Glenn Gould (2 page)

Mark Kingwell is a philosopher of our times and of our attempts to reinvent our existence. And he has long placed music at the core of his ideas. He is able to get at the mysterious effect Gould had upon us via what he did with sound
or, as Kingwell puts it, with silence. And he has found a way to draw out of the Glenn Gould we all thought we knew an even more remarkable figure who, whether through sound or silence, reveals us to ourselves.

Glenn Gould

The voice: it is fast, precise, self-satisfied, a little pompous.

It is filled with awkward attempts at the wry aside, like the meander of a scholar who has been giving the same lectures too often, doing accents and delivering anecdotes too polished by previous telling. The voice is also ironic, amused, intelligent, resonant, mischievous. It is preoccupied with itself, but not evasive or merely self-indulgent. The speaker answers questions, relishing the thought of them, even questions deemed by the speaker himself to be fearful or intimidating.

There is crisp structure in the sentences, delivered in well-formed paragraphs, cogent and architectural. It is the music of Glenn Gould's spoken English, a cultivated Canadian accent from a half-century ago, a tone fled almost entirely from this nation now, the mixture of flat and orotund phonemes peculiar to the official culture of emergent nationhood, the language of the CBC, of diplomacy, of the academy. The consonants, especially t's and d's, are
clipped—as indeed are the musical consonants of his characteristic lucid and precise playing.
¹
The vocabulary is wide, though sometimes musicological or precious:
aleatoric
,
motivic
,
thereunto pertaining
. The word
film
has one and a half syllables.

For Glenn Gould, the structure of speaking and the structure of thought itself were codependent, the mind's cacophony disciplined into a precise line by finding the right word, the artful compound sentence. The same is true in his voluminous, sprawling body of written work. Most important, it was true in his thinking about and playing of music. Glenn Gould above all sought structure in music, the “skeleton” of a piece, revealed in his interpretations, which were sometimes disparaged as “loose” because they were less formal than the academic standard. But they were never actually loose, only novel—loose in relation to a master-sense of the work, perhaps, but never in themselves. Nor was there any looseness in the music of his talk, either in form or content.

Aleatoric
means that aspect of music subject to improvisation or chance. The term comes from the Latin word
alea,
meaning dice, those rolling cubes of chance. It was introduced into music theory in the 1950s to describe the work of, among others, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but
it can be applied to much older music containing elements of randomness within larger structures. Glenn Gould, master of memory and technique, is not usually associated with improvisation in music, nor with these avant-garde masters; but the clue to understanding his music, and hence his mind, is contained here. For Gould not only played music, he played with it. He wanted to interpret a given piece so that it felt to the listener
as if he were making it up in the moment
. Achieving that effect required extraordinary measures of control and discipline, over himself and over as much of the world as he could command.

“For me it's a great liability to have a live audience,” Gould told an interviewer on an album released in 1968. In emphatic sentences he was attempting to justify his decision, four years earlier, to stop performing classical music in public.

The interviewer prompted: Why not? Certainly it is unheard of in current concert culture, but surely an artist is entitled to stretch that culture. Gould laughed. They know they are not serious about this happening. His reply was a tease: “That would almost be worth going back and trodding the boards for, if I could really do that!” Next question.

I was nineteen in 1982, the year Glenn Gould died, and had neither met him nor heard a single one of his records— on the latter point, not least because my taste in those days ran more to the Clash and Elvis Costello than to Bach or Beethoven. Like most people, I have come to know him—if that is the right word—only through his recorded playing and his published writings. Since Gould's death, the world
of music, or rather the world as it experiences music, has witnessed significant changes. Most notable of these is the ease of access to recorded music and its related consequence, the global jumbling of musical materials. Both are developments Gould would have welcomed: the first for its assumption of primacy in recorded music over performance and the second for its overturning of narratives of
musical progress,
with schools and periods succeeding one another according to a definitive account laid down by music history. What we should call the post-historical musical world—our world—is the one that Gould anticipated and advocated. At the same time, he was a self-declared puritan about art and frequently lamented music's corruption by commerce. Such are just the beginnings of his kaleidoscopic, contradictory, febrile, and brilliant mind.

Musician. Artist. Genius. Eccentric. National treasure. Celebrity. Pill-popper. Hypochondriac. Hermit. Icon. Puritan. Northerner. Joker. The story of Glenn Gould's life is one that has been told, and told well, many times and in many ways. In almost every case it has been told according to the imperatives, and fictions, of traditional biographical narrative. There is good reason to avoid doing so again.

The fiction of biography is precisely the kind of danger Gould appreciated. He was fond of play in other senses than
at the keyboard, shifting personae to the point where he interviewed himself in place of traditional essays, wrote imaginary reviews under fanciful pseudonyms, and adopted costumes, characters, and accents for prolonged horsing-around sessions in the studio as well as on radio and television. His notorious retreat from performance—a move he preferred to see as a step forward into recording and disseminating true interpretations rather than tired concerts of a narrow repertoire—took him out of the public realm even as it shrouded him in an irresistible mystery. He would not make himself available except via recordings and print.

