Gould was still more skilful in his adoption and manipulation of views about himself, many of them of his own provenance. These were juggled like so many beachballs, biffed and swatted but never rejected or answered, their legitimacy forever deferred by the performance. Thus did Gould communicate an unease with himself, the truth, and himself in relation to it. In fact, there could hardly be a more elaborated example of Storr’s schizoid type, revelling in the combination of isolation and communication as a means of controlling that which is revealed.
The most significant phrase in the Storr quotation is, however, the parenthetical one in the last sentence: “He can choose (or so he often believes) how much of himself to reveal and how much to keep secret.” Gould’s tone in this review, as in all his written work, especially the self-referential pieces, has an element not just of performance—he was not a natural writer, his tone always pedantic or defensive—but of self-delighted smugness. He sounds like one of those suavely accented James Bond villains who revel in explaining their plans for world domination before eliminating the pesky licence-to-kill agent in some overly elaborate fashion, possibly involving lasers and miniskirted henchlings. Like them, what is revealed in the explanation is not control but the desire for control, which in being revealed is also by the very same action thwarted. Real control means never having to worry about being either understood or misunderstood.
In fairness, Gould communicated a great deal more than this in the simple execution of his role as a performer of gifts. That much is clear to, and cherished by, even the most casual fan of his playing. The question is, What, precisely, is communicated by such playing?
Not meaning. Non-vocal music has no propositional content. We may speak of it as a language, with a grammar, but it remains a language that, even if in some sense intelligible, cannot be translated into any other. Though we may investigate music to learn about culture, or history, or ideas, music itself carries no message; though perhaps beautiful, it is mute.88 That is why many philosophers, notably both Kant and Hegel in rare overlap, praise poetry more highly, since it joins the emotional suggestiveness of harmonics with the precise articulation of truth. Many people, especially those of romantic persuasion, will find such ordering invidious, since for them beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know. Or, if they are of more Platonic persuasion, they might even think that beauty is a form of goodness. Thus non-linguistic beauty is considered just as valuable, if not more so, than the kind offered with words. Beauty is its own message, its own unanswerable argument.
The irony is that the beauty-goodness claim is advanced in written dialogue, even as the truth-beauty claim is made in a poem, in language; this is often lost on these romantics. In any case, we need not pause too long here to dismantle the many problems in so claiming a co-extension of the concepts beauty and truth. The English literary critic I.A. Richards used the last lines of Keats’s famous ode to illustrate the prevalence of “pseudo-statements” in poetry and suggested that anyone who accepted this as an aesthetic philosophy was likely to “proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naïveté.” But Richards was too hasty: it is not a pseudo-statement; grammatically, it’s a regular old statement. And as a statement it is either just false (lots of true things are ugly, and vice versa) or it is nonsensical, i.e., neither true nor false, lacking a truth value (as we say). And if it is the latter, then it is the statement of a pseudo-proposition, not a pseudo-statement.
Well, who cares about any of this? Significantly, Glenn Gould. Two things emerge clearly from his recording practice. First, that he believed strongly in the truth of an interpretation, as a revelation of the given work’s essence of potential. And second, that he had a strong, almost compulsive urge to share these interpretations, together with their attendant intellectual scaffolding, with as many people as possible.
In this view, it is not at all difficult to make sense of at least one of the stated reasons for the 1964 concert withdrawal. Gould was now endeavouring to spread his musical ideas far and wide, with no theoretical limit beyond the scope of reproduction. Nor is it hard to accept one of the corollaries of that decision, namely, that it is wrong not to share “the future”—meaning by that both existent and imminent playing or recording technologies and future potential audiences—with great works of the past. The now mostly uncontroversial decision to play Bach on piano, for example, was from his perspective no different from a decision to record with splicing and multiple takes or to consider the possibilities of synthesizers for recording classical music. (Though he was dismissive of gimmicky versions thereof, such as the briefly celebrated novelties of P.D.Q. Bach and Switched-On Bach.)
Gould’s sense of truth in interpretation was therefore inescapable in his playing, even though he did not subscribe to the romantic notion of a beauty-truth fusion. From a certain point of view he was more interested in bringing out the essence of the work than he was in whether it was beautiful; this, I think, accounts both for his ability to play pieces he did not like and to judge works based on aesthetic criteria that are, in fact, moral ones—something he admitted, indeed claimed, on many occasions. This is truth in a very loose sense, given that non-vocal musical work can have no truth value. But things without meaning can nevertheless matter, and the task of the player is to bring out the matter-not-mean potential of the work, paradoxically to give its muteness a compelling voice. We might call it rightness rather than truth. And we might say that music, like language, is a container for consciousness.
