Glenn Gould (16 page)

The curse of the
Zeitgeist
is not so much one's being driven to innovation, but rather having one's driven innovations made the subject of fashion. These notions can be hard to untangle, especially given all modern art's imperative to make it new; and so part of the curse is confronting that very difficulty. How much of a Schoenberg or a Boulez is a function of chasing fashion rather than being brutalized by it
post facto
? How much of what counts as radical innovation so counts because of its decision to oust the conservative status quo? Because the answers will always depend on our own sympathies and influences—our own sense of ourselves within a larger narrative—we, too, are victims of the curse. Gould suggests that the ultimate product of this curse, the familiar story of rising radical fallen to reactionary ruin, is “the archetypal product of the American Eastern Seaboard's megalopolitan mentality.”
⁹⁴
We might more simply call it, after Adorno, “the culture industry.” That story, in fact, rather than innovation, is the real product of the industry, that which we happily consume.

So Gould sought, with some success, to evade this narrative logic, though a critic might say that he merely expressed
its conservative counter-energy, by abandoning avant-garde music fairly early and concentrating his recording career on the classical canon. At the same time, and this is the other hand finally attacking, he was an ardent and relentless advocate of progress in the technology of mechanical reproduction. This advocacy included everything from his dismissal of concerts and critics to his championing of elaborate studio recording, new instruments, and the active role of the listener as a collaborator in musical experience.

Some of the debates on these matters must seem musty to a new-millennium audience, so it is worth pausing to consider what might be called the standard view against which Gould's stance seems so paradoxical. By the last decades of the twentieth century it had become clear that the modernist impulse in music, unlike analogous impulses in visual art or literature, had failed to alter its general landscape. Whereas nonrepresentational art and experimental writing had by and large been accommodated, if not domesticated, by mainstream culture, such that a modernist visual aesthetic might now be found in a banker's living room and telegraphic compression (if not poetry) in his emails, the same could not be said for music.

A small coterie of enthusiasts still pursued what is sometimes called “new classical music,” but in large measure the
audience for music had simply shattered into atavistic regard for the canon, on one side, and those with utterly no interest in it, on the other. The first group went to concerts with orchestras and conductors to hear music mostly composed before 1900. The second group went to concerts with guitars, drums, and amplifiers to hear music mostly composed within the last ten, if not five or two, years. Innovations within the tradition of music were a lost middle term, a status they still endure.

Accounts of this linked development vary, but the standard view has it that recording technology played a large and pernicious role. “The mechanization and mass reproduction of music provided it with the means of its antimodern historical evolution,” as Leon Botstein put it. The musical audience evolved in a mutation, becoming divorced from the production of music, and hence from musical literacy, because it no longer needed to acquire skills, or even travel distances, to experience music. Musically illiterate, they were also isolated, anti-social, and alienated, listening to their music alone in living rooms or automobiles—nowadays we would add, on earbuds, everywhere, all the time. Where once music brought us together, now it drove us apart, and the villain was recording technology. This “dehumanization” of the audience was but one consequence of “an extensive
commercial network of music based on advanced capitalism.” It likewise followed that, the machine being master, musical performance itself became a matter of rote learning, soulless repetition, synthesization, and in the most haunting example, the reduction of performance to mechanical speed and technique: the robot player.
⁹⁵

This articulation of what I have called the standard view was written in 1980. Few people would be prepared to embrace every element of the complaint—even at the time, Botstein's runaway logic and looming Skynet Terminator fears were exaggerated. Nevertheless, there is enough plausibility in the picture to show why versions of this position held then, and to some extent still do. And of course this counter-narrative of general cultural degeneration is the precise obverse of the tortured narrative of musical progress that, in elite circles at least, caught up Schoenberg and Boulez (and Stockhausen and Cage too) in its mandibles. The post-1945 story is one where even as fashion writ small is celebrating one (classical) musical innovator only to then discard him, fashion writ large is rendering the very idea of (classical) music a vestigial property, a cultural afterthought.
⁹⁶

Gould was poised uneasily in these movements. An unabashed celebrant of technology, he was also a supreme
practitioner, with an intimate, almost obsessive relationship to his piano and to the history of music. His playing was technically outstanding but never mechanical—even the blistering 1955
Goldberg Variations
was a marvel of expressive thought in action. He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the
Zeitgeist
and its most interesting expression. He was, in effect, stranded on a beachhead of his own thinking between past and future. That he was not able, by himself, to fashion a bridge between them is neither surprising nor, in the end, disappointing. We should see this failure, rather, as an aspect of his genius. He both was and was not a man of his time.

Since his death, narratives of progress have in general gone out of fashion (whether this is merely fashion is a question we are not yet in a position to say). In 1979, a year before Botstein voiced his complaint, three years before Glenn Gould's death, the philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard, in a report written for the
Conseil des universités du Québec,
had defined the postmodern condition as one of “incredulity towards metanarratives,” signalling—at least in the view of many—the end of the Enlightenment fiction of universal reason working itself out by means of history.
⁹⁷
No longer could we take seriously the idea that thought moved along a smooth arc
of improvement. In the art world, where the term
postmodern
had originated, this was already obvious in what the art critic Arthur Danto has called “the post-historical perspective.” Once anything (any thing but also any nonthing) can be art, art is freed from a historical logic of succession and improvement. The narrative arc collapses, leaving everything—representation, abstraction, concept, performance—up for grabs.
⁹⁸

And yet, we should not assume, in our anything-goes new-millennium smugness, that such debates are now resolved. Struggles about the role of technology in music-making continue, as do even more tortuous debates about sampling, assimilation, allusions, and authenticity. Bumper stickers visible in Southern California just a few years ago claimed that “Drum Machines Have No Soul,” articulating a sentiment that still longs for the human element as central to music. But the claim is not at all obvious, or definitive, since all music (save singing) depends on the intermediation of some form of
techné
or instrument. The musician and critic Franklin Bruno has noted that the only appropriate response to this bumper sticker must be “Neither Do Drum Kits.”

