration and nowhere else. And yet, at the same time—in the same time—this project is never complete or ideal because it negotiates the gaps, between notes, between intellect and touch, only as it acknowledges that they cannot ever be closed.

Since ancient times, philosophers have called this experience of conjoined expansion and recognition
wonder
. Wonder is that which excites the mind without offering itself to smooth understanding under the power of a ready concept. There is, I think, no better word for the exhilarating, demanding, and self-justifying experience of encountering a Glenn Gould interpretation—even if, sometimes, he has to try very, very hard to find the line of its reasoning for us to consider.

Gould, in an optimistic mood in 1962, on the wonder of art: “The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
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In life, as in concert performance, there is a non-take-twoness that we might well resent. We never have the benefit that the simplest recording studio confers, of doing it over one more time.

The musical take grabs a performance, pins it to the storage/retrieval technology. It is only
taken
if it can be put away in order to be taken out again and used. Played. Dictionary entries for the transitive verb
take
are among the longest to be found—perhaps indicating the number of ways and things we are concerned to take. For the noun
take,
the entry is short—the amount of type set up in a given session (archaic now); the continuous recorded scene or rendering in cinema and music; and the monies collected from a theatrical or sporting performance—and almost always accompanied by the definite article:
the
take.

The recording take reminds us, as the piece of music itself cannot, of the tension between part and whole that is the essence of music. The take records the moments of negotiation
between past and future, held fitfully, contingently, in the loose frame of the present. We cannot see that frame, cannot isolate it, yet we cannot experience music or anything else without its presumptive presence. If presence is even the right word. Its functioning. Its allowance. Its grace.

Music is perception, but it is not only perception; it is also a perception of that which makes perception possible, a glimpse of the conditions making perception possible. Music is thought, but it is not cognition—it has no fixed meaning or even a determinate concept. It does not follow from this, from the non-cognitive status of music, that it is without import. On the contrary, music matters even though it does not mean. Music matters
because
it does not mean. Any anthropological or evolutionary account of music's mattering, no matter how nuanced, will not be able to account for this mattering beyond meaning. Music embraces the promise of happiness given by all beauty.
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