In our own day, perhaps, such ideas are as uncontroversial as those about the ethics of recording. We no more suspect abstraction and free play of concepts than we do the standard techniques of the recording studio. Yes, dedicated projects of playing “early music” on “original” instruments, tuned flat or rescued from obscurity (the sackbut enjoys a vogue on American college campuses), are very much with us. But these strike many people as eccentric if forgivable foibles, slightly more reputable versions of the Renaissance Fayre or Klingon Opera festivals held regularly in city parks. There is no fundamental or originary truth to be had about a piece of music, no definitive authentic rendering that once and for all communicates its message, and so the quest for one is misguided prima facie. Gould knew that, and so defended his interpretations as compelling rather than cognitive or authentic; as accurate and intense renderings of the original concept. He did this at some length in his written work, to be sure, but all that verbiage is beside the point: these rational addenda are really just after-the-fact rationalizations, at best footnotes or clues to the actual argument. The only argument that matters is the argument offered by the playing itself.
What kind of argument? The answer to that is, I think, very hard to put into words without making music the servant of some master other than itself, which will never do. Perhaps it is best to proceed negatively: this is not an argument with a conclusion, though there may be resolution in the performance; it is not an argument with a point, though we may find it inspiring to hear; it is certainly not a normative argument, though we may decide, hearing it, that we must change our lives.
So then what? In a sense, it may be understood as an argument with time itself. The essential paradox of music is that, as a medium, it holds time open. Most media of communication are premised on the nullification of either time, or space, or both. Formerly it took a month for a letter to reach Europe from America; now an email is there in mere seconds. Time shrinks in communication just as space shrinks with speed: the commonality between communication and technology is that both are driven, in almost every instance, by the imperatives of speed. Speed closes distances, we say, because it allows traversal of space in less time: velocity is no more than distance divided by time. Like all divisions, there is no theoretical limit to it. The asymptote of all speed projects is the state in which time and space are so fully collapsed that all points are the same point, and therefore no interval stan
ds between them.
Music resists this: it draws time out, holds time’s obliteration at bay, with its deployment of artful sound and silence. We say that music communicates grandeur, or sadness, or elation, or wit. Strictly speaking it can do none of that, since it is not a medium of communication. We are speaking metaphorically: music suggests these emotions or ideas, arouses in us a response we characterize in that fashion. I argue that it performs these suggestions, or allows their entertainment in audiences, precisely because it is not communicative, because there is no proposition or truth-value in play. Whatever else it does or may do—arouse emotion, tickle the intellect, satisfy the sense or the soul—music refuses the obliteration of time.
That, finally, is the only argument music can make. Gould, performing the argument, knew that it was enough.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Appearance
Gould argued that a musical recording was like a film; that he was akin to both the players and the director; that the final result was a kind of artful deception, a recorded aural transcript that could smoothly, over and over, create the experience—the illusion—that one was hearing the music as it was composed, in the moment. In a succession of moments. What kind of deception, what species of illusion, is this?
The mistrust of appearances is deeply felt in human experience, an evolutionary advantage surely at or near the heart of our success as a species. No wonder it has been thematized by philosophers East and West from antiquity to our own day. Our apprehension of the world is suspect because, again and again, we discover that things are not as they seem. We wake from real-seeming dreams. We pull bent sticks from water to find they are straight. We ride close enough to a tower to see that it is square, not round. We reach for a coin upon the floor and find that it is merely painted there.
The last technique, called trompe l’oeil, expresses the stakes with rare forthrightness: the trick upon the eye. We are fools for semblance, and our only hope lies in recognizing our folly as a first step to its remedy.
And what lies on the other side of this wall of mirages? The philosophers say: the thing in itself. True knowledge. Ultimate reality. Transcendental Forms. Essences. Foundations. Noumena, not phenomena. Originals, not copies. Objects, not images. Plato’s well-known hostility to the distortions of mimesis, mere imitation or reflection, shadowy mirroring, is not lately given the sort of free rein the Greek philosopher favoured, when such suspicion is elevated into an elaborate system of epistemological hierarchy. But the basic orientation remains, possibly hard-wired into our problem-solving, adaptive consciousness. We want to punch through appearances to find something more reliable. We won’t get fooled again. Except, of course, we will.
Gould’s polemics about recorded music must be seen against this fundamental context of thought, as well as in the contemporary cultural surround. As the concert died its slow death, the once primary vehicle of music supplanted even if not destroyed by the long-playing record, the compact disc, and the digital computer file, the idea of the single-take performance lost its presumptive authority. Early experiments in recording, which simply captured a single performance so that it might be replicated anytime, at any distance, gave way to techniques of recording that created an illusion of single performance out of the raw material of multiple takes, overdubs, splices, and even electronic tempo manipulation. The question is, Does it matter?
To answer, we must specify what kinds of false appearances are possible. The most common cases are ones of simple perceptual or cognitive error, such as the optical illusions and dreams just mentioned. These errors are dispelled by a change of frame. But what of intended deceptions in appearance? Here we can distinguish at least two common types, of which Payzant offers a vivid example: an automobile without an engine is, to all outward appearances, no different from one with an engine.89 Because the motive force of the car is invisible under ordinary circumstances, those circumstances give us no means of judging the presence or absence of that force. We only discover the false car’s lack of functionality when we attempt to operate it. No amount of looking will do the job. So the appearance is misleading but in a manner dependent upon the project of future use. By contrast, a copy of an Old Master painting passed off as original is deceptive in one step: it wears its deception all on the surface. Either we see through it at the level of looking, or we do not; there is no function test, no second step. The forged painting pretends; the engineless car hides.
