Glenn Gould (21 page)

Jarrett has not recorded a great deal of classical music, but he has released some Bach performances, and his version of the
Goldberg Variations
offers yet another distinct interpretive argument for that great work. His choice of harpsichord rather than piano is curious, if historically accurate, and makes for a somewhat churchy (or maybe lair-of-the-evil-genius) rendering—what Gould would disparage as the “sewing-machine” effect.

⁴⁹
GGR,
pp. 35–36.

⁵⁰
I can certainly recall the baffled rage that erupted at a 1979 Toronto concert by the British pop group Queen, who walked off the stage during a playback of their monster hit “Bohemian Rhapsody”—they wouldn't even pretend to realize its overwrought lushness live. In a different but related category are those artists who are reviled as frauds for either (1) not singing on their own recordings (e.g., the dreadlocked 1980s duo Milli Vanilli, exposed as gyrating mannequins fronting other people's voices) or (2) trying to pass off a recorded performance of their singing as a live one (e.g., Ashlee Simpson appearing on the television show
Saturday Night Live
and having her lip-sync routine spoiled by a technical glitch).

⁵¹
Of course this is just the barest beginning in Kant's
a priori
investigation of human knowledge in
The Critique of Pure Reason
(
Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
1781; English trans. Werner Pluhar and Patricia Kitcher, New York: Hackett, 1996). There must also be “categories of understanding” (twelve in total, broken under the four headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality) and the so-called ideas of reason (self, universe, God), not to mention the resolution of various antinomies via analytic reasoning.

⁵²
GGR
, p. 92; the immediate context is a 1962
High Fidelity
essay in praise of Richard Strauss.

⁵³
See Henri Lefebvre,
The Production of Space
(English trans. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre's expansive “critique of everyday life” includes reflections on music, architecture, and the relation between them under the sign of consciousness and the city.

⁵⁴
GGR
, p. 237.

⁵⁵
My transcription from the liner notes; also
GGR,
p. 13.

⁵⁶
Quoted and discussed in Alfred Schutz,
Collected Papers,
vol. 2:
Studies in Social Theory
(Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1964), p. 199.

⁵⁷
Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1944; English trans. 1950; rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); quotations from pp. ix, 3, 6, and 11.

⁵⁸
Stephen Potter's deadpan satires on this topic are instructive. In
Gamesmanship
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1947),
Lifemanship
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950),
One-Upmanship
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), and
Supermanship
(New York: Random House, 1958), he provides all the essential tactics for true gamesmanship, which is the art of being one up by putting the other fellow one down.

⁵⁹
See James P. Carse,
Finite and Infinite Games
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1987). Carse views the distinction negatively: finite games, preoccupied with winning and finishing, dominate in life as well as sports; infinite games are, for him, revelatory of deeper human possibilities. Carse has larger metaphysical ambitions, not always so well judged. For example, he solves the genius question in the book's third section, “I Am the Genius of Myself,” by claiming that each one of us is, well, the genius of him- or herself. There you go.

⁶⁰
For more, see Huizinga,
Homo Ludens,
ch. 10; also Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn,
The Idler's Glossary
(Emeryville: Biblioasis, 2008). To be sure, the standard Greek view at the time of Aristotle was that music was straightforwardly useful, a form of moral education.

⁶¹
Gould's love affair with this instrument—“It's quite extraordinary, it has a clarity of every register that I think is just about unique. I adore it,” he told Jonathan Cott (
Conversations
, p. 47)—has been well documented by himself in various liner notes and interviews, and discussed ably by Katie Hafner in
A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); see also the crisp discussion in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
pp. 104–108.

⁶²
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_famous_people_have_ Asperger's_Syndrome

⁶³
If one includes fictional characters who might have Asperger syndrome, the list welcomes, among others, Bert from
Sesame Street
(not Ernie), Lisa Simpson, Calvin (of
Calvin and Hobbes
), Dilbert (of
Dilbert
), Pippi Longstocking, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosinski's
Being There
, Ignatius Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's
A Confederacy of Dunces,
and—yes—who could forget the poster boy for social withdrawal, Bartleby the Scrivener. Alert readers will notice that the title of Toole's novel is itself a reference to Swift's dry version of how we may spot the genius.

And in case none of this is convincing, note how one possible Asperger case, Gould, is drawn repeatedly to the imagery of another, Schulz: in a liner note from 1973 the pianist notes that “as his career came to a close, Hindemith drew consistency around him like a Linus blanket” (
GGR
, p. 148). Then, in a 1974
Piano Quarterly
article about the eccentric musician Ernst Krenek, Gould mentions how he goes outside only after “mobilizing my backup scarf as a Linus blanket” (
GGR
, p. 189). Coincidence?

⁶⁴
Alfred Bester, “The Zany Genius of Glenn Gould,”
Holiday
35, no. 4 (April 1964), p. 153; quoted in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
p. 95. “Here reason tottered,” Bester had commented at the time, but philosopher Payzant is more astute. He knows that Gould is not being merely mischievous; he is telling us something about how he thinks of music.

⁶⁵
Quoted in Bernard Aspell, “Glenn Gould,”
Horizon
4, no. 3 (January 1962), p. 92; and in Payzant,
Glenn Gould
, p. 105. By a curious inversion, his single recording on organ, of the first nine fugues from Bach's
The Art of the Fugue,
sound awfully piano-like.

⁶⁶
My transcription from the audio disc
Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout
.

