Glenn Gould (5 page)

The mind is also the medium. We speak of memorized lyrics or songs as
known by heart
. The ancient Greeks seated
cognition in the largest and most important of the internal organs—courage and identity belonged to the liver, that sustaining organ, and so that is where the gods centred their punishment of Prometheus for the crime of stealing fire, his eaten daily by Zeus's eagle, only to grow back for further torture. Later the seat of selfhood would move northeast, from the liver to the heart, where it has remained for centuries. We still speak of “eating our hearts out,” and we approve the things that only the heart knows, the reasons it has that reason alone cannot understand, though now we usually mean things about love. And to know things
by heart
means to
record
them, from the Latin
recordari,
from
re
and
cordis
—heart. Rendered on the heart, in other words, stored there, a sweet cordial for the mind. What else?

Gould, like Marshall McLuhan, understood this, just as he must also have appreciated McLuhan's argument that the world was shifting, almost before their mid-century eyes, from the modern dominance of visual space, with its culture of print and reason and record, to a postmodern moment ruled by acoustic space and its electronic penchant for emotion and visual stimulation. The two men did not see eye to eye on many things, as two such towering egos could not be expected to, but they both
appreciated the importance of mind extension even as they worked out, in their different ways, a philosophy of communication and the acoustic. At a time when their shared home, Toronto, was vibrant with deep thought about technology and culture—the time and place of Harold Innis and Northrop Frye, also the conservative shadow of George Grant, as well as themselves—they dug deep into the strange fact of consciousness and the way technology, even an elderly form of it such as the keyboard, can reveal us to ourselves.

Neither Gould nor McLuhan was able to appreciate the full force of the insight, however. McLuhan's notion of media as “extensions of man” gets much right about the nature of the extension, the desire for it, and its various instruments, with their bright promises and dark secrets; but it does not probe deeply enough into the mysteries of mind that man, or woman, is blessed with.
²⁵
Gould, meanwhile, was not rigorous in pursuing his initial, striking insight and so ran into confusions. Like many gifted musicians, he would sometime speak of the music he heard “inside his head” and was given to defending his notorious humming at the keyboard as an uncontrolled echo of that inner music. But the concept of inwardness is misplaced here; it is a misunderstanding of his own memory. Memory
is not the vast aviary imagined in Plato's
Theaetetus,
a storehouse of flitting birds we try, with limited success, to catch in hand. Memory, like mind more generally, is the embodiment of a person negotiating a world. Creating a world, indeed; and finding out, in so doing, who else is listening.

But then: where, or how, does music exist?

Is music the notes as they are arranged on the score, that is, the physical document? Surely not. By analogy, we would have to say that a book is just its physical manifestation as type upon a page. Do we want to say that?

Is this music?

Is music the sum total of its performances and recordings, the always-in-progress lifetime of a piece as it moves from gestation to debut to interpretation and perhaps canonization? This sounds more convincing.

And yet, any brute summing of performances, though it might appear to free the piece from its mere embodiment on the page, breaking the shackles of matter and re-investing music in time, seems by the same token to make it a prisoner of temporality. At the very least, in
this view a piece of music can never be finished, its essence forever deferred.

Is music, then, something else altogether? A transcendental reality, perhaps, sustained beyond mere performance or material, rendering these the simple vehicles or reflections of true music? In this view, music might be something like the Platonic Forms or, better, the sound of the celestial spheres as they slowly perform their eternal, harmonious, cosmic dance. What we hear on this mortal plane, the mundane passing of air past a reed to cause vibration, a bow of sheep's hair passed over a piece of catgut, a taut string deftly plucked or struck with a hammer, are only pale shadows of the divine chords. At best, they are capable merely of hinting at the beauties in a realm beyond human hearing.

Or is music more like language, where meaning is captured by the play of sameness and difference? We hear the same note now and later, when it does not perform the same function or take on the same significance. We see the same letter in this word and that, we hear the same word here and there. Meaning, in music or in language, is never reducible to any single element of its enactment. It is, instead, an emergent property of the structures of iteration and reiteration, performance and repetition.

That sounds fine, except that, though we sometimes speak of the language of music, and music meets language at more than one juncture—poetry, chorale—music itself does not seem to mean the way language does. Its singularity is more resistant, and its significance more pliable. The novelist and poet Nancy Huston: “Meaning is hard as a rock, but music is porous like soapstone.”
²⁶
Music seems to be non-parseable, not to be translated or otherwise rendered. Indeed, it does not seem to
mean
at all. (Perhaps a poem does not either? Archibald MacLeish thought so.)
²⁷

Is music perhaps none of these philosophical fictions, these conceptual chimerae, at all? Is it rather a feature of complex brain function, like the relations of mathematics or the sense of viable composition? What we recognize as the beauty of the piece is analogous to the perceived elegance of a logical deduction: the demonstrated truth of Occam's Razor in action, as we reach the conclusion in fewer steps or retain identical functionality using a smaller number of moving parts. Music has structure. We might even say it
is
structure, audibly revealed. Our conscious minds, themselves structured to recognize structure, respond to music as a hungry man does to food. The rich pleasure we experience at perceiving music's play of pattern—theme and variation,
anticipation and resolution—is what we mean when we say we are moved by music.

