Glenn Gould (14 page)

But what of the implicit meaning of north, the need for hospitality? A harsh environment—any strange environment—throws us onto the thresholds of strangers, asking for food and shelter. In the ancient traditions of nomads and settlers, the demand for hospitality could not be refused: I had to admit the stranger to my home, had to offer him a share of
my wealth and security. The stranger was my revered guest precisely
because
I did not know him. In Latin,
hostis
(enemy) and
hospitis
(guest) are rooted in the same otherness, the novelty of the unknown person—and thus the two hosts hosted in our own tongue, the one who welcomes his guests and the other that is the army, sometimes the heavenly one, which fends off the enemy. Hospitality, so often now removed to the hygienic realm of the service industry—the hospitality suites and hospitality mints of the hotel industry—retains in its etymology a hint of the real stakes.

The dwellers in Canadian towns and cities know this still, if only in crisis. When a stranger's vehicle is stranded in the snow. When a pet or child is lost in a storm. When we recall that the security of reliable shelter and ready supply of food is a collective achievement, though deployed under the sign of the isolated individual. The north bespeaks solitude only against the backdrop of shared risk. To be alone requires that we share, that we achieve together, the conditions of solitude's possibility. Did Gould appreciate that, making all those late-night telephone calls to distant friends, his shadowy interlocutors? Was that his form of welcome?

If so, was it enough?

In his
Piano Quarterly
review of Geoffrey Payzant's 1978 book about him, Gould faced down the mild psychoanalyzing in which Payzant had indulged here and there within the pages of his mostly philosophical study.

Citing psychologist Anthony Storr's now-classic study
The Dynamics of Creation,
Payzant had made this suggestive point: “Since most creative activity is solitary, choosing such an occupation means that the schizoid person can avoid the problems of direct relationships with others. If he writes, paints, or composes, he is, of course, communicating. But it is communication entirely on his own terms. … He cannot be betrayed into confidences which he might later regret. … He can choose (or so he often believes) how much of himself to reveal and how much to keep secret.”
⁸⁴

Gould retorted: “This citation seems indicative of Payzant's own attitude in regard to his subject and adroitly summarizes Gould's abhorrence of city life, his distaste for public appearances, his predilections for telephonic communication,
his belief that solitude nourishes creativity and that colleagual fraternity tends to dissipate it.”
⁸⁵

Later in the review, he mentioned in wry tones Payzant's hint—it is no more—that Gould's fondness for psychoanalytic imagery might indicate a history of analysis. “Given that Payzant and Gould are both residents of Toronto,” Gould noted, “and that this sort of speculation could presumably have been settled with a simple ‘yes' or ‘no', such inconclusive testimony—verging, indeed, on idle musing—can produce a rather comical effect.” Except, one wants to interject, that there is no
simple
yes or no here. “But its obverse,” Gould went on, “is that quality which lends to Payzant's book its greatest strength—the author's obvious determination to prepare his portrait without being interfered with, or influenced by, the conversational connivance and media manipulation at which Gould is allegedly a master.”
⁸⁶

Alleged by whom, exactly? By Gould, in a review of a book about himself ? By that book, or by some other, unnamed, book? By some generalized anonymous “they,” Martin Heidegger's
das Man
? In the end, Gould praised Payzant with the full force of his habitual irony of uncertain direction. Any critic could, he said, simply accept “the conventional image of Gould as an eccentric and erratic pianist-pundit.” Payzant had wisely chosen, instead, to “harmonize” Gould's “musical
predilections, moral persuasions, and behavioral extravagances,” in the process fashioning “a texture as structurally secure and chromatically complex as the baroque fugues which first awakened Glenn Gould to the wonder of the art of music.”
⁸⁷