⁶⁷
Heard, among other places, on
Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout
. Two other related anecdotes are labelled “The Last Resort” (Gould's own name for the expedient of turning on the vacuum or radio) and “The Half Hour” (Gould's claim that “everything there is to know about playing the piano can be taught in half an hour”; see Cott,
Conversations,
p. 31). This desert story also includes a backstage encounter with Kafka executor Max Brod and his female companion, who congratulate Gould on his recital of Beethoven's Second Concerto. The punchline, delivered in a heavy German accent, is that the woman calls it “unquestionably ze finest Mozart I haf ever heard!” (Cott,
Conversations,
p. 35).

⁶⁸
Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
p. 88. Payzant's larger discussion of musical idealism and the issues of tactility versus intellect in music is excellent; see chs. 5 and 6.

⁶⁹
Huizinga,
Homo Ludens,
p. 163.

⁷⁰
The best book I know on the play of taste and distinction in popular music is Carl Wilson's
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
(New York: Continuum, 2007), not least because of how Wilson, a music critic, manages to weave an analysis of Hume, Kant, Veblen, and Bourdieu through his personal engagement with the music of Céline Dion.

⁷¹
It is not, perhaps, surprising that Bourdieu uses Clark as a handy example of “popular taste,” distinct from both “middlebrow” (Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue
) and “legitimate” taste (Bach's
The Well-Tempered Clavier
). With Petula Clark, he says, we find “songs totally devoid of artistic ambition or pretension” (p. 16).

⁷²
GGR
, p. 304.

⁷³
GGR
, p. 323.

⁷⁴
Quoted in Bazzana,
Wondrous Strange,
p. 465; Friedrich,
Glenn Gould
, p. 225.

⁷⁵
GGR
, p. 415.

⁷⁶
I thank Richler biographer Charles Foran for this quotation.

⁷⁷
In fact it is more complicated than that. Susan Sontag, in “Notes on Camp,”
Partisan Review
(1964), suggests that camp is the refuge of the dandy in an age of mass culture, when traditional, hyper-refined aestheticism is no longer a viable option: “As the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass
culture” (note 45). Oscar Wilde is the key transitional figure between the high culture aesthete and the hi-lo reversals of the camp dandy. I would place Gould as the dark mirror-image of Wilde's brightness. He, too, marks the transition to mass culture and has the same preoccupations with aesthetics-as-ethics, though with an opposite valence. His avowed preferences for motels, diners, Detroit-built cars, and the music of Petula Clark may be read as his form of camp engagement with popular culture.

⁷⁸
GGR
, p. 326.

⁷⁹
GGR
, pp. 327–28.

⁸⁰
My transcription from the audio disc.

⁸¹
My transcription from the audio disc.

⁸²
GGR
, p. 390.

⁸³
For a sobering treatment of these issues, see Ken S. Coates et al.,
Arctic Front: Defending Canada in the Far North
(Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2008). Coates and his colleagues argue for national policies that would integrate and support a distinctively Aboriginal north, best served by designation as a development-free zone, like the Antarctic.

⁸⁴
Anthony Storr,
The Dynamics of Creation
(1972; rev. ed. New York: Ballantine, 1993), p. 57; quoted and discussed in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
p. 52 ff.

⁸⁵
GGR
, pp. 445–46.

⁸⁶
GGR
, p. 447.

⁸⁷
GGR
, p. 448.

⁸⁸
See, for example, T.W. Adorno,
Philosophy of New Music
(1947; rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and
Introduction to the Sociology of Music
(New York: Continuum, 1976); also Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed” and “A Matter of Meaning It,” in his
Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

⁸⁹
See Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
ch. 8, for this illuminating discussion.

⁹⁰
I will not attempt to cite the vast philosophical literature on this topic, including psychoanalytic, critical theoretic, and existential works, but two books are worth singling out: Lionel Trilling,
Sincerity and Authenticity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), which argues persuasively that we moderns are more concerned with authenticity (being true to oneself ) than those in earlier eras, say, Shakespeare's Elizabethan time, when the central issue was sincerity in speech (being true to another); and Harry Frankfurt,
The Importance of What We Care About
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), which includes a crisp analytic treatment of the desire-ordering that goes into the human project of
wholeheartedness
. My thanks to Lauren Bialystok for discussion of these issues.

⁹¹
GGR,
p. 368.

⁹²
GGR,
p. 354.

⁹³
GGR,
p. 216.

⁹⁴
GGR,
p. 219.

⁹⁵
Botstein, a violinist, essayist, and college administrator, articulates in a manner now almost unknown this strain of barbarians-at-the-
gates cultural critique; see his “Outside In: Music on Language,” in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, eds.,
The State of the Language
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

⁹⁶
This may be signalled by the sad fact that Stockhausen's clearest contemporary identity is that of the man who declared the 2001 attacks on New York's World Trade Center to be “the greatest work of art” imaginable. That he meant
art
in the sense of sublime Luciferian violence was naturally lost in the ensuing controversy.

⁹⁷
Jean-François Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979; English trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). It is worth remembering that Lyotard's focus was neither technology nor art but knowledge: his argument is epistemological.

⁹⁸
See Arthur Danto,
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and
After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Danto pegs the death of art to the year 1964 and the exhibition of work by Andy Warhol, that well-known Asperger sufferer, though one might think Duchamp's readymades had already hammered the spike in part way.