A person, meanwhile, being capable of active deception, may dissemble: that is, he or she can pretend as well as, and perhaps precisely in order to, hide. I wear a false smile to cover my falsehood, say, or dress as a businessman as part of my campaign of sociopathic serial murder. At the same time, the complexity of consciousness means that we are capable of deceiving ourselves as well as others: the delusions of false consciousness, bad faith, or repressed desire.90
Which of these—pretending, hiding, dissembling, or deluding—describes Gould’s idea of the fiction of a recorded musical performance? None, I think, though we might at moments be inclined to say one or more of them. Instead recorded music offers a clearly distinct kind of appearance, that of the achieved whole constructed of discrete parts whose material origin is made irrelevant. This form of appearing is not hiding, pretending, dissembling, or deluding. Music is just exactly what it appears to be, no more and no less, in two important respects.
The first concerns origin. We might think that recorded music is a sort of dissembling, since it feigns an appearance of sequential creation. Except that there is nothing concealed beneath the surface, since music is all on the surface. A closer analogy in interpersonal relations would be not dissembling but role-playing or self-presentation. Now, there may be considerable complexity in the deployment of a given social role or roles (good son, flirtatious partygoer, dependable professional), but there is no intention to deceive and no structure of concealment. There is, instead, what we recognize as play—in persons as well as in art. The materials of a painting, the pigment and oil or water or tempera, create an appearance of a face or a landscape, or just of forms; the earthly elements are fashioned in such a way as to play at looking like something, but we do not distrust them for that. The material elements of music, which are arranged sounds and silences, are all the more cleared of the charge. They simply are whatever music is; no suspension of disbelief, however minimal, is requested.
The second concerns originality. Unlike a forged painting, which is parasitic on the copied original, there can be no false pretense in music’s presentation, since no claim of originality or authenticity is advanced. To think otherwise is, in effect, to imagine that all art is crudely mimetic, as if every representational painting forever longed to achieve the executed deception of trompe l’oeil, to be so indistinguishable from the thing itself as to fool the bird who tried to eat Zeuxis’s painted grapes. Music and abstract painting, not being representational even in outline, should be especially immune from this odd charge, and even representational painting is ill-served by the thought. To judge paintings on their mere fidelity to nature or sitter is naive. As one of the characters in Gould’s “The Latecomers” remarks, great art aims to articulate ideas—universal themes—by means of particular details that do more than merely represent, that maybe surpass representation altogether. “Well, let me put it this way,” he said. “Perhaps The Last Supper is the greatest abstract piece of art ever produced.”
A critic might object that there is a claim of originality and authenticity in recording, made by implication. That is, we listen to a recording with an unstated presupposition that the performer is executing the performance as we hear it, captured as if by accident on the microphones and transferred to vinyl or digital code. But such naïveté is hard to maintain with a straight face. Gould’s film analogy is solid here: only a child imagines that the two hours of a film are captured in exactly two hours of filming (the actress Tatum O’Neal once confessed to this illusion). And even a child understands that there
is willing suspension of disbelief involved in the execution of the simplest cut or pan, the skilful framing of action and sequence. Narrative art, unlike life, can skip time. Why should music not, in its execution of time, compress and rearrange time? Moreover, this attention to honesty is aesthetically misplaced from the start. Wilde: “In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”
A more controversial version of the appearance/reality debate comes in Gould’s claim that his studio manipulation actually offered a better version of a given piece than could be achieved in single performance. But this, too, survives scrutiny. The sound editor’s art consists in drawing out the most compelling interpretation of the composition, aligning the elements seamlessly so that the whole unfolds not only without gaffe—even the most accomplished performer will make a mistake now and then—but without aesthetic defect. Editing serves the performer’s vision; and, if we trust his thought and skill, this art in turn serves the composer’s vision. The appearance is the reality, now in both superficial and deep senses: there is nothing beneath the audible surface, and therefore no gap to be suspicious of. The music is all we hear, but it is also all that we are meant to hear.
Which leaves just the nagging worry that the illusion will fail, that so far from being seamless, the construction of the appearance will intrude upon our awareness and so destroy the aesthetic moment. Gould’s own experiments in this field are convincing. In 1975 he gathered a group of professionals and amateurs into a CBC studio and set them the task of detecting splices and other editorial interventions in various recordings. Among other results, in some cases false positives outnumbered true hits by three to one—possibly an artifact of the structured suspicion in the experiment, but nevertheless indicative. And guesses tended to sort by expertise: musicians tended to distrust colouristic effects, such as sforzandos, pedal changes, or instances of rubato; sound engineers were drawn to ambient-volume dips; while laypeople favoured paragraphic thinking, hearing splices in movement shifts or at the end of passages.
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