And so, lacking one Glenn Gould, the public generates multiple ones, a succession of Gould-ghosts, all of them vaporous and partial. Meanwhile, cutting across this economy of reproduction, there extends a different multiplicity, the one comprising different cultural moments. Every generation of performers after Gould has to come to terms with the lofty standards he reached. Every generation of listeners has to negotiate the implications of his advocacy of recording over performance. At the time he stopped giving concerts, the issue was alive with a McLuhanesque energy and vehemence. This may strike later observers and fans as misplaced or even absurd, but if so, it is only because Gould, ahead of his time, had already done much of the hard early thinking,
the pioneering insight. In fact there can be no definitive resolution to either of these energies of multiplication and contradiction—manifold Goulds, manifold eras—and so any attempt to distill the variety of personae and interpretations into a single portrait of Glenn Gould would be false from the start, a depressing compression, as if, in the words of one writer, “a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages—bottled, like homemade chutney.”
³

There is more to consider than just this standard objection, however, which might be levelled against any number of biographical projects. Gould's life, lived in and through music, reveals that the unified self is not just a fiction from the outside in; it is also a fiction from the inside out. The outside-in illusion underwrites the notion of a correct, or even merely convincing, interpretation of a person's life. I mean the notion of a singular self, somehow captured in the most valid representation of Gould, the one that “makes sense” of his genius as an opaque gift and of his eccentricities as the outward signs thereof. This has been attempted, and the resulting rival explanations lie before us.

The more profound, and more common, illusion is the inside-out one: the fiction that allows us to shape consciousness into a singular self in the first place, the projection of unified existence and consistent self-presentation. The two
fictions, life explained as linear because assumed to be lived thus, depend upon and reinforce each other. But that also means they stand, and fall, together. Any instability experienced from the inside out gives the lie to any, and all, attempts to
explain
from the outside in. A Gould tamed into linear narrative misses the point of Gould.

Glenn Gould was well aware of the play between these illusions, and even as he sought line in music, he worked to destabilize line in life. Indeed, we may read his seeking on the one hand as a result of the felt lack on the other, a tragic awareness of contingency. Gould's stated and published ideas suggest such a philosophy of multiplicity, though nowhere does he explicitly argue the position—perhaps out of a clever intuition that enacting the instability of self would be more compelling, and certainly more amusing, than arguing it.

Thus a recurring theme in Gould's published work— work that is spiked with insights and jumbled theories—is that larger narratives of progression in music, as in life, are unreliable, even fraudulent. For example, though convinced in early professional life, typically against the grain, that a neo-traditional stance was appropriate to the modernist times, he later came to distrust sweeping stories of schools and movements, of trends and counter-trends. They were, to
him, first the stuff of journalism and later, worse, the grist of music history's mill. At the same time, the unifying thought in Gould's philosophy of music—and it is primarily as a philosopher of music that I mean to treat him here—is that the single most important aspect of music is architecture, or line: the overall structure of a piece, revealed in its beauty by the act of playing. Not modulation, not timbre, not colour or tone. That is why articulation and phrasing are so central to his playing—“like an x-ray revealing a skeleton,” he said; it is also why the complexity of structure combined with the freedom of interpretation of J.S. Bach's expansive oeuvre drew him so often, and so movingly. Though he resisted the label of “Bach specialist,” Gould played Bach and other masters of fugue and counterpoint more frequently than the music of the thirty-odd canonical figures whose works he recorded.

This love of line was also what made him say that playing the Tudor master William Byrd gave him “great delight” or that, on at least three separate recorded occasions, his “favourite composer” was Orlando Gibbons—“certainly the composer with whom, at some mysterious spiritual level I won't begin to explain, I most identify.” Asked in 1970 by
High Fidelity
to list his “desert island discs,” Gould mentioned as first choice a Deller Consort recording of
Gibbons's hymns and anthems “because ever since my teen-age years this music (and for close to fifteen years this particular record by the Deller Consort) has moved me more deeply than any other sound experience I can think of. In fact, this is the only disc in my collection three copies of which I have literally worn out.”
⁴

These late-Elizabethan composers wrote few pieces for keyboard, and Gould recorded only one disc that features them—sadly, since his playing on this record is among his best, intellectual and moving in equal measure. Indeed, his engagement with Gibbons and Byrd may be easily dismissed as a footnote to his lengthy performance-based arguments with Mozart and Beethoven, two composers he claimed to dislike, or his extended meditation on Bach's contrapuntal genius. But Gibbons and Byrd—“the two northern masters,” he called them, a term of high praise for this lover of northern climes and their chilly solitudes—offer purity of composition, a structure almost mathematical in its elegance, even as they presage large changes in music's orientation. As Gould put it, what we have here is “a reminder of those antecedents of the modern world which one could endeavour to extenuate in quite a different fashion than post-Renaissance tradition decreed.”
⁵

Gould followed the trail of an apparently stray, single B-flat note in Byrd's “Sellinger's Round”—a sign of something new in Tudor music, he argued, the harbinger of the modern developments to come. He suggested that the two Tudor composers “share an idiom but not an attitude,” with Gibbons standing as the lugubrious Gustav Mahler to Byrd's exuberant Richard Strauss. Taken together, they reveal the line of beauty that made Gould love music, the love that made him a musician. Byrd and Gibbons also, as
fin de siècle
composers, occupy a moment of transition—something Gould clearly relished in them and in his own late-millennial circumstances. In their case, it was toward “that new key-oriented chord system to which, within a few years, most music would subscribe.” What we take for granted, a conventional set of keys and chords, these two minor geniuses anticipated. What did Gould anticipate in his own transitional moment, which we may now, or soon, take for granted? I will endeavour to answer that question in this book.