Glenn Gould (9 page)

No flesh-and-blood performer could hope to win such a contest. Is it any wonder that we speak of performers
dying
when they deliver a disastrous performance? Is it any wonder, contempt and anger returning back with interest, that a comedian will talk about
killing the room
? To be sure, a less common usage in the genteel world of classical music! But the impulse and the competition are the same. You come here and pay to watch me do this, whatever it is, because
you cannot do it
. And then you will cast judgment
upon what you cannot do because that is what you
can
do, that right is part of what you have purchased. Thus does an agreeable contract conceal the zero-sum game beneath its surface.

Gould had more concrete complaints about the music world's insistence on performance competitions, especially with the glamour solo instruments such as violin or piano. He was the uneasy beneficiary of those competitions, arising like all prodigies from the sea of contestants and gaining the attention necessary to secure the next rung in a rigid ladder of success: a more prominent teacher, a recital with orchestra, a tour, a recording contract. He exposed the dark currents beneath the bright surface of the system. How easily we accept the win-lose logic of the competition, where someone's being first is possible only at the cost of all others not being so. How neatly we smooth over the pernicious effects of a novelty-mad system of musical desire, with those briefly famous Japanese ten-year-old violin wizards and teenage Austrian keyboard geniuses shunted into lifetime obscurity before they exit puberty.

From the other side, though, we might be inclined to take a different view. Was the genius of Gould not something larger than Gould himself? Did he not perhaps have
a positive duty to share it, or at least not to withdraw it arbitrarily and without explanation? In fact, on the last point, Gould was quite ready and even eager to offer explanation. The 1968 spoken-word disc with McClure,
Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout,
lists on the cover a “partial agenda” that includes the following headings: The Concert Is Dead; The Only Excuse for Recording Is to Do It Differently; A Live Audience Is a Great Liability; Electronic Music Is the Future. (Also Why I Sing Along and Petula Clark's Songs Are in the Post-Mendelssohn Tradition, about which more later.)

On this record and elsewhere, Gould jumbled his objections into a confused and confusing mash of what looked more and more like desperate, if dryly delivered, self-justification. Live audiences create distractions and an atmosphere of dread. Concerts are obsolete because recorded music is widely available. Recorded music must be, in one sense, a recorded performance; but to create the illusion of seamless performance, it will be necessary to create multiple takes, employ spot-dubbing within takes, and rearrange timelines. The only justification for recording is to
subvert
the idea of the captured performance. And so the future lies in a perfectly electronic world where recording is realized without error or tic. At the same time, Gould indulged the
tic of audible singing along because … well, because he could and because that put these performances under the sign of Gould. The 1964
Time
magazine review quoted on the back cover of the album captures the paradox: “There is grace and good humour to all his recordings that make them seem like captured improvisations—personal, inspired, free. Such creative excitement is something few pianists can achieve.”

Not just captured performance, captured
improvisations
! By refraction, we glimpse the unstable outlines of the Gould ideal: a recording so perfectly engineered and so carefully crafted, perhaps over hours and days of playing and mixing, that it sounds as though the player is making up the music as he goes. Gould never improvised for the microphone, unlike jazz or experimental players such as Michael Snow or Keith Jarrett (another notable devotee of audible humming while at the keyboard).
⁴⁸
But he did appear to believe that interpretation and its attendant servant, the splice and take two allowed by recording, were a kind of improvisation. In a filmed conversation with Bruno Monsaingeon in 1976—a text of the dialogue was published in
Piano Quarterly
—Monsaingeon charged Gould, who often ignored or minimized dynamic changes, or refused to heed noted tempo markings, with wanting to “add an improvisatory element to all eighteenth-century music.”
Gould pleaded guilty, cheerfully admitting that he eliminated sforzandos in Mozart's music, or arpeggiated chords that are written conventionally. “I imagine you do because they intrude upon your prerogatives as an improviser?” Monsaingeon asked. “I would have to go much farther than that, Bruno,” Gould said. “I think they represent an element of theatricality to which my puritan soul objects.”
⁴⁹

Gould was fond of saying that recording music merely allowed the musician the same freedom enjoyed by any other artist: a painter can change or cover a section of canvas, a writer can erase and revise. The analogy was not precise: Gould the performer was not the composer, even if his interpretations were judged themselves works of art. (As indicated earlier, I would so judge them.) The composer may revise a given piece as much as he or she likes; the composer is the only person entitled to say when the piece is done. The player is supposed to play the piece, and in some sense we retain an ethical-aesthetic right to expect that he or she can play it all the way through. Thus the idea, possibly atavistic but certainly persistent, that recording artists should at least be able and willing to play live.
⁵⁰
Audiences regard such playing as a sign of authenticity, of artistic honesty—even if they also realize that authenticity and honesty may be unstable or dangerous categories.

We can observe the underlying instability here in familiar slippages from other art forms. A director and troupe of actors might decide not only to set a Shakespeare play in some provocative milieu—Romeo and Juliet as scions of rival California gangs, say—but also to cut whole sections of the authenticated text in the interests of brevity. These liberties are tolerated for a variety of reasons: leanness in the performance, coherence in the narrative. We accept these decisions, if we do, as called for or justified by the situation itself; that is, they are normatively inscribed in the demands of performance. This is a different form of acceptance from the one where, watching a film, we suspend disbelief about the actual time taken to film the various shots or the order in which they were done.

Film was Gould's strongest analogical point—it is no wonder he returned to it again and again, including his last recorded defence of the withdrawal, a 1980 multi-voice “fantasy” piece included in a twenty-fifth-anniversary disc done with Columbia. A player recording a piece may indeed resemble a director working with actors and a script, asking for take after take, ordering the actual playing as convenient under the aegis of the assembled whole being the piece in its correct order. And no director, even one who aimed for a highly artificial appearance of
reality
or
immediacy,
would
consent to reproduce his efforts in some live manner. Indeed, given the nature of the medium, it is hard to imagine what that manner would be.

