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
CHAPTER SIX
Genius
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.
It has to be conceded that pitch is no guarantee of an ability to compose, let alone compose well. Pitch is neither sufficient nor strictly necessary for musical creation. Though Gould was making up his own tunes by age five, including some that were performed at his school or in church, and meanwhile showed great accuracy and precision at the keyboard, singing the notes as he played them, his own efforts at mature composition are indifferent at best. His one successful recorded work, String Quartet op. 1, was an attempt at counterpoint in which, as he himself admitted, he made all the rookie mistakes of the composer’s game. It was also composed in a classical style that, in the year of its origin (1953), any ardent advocate of twelve-tone avant-gardism such as Gould should have abhorred.
He liked to insist, instead, that his compositions in “contrapuntal radio” showed his real compositional talent—not least his documentary “The Idea of North” (1967) and, as a small but telling example, his charming 1963 creation called “So You Want to Write a Fugue”—a multi-voice layering of advice for prospective composers of counterpoint, first broadcast on CBC-TV as the finale to a program entitled The Art of the Fugue and later released by Columbia on the two-disc Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album (1980): “So you want to write a fugue? You’ve got the urge to write a fugue? You’ve got the nerve to write a fugue? The only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one. But never be clever for the sake of being clever, for the sake of showing off !”31
At the same time, Gould would often agree to, sometimes even favour, the phrase recreative (rather than creative) artist for his own musical interventions at the keyboard. Every interpretation is a new work in its own right, something especially true of the Bach oeuvre, whose lack of specified tempi or phrasing leave decisions about pacing, articulation, and ornamentation largely in the hands of its player or conductor. Though one works in the vertical dimension of the stave, herding the motive along as it performs the business of progression from moment to moment, one can only do so with a keen awareness of the horizontal dimension of the work, its architecture—another issue for interpretation. Add to this the dynamic and colour possibilities available to the pianist, unknown to the composer working on clavichord or harpsichord, and it is easy to see that there is indeed such a thing as a genius of interpretation.
On January 3, 1964, Time magazine, that arbiter of mainstream legitimacy, proclaimed the thirty-one-year-old Gould’s recording career “little short of genius.” He had yet to record even half of what he would eventually produce in the studio, including many of his now most-prized albums.
All that lay far in the future. His parents later insisted they did not want Gould to have the skewed life of a musical freak—the words Mozart and prodigy were banned from the household lexicon—but from the start his mother was convinced that he would be a supremely gifted musician, in particular as a concert pianist. Music was everywhere in his life from a point before birth: anticipating a later fad, during pregnancy Gould’s mother played music often to stimulate fetal development.
Gould’s first public performance came on June 5, 1938, at age five: he accompanied his parents’ vocal duet at the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the Business Men’s Bible Class, of which his father was a member. In August of the same year he was a contestant in a piano competition held at the Canadian National Exhibition but did not win. On December 9, his second public performance was at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Toronto. His playing astonished the audience, and young Glenn began saying he wanted to be a concert pianist.
By 1944 Gould was competing in Kiwanis Music Festivals, an experience he would later discuss with derision. Winning a $200 prize in the first of these also brought his first press coverage. He was twelve. The next year, on December 12, 1945, he made his professional organ debut, graduating from churches and provincial competitions to the Eaton Auditorium in downtown Toronto. He played Mendelssohn’s Sonata no. 6, the Concerto Movement by Dupuis, and the Fugue in F Major by J.S. Bach. A review in the Toronto Evening Telegram called him a genius—the first public application of the magic word.
On May 8, 1946, he played for the first time with an orchestra, performing the first movement of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 4 with the Toronto Conservatory Symphony at Massey Hall. The critics were respectful. On January 14 and 15, 1947, he made his professional debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, performing all four movements of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 4. Critics noted his distracting onstage fidgets, later explained as the result of allergenic dog hair on his suit.
Really? On October 20 of the same year Gould gave his first full recital in the Eaton Auditorium’s “International Artists” series. He played five sonatas by Scarlatti, Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata, the Passacaille in B Minor by Couperin, Liszt’s Au Bord d’une Source, the Waltz in A-flat Major (op. 42) and Impromptu in F-sharp (op. 36) by Chopin, and Mendelssohn’s Andante and Rondo Capriccioso. Reviews were positive. They also laid stress on the growing evidence of unusual mannerisms: twitching, humming while playing, lowering his head almost to the keyboard. Already a dedicated hypochondriac and mild germ paranoiac, Gould had been avoiding crowds and bundling himself up in the famed later manner since at least the age of six. Now, at age fifteen, the outward signs of genius were all in place. It is a word that would be applied, more and more frequently in the years to come, to the young man from the Beach.
But what, after all, is genius? Writers as diverse as Diderot, Artaud, and Pound would maintain versions of Aristotle’s divine madness position—sometimes, indeed, tending to the far less plausible view that, just as all geniuses are madmen, all madmen are geniuses. Neither conclusion is borne out by the evidence, unless we are prepared to agree that any exceptional performance is by definition divine.
By this token, though, divine madmen seem to proliferate too far and too fast, revealing a familiar anti-divine double endgame. The trouble with genius is that there is always either too much or too little of it. In a logical extension of the elitist’s rap on democracy—in the land where everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody—nowadays we have both too many geniuses and too few. So every successful investment banker is now a genius of finance, every talented cook a genius of fusion, every slippery running back a genius of rushing, every logo artist a genius of design.
On the other hand, the once solid geniuses of literature and philosophy, the canonical Great Names of the Great Books, are everywhere contextualized and historicized and otherwise cut down to size. They’re not so special. Who do they think they are? Genius is exposed as a typical piece of Enlightenment self-congratulation, the regard of limited
interests, maybe class-based ones, all dressed up as universal significance. In popular sociological texts of our own day, the exceptional is made ordinary, success analyzed in order to demystify it and make us all feel better. Now genius is just another word for someone who practises the ten thousand hours needed to excel at any given thing. No word, in these tautological accounts, on what qualities of gift or inspiration are needed to stay the course of those hours…
Satisfying though this may be to our self-regard, down here in the mediocre ranks, it seems ultimately unsatisfactory. The choice between an inexpressible gift from the gods and mere workmanlike persistence is typical of the age, a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t reduction. But what can we say in the face of it? How to avoid mysticism, on the one hand, and on the other what the critic Harold Bloom calls “historicizing and contextualizing the imagination of genius,” the pernicious influence of “all those who would reduce authors to social energies, readers to gleaners of phonemes”?32
Bloom’s special interest is literary genius—a category whose existence some people would be inclined to doubt.33 We can nevertheless indicate some of the features that considered thinkers have ascribed to genius. Fecundity, first, since that is the root of the word: genius produces; it germinates. Also vision: an ability to see possibilities denied to the ordinary practitioner of an art, still more the ordinary fan or person in the street. Hence, too, originality—what philosopher Hans Jonas called “the intoxication of unprecedentedness.” This quality makes genius an unstable property, since, if too little originality makes for mediocre work, too much originality risks incomprehensible work. Indeed, many consider genius to be that volatile reaction on the margin between sense and nonsense—a version of the madness theme again.
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