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!
CHAPTER NINE
Time
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.
Divisibility in timekeeping should therefore be understood as an emergent property of our lived experience of time, not a necessary condition for that experience, as it may retrospectively appear. In other words, we pause and consider our feeling of time having passed and then reckon that feeling into the units of some reliable metric. We find this useful and even necessary. But this division, like measurement in general, is performed via abstraction—another post facto illusion, however necessary. And naturally, once achieved, such abstractions offer immensely powerful instruments in the service of our varied human purposes. But they remain just that, instruments, and they rely on the unspoken presuppositions of their practices. Measurement and division are possible because of what philosopher Michel Foucault provocatively called the “contingent a priori ”—not Kant’s synthetic a priori, that is, but the non-necessary but assumed conditions of practical possibility. We can divide time not because of some unit-based essence of time, but because we assume the overlay of structure—simultaneously a form of violence and freedom, like all grids—on our suspension in the temporal.
There is an abyss between every note; a void looms in every interval. Measured time, musical time, is a wispy suspension across those voids. And then consider Count Basie: “It’s the notes you don’t hear that matter.” Or Gould himself: “It [great music] is an ultimate argument of individuality—an argument that man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.”52
One is forced to wonder whether Gould, in the throes of his evident passion, actually enjoyed playing music. Not in concert, I mean, but at all. The question is not idle. In Bruno Monsaingeon’s studio film of Gould recording the 1981 Goldberg Variations, one of the most impressive displays of genius in one medium caught by the deftness of another medium, we see a man lost in the music, lost in time, the supple fingering—he is forty-nine years old!—a sort of fine-grained climb across temporality. Transported, yes. But happy, exalted? Or, perhaps like the addict, a kind of willing prisoner of his own desires? Caught and freed at one and the same moment, at once controlling and driven, not taming time but pleading with it . . .
CHAPTER TEN
Architecture
You may have heard this claim: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. In fact, you have heard it more than once, for this sentiment has been attributed to at least the following: David Byrne, Steve Martin, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Lester Bangs, Gertrude Stein, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk, Brian Eno, Louis Althusser, Woody Allen, and Clara Schumann. Some dinner party that would make!
The sentiment itself is nonsense, though possibly forgivable nonsense. Few musicians like critics. Gould himself excoriated critics even while visibly craving the right sort of intellectual appreciation—one motive behind his creation of parody characters who would opine about his work. The nonsense extends along two fronts: first, that one should not want to write about music because writing is a medium distinct from music. In this view, the only appropriate reaction to music is more music, an absurd position if taken literally. Second, that the pointlessness of music writing is proved by analogy to the presumptive silly activity of dancing about architecture. But what, we may want to ask, is so silly about dancing about architecture?
Architecture has been defined as frozen music, a fanciful description but one that captures an essential insight. Architecture and music are alike in being extensions of structure across time; they are means of inscribing time in space. Kant’s forms of sensibility are really no help here. Consciousness is the mysterious ability to spatialize time, to move a “self ” through a metaphoric space. These metaphors are what make us human: metaphor is connection, it is the world-covering linkage of mind. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre, speaking in 1967, made the crucial point about the linkage between mind and world that is achieved through built forms: “Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world,” he said, “spaces are the realizations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times, the rhythms of the city, the rhythms of the urban population.” Space, when experienced and shared in the form of public places, streets and buildings, is revealed as actually a form of time. “I suggest to you the idea,” Lefebvre went on, “that the city will only be rethought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time.”53
The spatiality of built forms can sometimes obscure or overpower their enacted temporality, their gathering of time into shape. Most basically, we must exist with them moment to moment, day to day, even as we perceive at the complex, permeable margins how the building argues with its surround, its site and urban context. But a built form does more than this; it orders time-cradled consciousness into direction, movement, and use—what architects called program. A building is not like a painting, which seems to offer itself up in toto all at once, set off from the rest of the world by its obvious frame— though even this appearance is misleading, given how we must linger on the painting in order really to appreciate it, or how a given painting may work to subvert and overflow its frame. At the same time, music’s apparent temporality, its being experienced in successive moments, can work to obscure even as it delivers our sense of the plan of the piece, the way it is built.
This last feature of music is what is meant by the architecture of a work, and the usage is not at all idle. Arché—the Greek root for arch—means “first principle,” the beginning of the world. Architecture, the fashioning (tekton) of basic forms, is thus the most primordial of the arts, prior even to philosophy, at least in etymology. Without a first principle, there is no beginning; without an ordered beginning, there is no organization going forward. The same sense of necessary order is expressed in other places where architecture makes a metaphorical appearance: computer architecture, systems architecture, bureaucratic architecture (an ironic usage, perhaps).
Music itself, unlike built forms, is invisible in its architecture. That is one reason why an interpretive artist like Gould is no mere docent to a sort of tour of the musical building but instead a co-creator, almost an architectural partner. Music relies on the positive quality of sound, the audible punching of notes through vibrating air, for its realization. In this sense, we do not hear music. What we hear are sounds, notes in scattered progression, such that an underlying structure is somehow made evident—though not to the senses, rather to the intellect.
As a result, the musical experience is a complex entwining of sensible and intelligible, of (crudely) body and mind, as perceived sounds are organized by the hearer to replicate—or should we say embody?—the invisible structure that gives the piece its line. As Gould noted in the essay that accompanied the 1964 release of his “So You Want to Write a Fugue?” in an issue of HiFi/Stereo Review, “the persistence of fugue is evidence of the degree to which, acoustically and psychologically, certain d
evices peculiar to its structures—devices of subject and response, of statement and answer—are embedded within the consciousness of modern man.”54
It would be a mistake to think, on the basis of these insights, that music is therefore entirely intellectual, or that simple or primitive sound-structures are insufficiently complex to deserve the label “music.” Even patterned basic rhythms and song structures have contrastive elements to which embodied human consciousness responds; otherwise there would be no way to explain the enduring appeal of simple drumming, the three-chord progression, or the undemanding verse-chorus-bridge plan of much popular music.
Gould was especially drawn to musical architecture, as many highly intelligent musicians are. The mathematical beauty of baroque style, especially fugue, involves a refined intellectual pleasure. Or he sometimes was pulled by what was hinted at but not realized in the music. Gould said of Gibbons, for example, whose keyboard composition he labelled “half-hearted virtuoso,” that “one is never quite able to counter the impression of a music of supreme beauty that somehow lacks its ideal means of reproduction.”55 Or he hinted at the existence of an idealized Bach lying behind its merely factual clavichord composition, waiting for the piano to draw it out. Gould spoke at many points as if he believed the ultimate reality of music to reside in its idea, the structure conveyed by the line. Hence one of the defences of his notorious humming: hearing the music in his head, he then transferred it to the airborne sensorium via the keys. But this expression was only a physical reflection of something mental, and the humming was likewise. At other moments, he was firm that music’s reality is tactile and sonic, not ideal, that it does not exist apart from the playing. But what, exactly, do the tactilia of music reveal?
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