Gould lay on the cusp of a change in attitude to music. His career spanned the period in which recordings were, for the first time, reaching impressive levels of both accuracy and accessibility. He was bold enough to suggest that recordings are not best viewed as substitutes for live concerts, but are instead a medium unto themselves. This is correct. Where he erred was in thinking that this transition is a binary function: that the new medium will render the old obsolete. As McLuhan could have told him—indeed maybe did, on one of the several occasions they met or appeared together—a new medium does not replace an older one, it encompasses it like a new ring on a tree. Recorded music does not obliterate live music any more than television obliterates radio, or radio obliterates newspapers. Having made this elementary error, Gould's basic premise for the subsequent arguments against concerts was revealed as faulty.

The real reasons he was a “concert dropout” are not philosophical, they are psychological. That is not to say they are obvious or easy to understand. It suited him to take this stand, to enter a refusal to an established system: thus the use of the
then-fashionable notions of dropping out and going electronic, Gould as classical music's version of Timothy Leary. But it suited him because he found performing unpleasant, not because he found it objectionable. The latter is a construct that at once justifies and conceals the former. And this concealment, apprehended at another level of his psyche, pleased this master of disguise and personae rather too much. Gould did not so much perform his
silence
as he performed his
refusal,
a juicy and endlessly repeated exit from the stage.

Nor is that all. The underlying irony is that Gould's apparent retreat into recording is actually the biggest competitive advance of all, one hinged on the technology of recording itself. Recorded music is what economists call a
scalable
activity: an individual effort that pays off over and over without further exertion. Reproduced and distributed on vinyl, a single musical session can capture a vast audience that was once necessarily divided among many in-person players. Every purchased Glenn Gould recording thus diminishes the chance of another musician being heard at all. Like bestselling books and blockbuster films, hit recordings are part of an inherently unfair winner-take-all market; the difference is that here the rivals are not just other books or movies, but other musical experiences in all forms. Talk about smoking the competition!

All music has a time signature, ranging from the standard 2/4 and 3/4 of everyday experience to the esoteric deployment of 7/4 and 9/8 in some Bartok, 10/4 in Radiohead songs, or breakneck 19/16 in performances by Carlos Santana and the Mahavishnu Orchestra or Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. No matter what the signature's complexity, all music assumes as a precondition that time is both available and, more to the purpose, divisible. There could be no arrangement of beats and notes without these preconditions, and hence there could be nothing we call music. But what, after all, is time? And where, exactly, does its divisibility lie?

The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, in characteristic dashing fashion, deemed the question misplaced or mischievous. When we seek to examine the subject of time, we see nothing, for there is nothing to see. Time is an abstraction from experience that experience itself cannot grasp and thus an instance of the well-known tendency for ideas to run
amok when undisciplined by skeptical philosophy. All knowledge save the logical and mathematical must derive from the impressions of our senses, and critical examination shows that we have no sense impression of something called
time
. Not least of the many important implications of this view is that what we call the self is no more than a fiction of memory, constructed from what we recall of past events; and that there can be no possible prediction of future events based on the apparent stability of past ones.

These conclusions may seem counterintuitive, but there is very little that reason is able to say in response to them— except to note an underlying problem in the assumption of the very idea of an experience. Hume posits a
succession of awareness
that is fabricated into a sense of self and temporality. But what is the condition of possibility for that succession of awareness? Must it not be precisely an
awareness of succession
? In other words, how can an experience even be an experience if there is not some grid of continuity and order that makes experience possible? The solution, Kant argued (answering Hume's “scandal for philosophy”), must be that time—and space—are pre-existing forms of sensibility that make experience itself possible. We do not experience these forms; they are the necessary presuppositions of any experience whatsoever. We cannot know them in the sense of empirical
knowledge; but we can, indeed must, assume them to hold in order for there to be any such thing as empirical knowledge.
⁵¹
Glenn Gould, in common with any musician of gifts, brought this complex assumption closer to explicit articulation in the very act of playing. In fact, because some large part of Gould's play was play with time—fooling with tempo, obviously, but also with articulation, itself another name for the rich execution of tricky time-gambits—he revealed himself, again and again, as a master of sensibility. I said earlier that Gould
played the silence,
not the notes, including the big silence of the concert withdrawal. Is it perhaps even more apt to say that, after all, he
played time itself
?

But what then of the
exact divisibility
of time, that which appears to make such play possible in the first place? Without measure and division, music is not possible. In one view, such measure and division just is music, for sound so ordered makes for the structures and relations we perceive in composition and performance. An automobile's horn sounds a note—most often in the key of F or G, we're told—as does a seagull's cry; neither is music, though their tones can be found in music. (Leave aside the custom car horn that plays the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or the first bar of “Dixie.”) When arranged properly, that is, on an ascending scale and within a time
signature, these sounds create (the possibility of ) music. The standard musical arrangement, graphically represented by the written score, is a negotiation with time as well as with sound: the staves have horizontal as well as vertical extension.

The conventions of the score did not emerge clearly until the sixteenth century, but were quickly adopted throughout Europe and were firmly entrenched by the middle of the seventeenth. Music itself, it goes without saying, is far older. In this sense, musical notation and its sense of temporal divisibility is analogous to the emergence of the reliable mechanical clock sometime in the twelfth century. Precise timekeeping devices, however useful, lacked the unit-based logic of the mechanical clock, which alone was capable of accurate equal measurement. The experience of time, and the practice of timekeeping, predate the unit of time: all civilizations have lived by the sun and moon, by the passing of the seasons.