The review itself surely has fugal elements, even if the book in reality does not. Gould's play here is multilayered and self-conscious to a degree well beyond the easy use of that solecism of the media age, referring to oneself in the third person. That is merely part of the review's basic conceit. In addition, he is indulging media images of himself even as he—apparently—ridicules or distances himself from them. The concluding show of praise is itself a fiction of the review's performance, for at least two obvious reasons. First, there is no clear substantial difference between the so-called conventional view and the one he attributes to Payzant: both work to explain Gould's eccentricities in the context of his music, explaining one by reference to the other. Thus, Payzant's view is tarred with the same brush—or, perhaps, accepted as equally valid; it is not easy to say—as the usual ones. Second, even supposing a clear difference, the attribution of structural harmony to Payzant's view is heavily backhanded, carrying a strong whiff of mockery. Payzant, Gould suggests, has imposed on his life the same sort of “cheating” structural narrative
resolution that Gould brings to a recording, or that a composer brings to a counterpoint composition.

What is being communicated here, then, beyond Gould's routine show of cleverness?

His competitive streak, for one thing. Gould slighted Payzant for mentioning family reminiscences of his childhood will to win at croquet on the cottage lawn in Ontario, his fondness for driving powerful cars aggressively, his penchant for playing the piano with tour-de-force prowess—this despite the repeated claims that competition was anathema to him, and to music. On croquet at least, the critic had a point. Anyone who has played croquet, especially at a summer cottage or in the garden of an Oxford college, knows that it is among the most vindictive of games. Among other things, it is fair play to choose to send your opponent's ball rocketing into the undergrowth in place of attempting to advance your own. “Payzant seems determined to uncover inconsistencies in Gould's attitude,” Gould remarked mildly. But of course this is the ultimate competitiveness, that of ever having to have the last word, the higher forms of which tendency Gould displayed constantly in his late written work and conversations. Gould was a player in more than one sense: he was devoted to the disinterested possibilities of art's openness, sure, but he was also a ninja master of
literary one-upmanship and sly evasion. Whenever confronted by a contradiction, he slid smoothly by it, ideally while delivering a sneaky counterpunch to his accuser in the form of feigned offence—the feigning as important as the offence, since he would not wish to be pinned down even to being offended.

Gould was still more skilful in his adoption and manipulation of views about himself, many of them of his own provenance. These were juggled like so many beachballs, biffed and swatted but never rejected or answered, their legitimacy forever deferred by the performance. Thus did Gould communicate an unease with himself, the truth, and himself in relation to it. In fact, there could hardly be a more elaborated example of Storr's schizoid type, revelling in the combination of isolation and communication as a means of controlling that which is revealed.

The most significant phrase in the Storr quotation is, however, the parenthetical one in the last sentence: “He can choose
(or so he often believes)
how much of himself to reveal and how much to keep secret.” Gould's tone in this review, as in all his written work, especially the self-referential pieces, has an element not just of performance—he was not a natural writer, his tone always pedantic or defensive—but of self-delighted smugness. He sounds like one of those suavely
accented James Bond villains who revel in explaining their plans for world domination before eliminating the pesky licence-to-kill agent in some overly elaborate fashion, possibly involving lasers and miniskirted henchlings. Like them, what is revealed in the explanation is not control but the
desire
for control, which in being revealed is also by the very same action thwarted. Real control means never having to worry about being either understood or misunderstood.

In fairness, Gould communicated a great deal more than this in the simple execution of his role as a performer of gifts. That much is clear to, and cherished by, even the most casual fan of his playing. The question is, What, precisely, is communicated by such playing?

Not meaning. Non-vocal music has no propositional content. We may speak of it as a language, with a grammar, but it remains a language that, even if in some sense intelligible, cannot be translated into any other. Though we may investigate music to learn about culture, or history, or ideas, music itself carries no message; though perhaps beautiful, it is mute.
⁸⁸
That is why many philosophers, notably both Kant and Hegel in rare overlap, praise poetry more highly, since it joins the emotional suggestiveness of harmonics with the precise articulation of truth. Many people, especially those of romantic persuasion, will find such ordering invidious,
since for them beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know. Or, if they are of more Platonic persuasion, they might even think that beauty is a form of goodness. Thus non-linguistic beauty is considered just as valuable, if not more so, than the kind offered with words. Beauty is its own message, its own unanswerable argument.

