Glenn Gould
ALSO IN THE
EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS
SERIES:
Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe
Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards
Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson
Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto
Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin
by John Ralston Saul
Wilfrid Laurier by André Pratte
Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan
René Lévesque by Daniel Poliquin
Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray
Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland
L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart
Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen
Maurice Richard by Charles Foran
Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji
Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden
Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci
SERIES EDITOR:
John Ralston Saul
Glenn Gould
by MARK KINGWELL
With an Introduction by
John Ralston Saul
SERIES EDITOR
PENGUIN CANADA
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First published 2009
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Copyright © Mark Kingwell, 2009
Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2009
Quotations from The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1984), are used by permission of the Publisher and the Glenn Gould Estate. Copyright © 1984 by the Estate of Glenn Gould and Glenn Gould Limited. Quotations from Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould: Music and Mind (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1978 and 1984), are used by permission of the Publisher. Copyright © 1984, 1992, 1997 by Key Porter Books. Quotations from Jeramy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008), are used by permission of the Author. Copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2008.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
* * *
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Kingwell, Mark, 1963-
Glenn Gould / Mark Kingwell.
(Extraordinary Canadians)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-670-06850-0
1. Gould, Glenn, 1932–1982. 2. Pianists—Canada—Biography.
I. Title. II. Series: Extraordinary Canadians
ML417.G69K55 2009 786.2092 C2009-902415-2
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CONTENTS
Introduction by John Ralston Saul
1 Aria
2 Silence
3 Fiction
4 Memory
5 Existence
6 Genius
7 Quodlibet
8 Competition
9 Time
10 Architecture
11 Play
12 Illness
13 Puritan
14 North
15 Communication
16 Appearance
17 Progress
18 Art
19 Personae
20 Wonder
21 Takes
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHRONOLOGY
INTRODUCTION BY
John Ralston Saul
How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.
This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?
For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.
These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.
All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.
Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.
You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a
collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.
The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.
That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.
The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.
What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people’s lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.
Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.
People around the world sensed from the first moment they heard him that Glenn Gould was about much more than playing the piano better or differently. In what can be called chance or destiny, he emerged as part of a creative explosion of ideas and sounds in Toronto. Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Glenn Gould. All of them were reflecting and experimenting on what communications would and could become in a very different era, and they were all doing this in the same place at the same time. What the twentieth and now the twenty-first century thought and thinks about how we communicate with each other began in that place with those people.
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
CHAPTER ONE
Aria
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.
First of all, I resent the one-timeness, the non-take-twoness, of that particular experience. As a matter of fact, I can remember many times when I did give concerts on the North American concert circuit when my performance was going rather inadequately and rather haphazardly; maybe I hadn’t practised enough or I felt as if I was competing with my own recorded version, if such exists—and I often felt that way!—and if I was, I was damned if I was going to practise for it, as a matter of fact. And if a performance were going that way, I was terribly inclined to stop—this is something that a psychiatrist would have marvellous things to say about, I’m sure—terribly inclined to stop in the middle and say, “Take two!” But one couldn’t quite, without risking a scandal and very bad reviews, and so I never quite did. But I always wanted to.2
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 narra
tives 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
Glenn Gould Page 1