Glenn Gould (19 page)

Music is like conversation, or a joke, or consciousness: all are structures of anticipation and resolution, expectation and incongruity, negotiations with time. We can plot the line of music just as we might plot the structure of a joke or a conversation, but this line or structure will not
be
the joke, the conversation, the music. Perhaps it is right to say: music is consciousness. Music's play of expectation and
resolution, its set-ups and punchlines, its surprising satisfactions and satisfactory surprises, are the stuff of mind itself. And like mind, a given piece of music must come to its end, must subside into silence. It must die, or die out— bang or whimper does not signify. But to die is not to perish. The performance ends but the piece lives on, to be played again. And again. Taken.

Music is not the food of love, it is the food of life. Music is eros, basic life energy, existing before parseable meaning and not reducible to it.

On October 4, 1982, at the decision of his father, the systems supporting the life of Glenn Gould—the bodily life, at least; perhaps not the consciousness he never recovered— were withdrawn. He was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery next to his mother; his father, having suffered the tragedy of outliving a child, would later join them there. On Glenn's marker there is carved a piano, as well as the first two and a half bars of the aria from the
Goldberg Variations
.

A person is not one thing. A person is a composition improvised by the maker. We each can try to play it.

Start again. Da capo. From the top.

¹
Geoffrey Payzant, in his
Glenn Gould, Music and Mind
(Toronto: Key Porter, 1978; rev. ed. 1984) will note the relation in reverse, namely that “Gould displays astonishing control over these consonants [of individual musical notes] in his piano playing (just as he does, incidentally, in his speech)” (p. 117).

²
My transcription from the audio disc
Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout
(Columbia BS15, 1968).

³
Ian McEwan,
Saturday
(New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 5. The narrator is noting the depression the main character, a London neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne, feels while reading a biography of Charles Darwin in order to please his literary daughter. This same neurosurgeon likes to play piano recordings of Bach while in the operating theatre. “He favours Angela Hewitt, Martha Argerich, sometimes Gustav Leonhardt. In a really good mood he'll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould” (p. 21). Later, considering his four recorded versions of the
Goldberg Variations,
Perowne “selects not the showy unorthodoxies of Glenn Gould, but Angela Hewitt's wise and silky playing which includes all the repeats” (p. 257).

A commentator has noted that this reference indicates Gould's 1955 debut, “which is notable for its unorthodox tempos and for ignoring the ‘A' section repeats” in the canons, the Fughetta, and the other fugue-like elements. This interpretation is looser in intellectual, not technical, terms; and that only arguably. Hewitt's deliberately paced
Goldberg,
at 78 minutes, 32 seconds, is almost a
half-hour longer than Gould's 1981 version—that is, the slow Gould, which clocks in at 51 minutes, 18 seconds (the 1955 record is just 38 minutes, 34 seconds long). Hewitt, the recent Canadian star with a special genius for precise but emotional renderings of Bach—some find them overfond of rubato—has grown understandably weary of comparisons to Gould, whom she remembers seeing on Canadian television and thinking rather strange.

⁴
Tim Page, ed.,
The Glenn Gould Reader
(Toronto: Key Porter, 1984), p. 438. [Hereafter
GGR
.]

⁵
My transcription from the liner notes; also
GGR
, p. 11.

⁶
Jerrold Levinson,
Music in the Moment
(1997; rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), offers an accessible philosophical engagement with this problem.

⁷
BWV988, first published in 1741.

⁸
GGR
, p. 23.

⁹
Reprinted in the liner notes to a reissue of the 1955
Goldberg Variations
(Columbia MS7096); quoted in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,

p. 15. This chair can be heard creaking in most of the recordings of Gould's career and so becomes, as Payzant notes, “as much a secondary trademark of his performance as his vocal noise” (p. 77).

¹⁰
My transcription from the liner notes; also
GGR,
p. 28.

¹¹
CBC Radio broadcast (April 30, 1967); quoted in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
p. 37.

¹²
The art of interpretation is situated, on Gould's own understanding of it, in critical, improvisational, and multilayered territory. There is
no single correct interpretation of a piece, only a host of choices and references; as a result, any given musical interpretation speaks of and to the world at large, not just of and to the musical score. Gould's writing shows the same range and complexity, the same serious playfulness. We could therefore say that he is more a
hermenaut
than a
hermeneut,
and conclude that we must incline ourselves likewise if we are to recite the score of his life. (My thanks to Joshua Glenn for clarification of this point.)

¹³
A fictional one, as it happens: the narrator of Christopher Miller's Gould-inflected novel,
Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); see note 18.

¹⁴
For those so inclined, this is a crude way of characterizing the difference between Sartrean existential alienation (the other as presumptive accuser or threat) and the existential recognition found in Levinas (other-being as forever calling me to ethical account).

¹⁵
Dennis Braithwaite, “Glenn Gould,”
Toronto Daily Star
(March 28, 1959); quoted in Payzant,
Glenn Gould,
p. 3.

¹⁶
See, e.g., Paul Ricoeur,
Oneself As Another
(English trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

¹⁷
Slavoj Žižek,
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through
Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 69.