Or is music a social and cultural phenomenon, like the rituals and religions with which it is so often associated? Seen this way, music is an elaborate semiotic system, a network of human communications grids. It thus has the ability to exhibit a wide range of functions that we class under the contested notion of
human nature
. As neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin has categorized it, for example, music can do some or all of the following: facilitate friendship, excite joy, convey knowledge, provide comfort, bolster religion, and communicate love.
²⁸

All true. And yet what does that tell us about
music
? The emphasis is a mark of frustration, the special italics of impasse. The more we seek to define music, the more it evades us. We know it when we hear it, to be sure. Increasingly, we can hear it anytime and anywhere, for, unlike in previous eras, music is now comprehensively available. So much so, indeed, that its rarity in daily experience—once the chief feature of music's presence in cultural and individual life—is now almost as unimaginable as a world without internal combustion or running water. But what do we think we know when we know
that
?

It is a fallacy to assume even that love of music is universal. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim Dixon is surely the exception when he complains about being subjected to “some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart” and then “some Brahms rubbish,” followed by “a violin sonata by some Teutonic bore.” Unlucky him, we might think, at least for the Mozart. But that
some
is indicative: these are curses, not philistinism. Dixon takes the canonical names in vain as a way of letting out his particular
cri de coeur,
that of a man who spends his life being bored by other people, especially his employers.

But what about Vladimir Nabokov? In
Speak, Memory
he wrote that music sounded to him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.… The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.” Sigmund Freud professed himself a fan of art but found music without pleasure because some “turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”

Most of us are not so afflicted, or so resistant. Love of music is universal across all human cultures—though not without considerable variation—and the large majority of us enjoy it daily, usually deeply and without question. The
ancient Greeks thought music was celestial and eternal, like mathematics. Modern cognitive science suggests it answers our “appetite for gratuitous difficulty.” Teenagers everywhere know that music is identity in its easiest form, invidious distinction based on taste.

As Gould ardently wished, music is now easier to get than ever, easier to have with us at every moment, not any music but
all
music, the iPod-fed soundtracking of everyday life the logical outcome of our deep animal pleasure in the aural. Almost inconceivable now to recall how we used to have to take a bus across the city to visit the guy who had sub-woofers and a good record collection, sitting around the basement rec room to listen to
London Calling
or
Armed Forces,
or the way mix tapes were passed around like secret tokens of cool in an era before nearly instantaneous MP3 downloads.
²⁹
And how much more bizarre those scenes in
The Magic Mountain,
where a gramophone and a stack of records utterly transform life in Thomas Mann's alpine sanatorium?

Purists complain still, as they did when Gould was among the first to advocate recording techniques over performance, that ubiquity of music lessens our regard for it, but there is no evidence of this. Hans Castorp plays a recording of Schubert's “Linden-tree” over and over, his love renewed
timelessly each time. But the implications go further than this. Musical taste has for centuries been structured by the matrix of technological availability. Music could be enjoyed only by those who could afford to create it, and those with less pressing relations to the conditions of necessity could afford to create it
complexly
. Thus the emergence of
legitimate
musical taste around the
classical
music of formal experimentation found in the European religious and court traditions. Music moves from its homes in liturgy and dance to become an aesthetic end in itself, an art form. And increasingly it is subject to the claims of Kantian disinterestedness—that it should be appreciated for other purposes than the inherent beauty it delivers.

But that idea of anti-utilitarian, or pure, aesthetic enjoyment is itself revealed as a class property rather than a fundamental quality of mind. It establishes the
taste
position of those rare (usually wealthy) few who can afford to experience music in this fashion. Any taste system based on rarity grows unstable when material conditions alter, especially when there are changes in the basic distribution of availability. The formal concert evening to which Gould would object is, from this viewpoint, merely the last morbid excrescence of an aristocratic system of taste. Falsely democratic, apparently open to anyone's enjoyment, it is still governed by the lexical
values of
good taste
in music. Moreover, his refusal can be seen as marking the classical concert's perverse zombie energy, its dying spasm. As a form of canonical taste becomes endangered by real democratization––for example, that of popular music disseminated by radio and recording— the more energetically and desperately it tries to assert its authority.
³⁰

We look for the signs of genius to explain what we cannot otherwise explain. “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness,” Aristotle said, and even a scientific world retains a peculiar faith in the idea that genius is a divine gift, a visitation.
Inspiration
means to breathe into, and even now, in a more secular and less mysterious age, we may feel that a special air belongs to those who can do something we cannot imagine doing, something high-percentile and rare.

The romantic narrative of genius works to nudge divine madness, otherworldly and mysterious, into a natural and less explosive category. Genius shall be evident from the earliest moments—or at least the
post facto
back-story will make it so. Mozart's childhood compositions are unarguable, as are the sketches of Picasso. In Gould's case, we grasp at slighter evidence: his father reported that the young Gould would hum rather than cry and would, reaching up his arms, “flex his fingers almost as if playing a scale.” More reliably, from the age of three Gould showed evidence of perfect pitch, identifying
tonality and modulation with assurance—a necessary condition for the vast musical memory he would later exhibit, surely a cornerstone, if not in fact the crucial conduit, for his sense of self, his reliable personhood.