The irony is that the beauty-goodness claim is advanced in written dialogue, even as the truth-beauty claim is made in a poem, in language; this is often lost on these romantics. In any case, we need not pause too long here to dismantle the many problems in so claiming a co-extension of the concepts
beauty
and
truth
. The English literary critic I.A. Richards used the last lines of Keats's famous ode to illustrate the prevalence of “pseudo-statements” in poetry and suggested that anyone who accepted this as an aesthetic philosophy was likely to “proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naïveté.” But Richards was too hasty: it is not a pseudo-statement; grammatically, it's a regular old statement. And as a statement it is either just false (lots of true things are ugly, and vice versa) or it is nonsensical, i.e., neither true nor false, lacking a truth value (as we say). And if it is the latter, then it is the statement of a pseudo-proposition, not a pseudo-statement.

Well, who cares about any of this? Significantly, Glenn Gould. Two things emerge clearly from his recording practice. First, that he believed strongly in the truth of an interpretation, as a revelation of the given work's essence of potential. And second, that he had a strong, almost compulsive urge to share these interpretations, together with their attendant intellectual scaffolding, with as many people as possible.

In this view, it is not at all difficult to make sense of at least one of the stated reasons for the 1964 concert withdrawal. Gould was now endeavouring to spread his musical ideas far and wide, with no theoretical limit beyond the scope of reproduction. Nor is it hard to accept one of the corollaries of that decision, namely, that it is wrong not to share “the future”—meaning by that
both
existent and imminent playing or recording technologies
and
future potential audiences—with great works of the past. The now mostly uncontroversial decision to play Bach on piano, for example, was from his perspective no different from a decision to record with splicing and multiple takes or to consider the possibilities of synthesizers for recording classical music. (Though he was dismissive of gimmicky versions thereof, such as the briefly celebrated novelties of P.D.Q. Bach and Switched-On Bach.)

Gould's sense of truth in interpretation was therefore inescapable in his playing, even though he did not subscribe to the romantic notion of a beauty-truth fusion. From a certain point of view he was more interested in bringing out the essence of the work than he was in whether it was beautiful; this, I think, accounts both for his ability to play pieces he did not like and to judge works based on aesthetic criteria that are, in fact, moral ones—something he admitted, indeed claimed, on many occasions. This is truth in a very loose sense, given that non-vocal musical work can have no truth value. But things without meaning can nevertheless matter, and the task of the player is to bring out the matter-not-mean potential of the work, paradoxically to give its muteness a compelling voice. We might call it rightness rather than truth. And we might say that music, like language, is a container for consciousness.

In our own day, perhaps, such ideas are as uncontroversial as those about the ethics of recording. We no more suspect abstraction and free play of concepts than we do the standard techniques of the recording studio. Yes, dedicated projects of playing “early music” on “original” instruments, tuned flat or rescued from obscurity (the sackbut enjoys a vogue on American college campuses), are very much with us. But
these strike many people as eccentric if forgivable foibles, slightly more reputable versions of the Renaissance Fayre or Klingon Opera festivals held regularly in city parks. There is no fundamental or originary truth to be had about a piece of music, no definitive authentic rendering that once and for all communicates its message, and so the quest for one is misguided
prima facie
. Gould knew that, and so defended
his
interpretations as compelling rather than cognitive or authentic; as accurate and intense renderings of the original concept. He did this at some length in his written work, to be sure, but all that verbiage is beside the point: these rational addenda are really just after-the-fact rationalizations, at best footnotes or clues to the actual argument. The only argument that matters is the argument offered by the playing itself.