¹⁸
Miller's
Simon Silber
is sometimes included as a fictional treatment of a Gould-like pianist. In fact the main character, though entertainingly eccentric, bears no resemblance to Gould and has none of his playful oddness; but there are some enlivening jokes
about the connection. The novel, a series of commissioned biographical liner notes for Silber's compositions, includes an explanation of the
“Babbage” Permutations,
a work dedicated to the mathematician Charles Babbage, inventor of the computer. Allegedly “inspired by the Schumann work, [it] is simply an exhaustive computer-generated set of permutations on the sequence ‘B-A-B-B-A-G-E', played here in the evenhanded manner of Glenn Gould— whom my friend admired and resented to the end” (pp. 9–10). The narrator, an out-of-work philosophy graduate, was born on February 29, 1960, and “in off years” celebrated his birthday on March 1—my own birthday, incidentally, and not far off on the year (1963).

A more evident fictional treatment is David Young's 1992 play,
Glenn
(rev. ed. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1998), which breaks Gould's character into four alliterative facets (prodigy, performer, perfectionist, puritan) and explores the dimensions of his thought, like Girard's film, with a repeated aria and thirty variations (scenes). Gould also makes a caricature appearance (along with Josephine Baker, Fred Astaire, and Django Reinhardt) in the 2003 animated film
Les triplettes de Belleville
.

To take just two recent works by Canadian writers that feature a fictional or inspirational Gould: (1) Gould makes a cameo appearance in Jonathan Bennett's novel
Entitlement
(Toronto: misFit Books, 2008) encountered at the Fran's all-night diner on St. Clair Avenue and—somewhat implausibly—heard quoting from memory the lyrics to a Clash song. And (2), in Jeramy Dodds's poetry collection
Crabwise to the Hounds
(Toronto: Coach House Press, 2008), Gould features in four different poems: “Dictaphone
reel of Glenn Gould's last gasp” (p. 53); “Modulated timbre and cadence for baby grand” (p. 57), which quotes his “resentment” of concert playing's “non-take-twoness'” as an epigraph; “Glenn Gould negotiates the Danube in the company of a raven” (pp. 63–66), a long prose poem; and “The easiest way to empty a seashell is to place it on an anthill” (pp. 48–51). The last begins, “At first his right and left hands hover over the keys / before falling to the ivory / like a luggage-bombed Boeing” and continues with a series of ever more elaborate metaphors for the attack style of the two hands: “His right skis to the North Star, seeing-eye dog of explorers. / His left pivots at the star and stumbles in perfect harmony / like an actor playing the Bullet-Riddled Man” (p. 49).

A reviewer who noted that appearances of Gould in Canadian poems are now so frequent as to amount to “a verse cliché” forgave Dodds his move only because the poet showed “the same idiosyncratic brilliance that the famed concert pianist injected into his own art.” Well, maybe. In any event, a non-exhaustive list of recent poets, not all Canadian, who mention or enlist Gould in verse form would include J.D. Smith, Kate Braid, Bruce Bond, Ann LeZott, Richard M. McErlean, Jonathan Holden, and Janine Canan.

The
Goldberg Variations,
in a related movement, have themselves inspired artwork in other forms, from Nancy Huston's satirical debut novel
Les variations Goldberg
(1981; English trans. Montreal: Signature Editions, 1996), wherein one character deprecates “the frenzied charge of a Glenn Gould” attacking the piece, to a 1984 painting by Gerhard Richter,
Goldberg-Variationen
, in the shape of a long-playing vinyl disc. (I thank Angela Hewitt for the last example.)

¹⁹
This might be considered the inverse of the standard situation, whereby someone is inspired or elevated by the same music. For example, in the ultraviolent 2008 remake of the science-fiction classic
The Day the Earth Stood Still
—popularly dubbed “The Day Keanu Reeves Stood Still”—the visiting environmental clean-up alien Klaatu (Reeves, in an exquisitely expressionless performance) is in part persuaded to spare humanity when he hears the aria da capo and Variation 1 played (out of order) by Ryan Franks. “It's beautiful,” he says. A good-looking scientist (Jennifer Connelly) hugging her stepchild also gives him pause. Humanity brutally exploits the planet, yes, but we're not
all
bad.

Meanwhile, the situation whereby a musician of talent is sent into despair, perhaps suicide, by overhearing or witnessing a musician of genius is a familiar one. Versions of it can be found in Peter Shaffer's
Amadeus
(1979; New York: HarperCollins, 1981) and Rebecca West's
The Fountain Overflows
(New York: Viking, 1956). Other stories, possibly apocryphal, have the songwriter Gerry Coffin pushed into madness by the example of Bob Dylan, and guitarists Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend overpowered and shamed by a Jimi Hendrix performance. The American novelist Mark Salzman, son of a musician, planned a musical career and entered Yale at sixteen to study it; after hearing cellist Yo-Yo Ma play at Tanglewood, he gave up in despair and majored in Chinese instead—surely a common experience. The sculptor Richard Serra, in a different dynamic for which we may be thankful, allegedly gave up painting after seeing Velázquez's
Las Meninas
, despairing of bettering him.

²⁰
This is how Martin Amis defines alcoholism, not philosophy, in his novel
Night Train
(New York: Vintage, 1997), perhaps after the remark made by Sara Mayfield that her friend F. Scott Fitzgerald was killing himself via layaway. Procrastination has also been so defined. My version has the historical sanction of the Socratic definition of philosophy as
learning how to die
. Cf. Plato,
Phaedo
Book I: “The philosopher desires death—which the wicked world will insinuate that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is the separation of soul and body—and the philosopher desires such a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth.”

²¹
All quotations from Bernhard,
The Loser
(1991; English trans. Jack Dawson, New York: Vintage, 2006).