These circumstances of confusion and contradiction are, no doubt, a function of what Botstein called a musical network structured by advanced capitalism. But there is no
simple vector of succession and obsolescence even in capital and its most obedient servant, technology. As Marx noted long ago, many modes of production may co-exist in society at once, antagonistic and contradictory. Or, in McLuhan's formulation, technologies nest and wrap; they do not neatly synthesize, eliminating the prior moment.

Art is over.

Long live art.

As we have already seen, Gould, like most outspoken artists, had a theory about the end of art. This is firmly in the modernist tradition: it is almost as though declaring art over, or nearly so, is the necessary condition of engaging in it in the first place. Art has this in common with philosophy, that discipline of forever-declared endings. But we must distinguish Gould's version of the thesis from the generalized view that progress in art, or anyway the idea of progress in art, has come to an end.

The first important dimension of his declaration is that it is entangled in the wiring of recording technology. “I do believe that once introduced into the circuitry of art, the technological presence must be encoded and decoded,” he wrote in 1975, “in such a way that its presence is, in every respect, at the service of that spiritual good that ultimately will serve to banish art itself.”
⁹⁹
Gould seemed to mean something like this: when
technology's presence in art has finally been accepted, its ongoing negotiation will be the subject of art. And then any atavistic or magical qualities associated with the art, the sort of forbidding aura that clings to craftsmanship, mysterious genius, and visionary erudition, will be exposed as so much cliché. An educated audience will no longer be able to take seriously the old idea of art, and so that idea will consequently wither.

In places, Gould had a moralistic version of these claims. He despised ornament, like any good modernist: it is unforgivable falseness, even as recorded music, in his view, is not just forgivable but demands falsehood. (He ought to have been clearer: according to his own arguments, it was not a falsehood at all.) If Jonathan Cott's recorded phone conversations are indicative, Gould's late conversations were full of casual use of words such as “outraged,” “garbage,” “foolish,” and—his evident favourite— “appalled” and “appalling.” (Apparently they were also, less charmingly, peppered with random declines into the voices of his various personae.) Precisely what appalled him is wide in range, naturally, but it tends to involve meretriciousness or falsity in presentation, as in the case of the Beatles, or sententiousness in argument, as in those who claimed to find Muzak a scourge. From this vantage,
art's end is a liberation from pretension and mystification, the ultimate democratic revolution.

But ornament is not the same as mediation. In other places, the argument invokes a somewhat woolly version of sociobiology. Contrary to standard views that technology distances us harmfully from visceral human realities such as violence or the provision of food, Gould affirmed the moral value of moving away from our more brutal selves. It follows that technology, which allows humans to do that, presents us with a clear positive choice. “Morality, it seems to me, has never been on the side of the carnivore—at least not when alternative life-styles are available,” he wrote. “The evolution of man in response to his technology … has been anticarnivorous to the extent that, step by step, it has enabled him to operate at increasing distance from … his animal response to confrontation.”
¹⁰⁰
Recording technology is either an example of this moral evolution or a metaphor for it—the argument is unclear—but in any event it ought to be embraced without reservation.

It may not be obvious how art is implicated in a general sense here, but Gould asserted it this way: the “intrusion” of technology “imposes upon art a notion of morality which transcends the idea of art.” Art is over when we realize the moral imperative to surrender our carnivorous attachment
to the visceral, the immediate, the natural. But Gould was no decadent aesthete, celebrating artifice over nature in the manner of Oscar Wilde or Joris-Karl Huysmans's Des Esseintes. He was, instead, suggesting the inescapability, and hence the value, of intermediation. In a sense, the art/nature dichotomy disappears here, and so art ends not because playing does but because it no longer claims any special status as
either
higher or lower than nature.

The most sustained discussion Gould offered on this complex of recording, morality, and art comes in a long 1966 essay published in
High Fidelity
called “The Prospects of Recording.” As ever, it is a rhetorical roller-coaster ride, with flats of clear argument disrupted by sudden mounting ascents and vertiginous polemic plunges. The last paragraph in particular is worth quoting in full: “In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.”
¹⁰¹

Parsing this knuckleball of opinion and assertion is no small task. One might see at its end a Nietzschean injunction to make one's life a work of art. Or it might be
offered as a sort of aesthetic theodicy, with the deliberate echo of Wolff and Leibniz at the beginning. It could even be read as its own mini-manifesto, excoriating art-as-therapy, art-as-craft, and art-as-truth in one fell swoop, nullifying the necromantic distance between artist and audience.

But an even better question than
What does it mean?
is
Did Gould mean it?
I think yes and no. He was sincerely committed to recording technology as its own complex instrument in the world of music, and was surely correct that if music's business is reaching an audience, the means with the widest spread is best. But it is hard to believe that he really held the audience in the esteem suggested here, despite his claims that a hi-fi listener is a kind of co-creator. As he himself said more than once, the average music fan knows no more about music than an avid driver knows about the internal combustion engine. Specialization does not wither, not at least if we want to go on getting music that moves us.