Gould—we should say, the Gould character within the fictional frame—was evidently nervous. He admitted he had soaked his hands in ice water before the recording, just as he did before performing on the piano—a clear instance of displaced anxiety ritual. And in the piece’s only actually funny exchange, the Gould character is asked whether he is ready to proceed. “Well, I’ve just taken a Valium, Margaret,” he replied with an audible smile, “and I’m trying to be as calm as one can be when confronted by a bevy of critics.”103
Listeners will wish they were similarly fortified. With Sir Nigel tutting and harrumphing and Professor Klopweisser pontificating to Gould’s murmured approval, we limp through a series of arguments about interpretation. The final Gould character, Theodore Slutz, arrives late. He is described as the Fine Arts Editor of the New York Village Grass Is Greener—“Equally at home with literature, painting, music and architecture, he represents a new high in the democratization of American intellectual life”—and as author of an essay collection, Vacuum, which provides “a unique summing-up of the state of American culture in the last decades of the twentieth century.” Slutz, supposedly based on a New York cab driver Gould liked to imitate, in fact sounds like a mumbling beatnik poetaster, sprinkling liberal instances of “‘man,” “like,” “you know,” “dig,” and “cats” in his discourse.104
In a final indignity, all three plus Pacsu’s Hungarian Communist harridan, Marta Nortavanyi, are depicted in photographs within the gatefold album. Yes, Glenn Gould poses for the camera in various wigs and moustaches, swapping frock coat for leather jacket as the character demands. I am not making this up.
It’s not that this “Glenn Gould Fantasy,” as the album dubs it, has no points of interest. Gould and Klopweisser argue convincingly that one should feel free to play Gibbons on the harpsichord even though the instrument was unknown to the Tudor composer. The reason for this liberality, sometimes condemned by purists, is that they conceive music as, above all, the play of ideas rather than of notes as such. Gould’s “infuriating inconsistencies” and interpretive liberties in tempo are set against the sort of “conceptual fuss and bother” that leads to a restrictive and probably incoherent “authenticity.” The artist, Klopweisser argues, is “creating a point of view” with energy directed negatively, or antithetically, across the composer’s impulse. “If you do it well,” Gould interjects, “the end result is a far more intense and accurate realization of the original concept.”
And so another version of the apologia for the 1964 withdrawal. Mere repetition in the concert setting “afflicted” the musician with a “syndrome” that led to “the slow death of the spirit.” If the performance on night one was successful, the rest could only be failure instead of silence as one performed the same piece again and again. “It was a kind of torture because it ran directly counter to the spirit of invention that that first night had represented.” It is worth noting that this objection is distinct from, and incompatible with, the oft-quoted non-take-twoness objection.
At this point the various voices engage in elaborately layered cross-talk, drowning one another out as they argue about whether humans can pick up multiple auditory vectors. We are then given a long account, in hockey-announcer style, of Gould’s “hysteric return” performance—that is, of pieces by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, delivered from drilling platform XP-67 in the Arctic, using one dozen pianos, to howling wind accompaniment, for the board of Geyser Petroleum. Against the background of midnight sun over the Beaufort Sea, the accompanying orchestra is stationed two miles downstream of the platform on the Canadian submarine Inextinguishable, the production broadcast from its conning tower. Gould, sneezing and coughing, blowing his nose, eventually plays some Ravel from his knees, the famous folding chair having been carried off by a wind gust. This work is called representative of “Mr. Gould’s predilection for the romantic and impressionistic repertoire,” at which point the audience abruptly departs and, this being no longer a public event and therefore of no interest, the transmission must cease. Seal cries are heard as Gould mumbles, Elvis-style, “Thank you, thank you very much.”
I am not making this up either. The critic Jed Distler has said of this disc, “The humor is stilted, contrived, and interesting only to true believers.”105 He was being charitable. The humour is punishing, reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch gone badly wrong or of the least tolerable of stagey early-Beatles kookiness. There can be no excuse for it, and the one clear lesson of the recording is that it could exist only because of the stature of its creator. Gould in effect called in twenty-five years of chits from Columbia when he got them to release this embarrassing piece of twaddle. Ultimately, though, it says more about Gould than about them.
Gould had played with characters before. In 1965 he published in Musical America several articles written by one Dr. Herbert von Hochmeister, “distinguished Canadian scholar and critic” and “the widely read fine arts critic of The Great Slave Smelt, perhaps the most respected journal north of latitude 70 degrees.” These arch, overwritten pieces—about the CBC, the cult of the conductor, and government patronage of the arts—are not without bite: “The very words ‘Canadian Broadcast System’, wafted into the night air with the soporific white-noise comfort of a staff announcer confirming a station break, bring a catch to all loyal, and liberal, throats, a tremor to all tractionless spines, a welcome certainty that what we’ve just heard has been stamped culturally fit.”106
In 1968, as liner notes to his Columbia recording of Liszt’s piano transcription of the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, he offered “four imaginary reviews” by characters we can view as warmups to the 1980 piece: Sir Humphrey Price-Davies (snooty conductor), Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Heinkel (austere dialectician), S.F. Lemming, MD (reductive Freudian), and Zoltan Mostanyi (doctrinaire Communist). Despite their obviousness, these characters hold interest more than does the “fictionalized documentary for radio” from 1967, Conference at Chillkoot, which features keynote speaker Sir Norman Bullock-Carver, critic Homer Sibelius, avant-garde composer Alain Pauvre, and others. (The text was published by Piano Quarterly in 1974.)
Gould’s liner notes were often brilliant, from the youthful abstractions of his first Goldberg Variations to the wit of the Gibbons/Byrd disc and the considered judgments of his album of Hindemith piano sonatas, for which he won an album notes Grammy in 1974—the only Grammy awarded during his lifetime. (Two posthumous ones, for best classical album and best solo performance, went to the 1982 Variations; his final recording, the Beethoven Piano Sonatas nos. 12 and 13, got the best solo nod in 1984.) But the belaboured humour of the imaginary reviews is best left at the dinner table, if anywhere. Unfortunately, Gould lacked such a mundane outlet even as he had access to more public ones. His fractured ideas are communicated by fractured personalities, and the numerous characters allowed him the same liberties enacted by the High Fidelity self-interview of 1976, only now multiplied and intended as comical. There, irony was in fact operating, if delivered with sometimes ham-handed force; here, irony has given way to self-gratification and, hence, discomfiture. We do not know where to look.
One is reminded of the peculiar unease that attends the telling of jokes in social situations, where the person being told the joke is a sort of prisoner of the person telling it. And if the joke is bad, or suggests some sort of “grasp of essential relevance,” as one philosopher has defined sanity, then the unease redoubles.107 We listen to this fantasy recording of 1980 with a growing desperate wish to make it all stop, gazing longingly at some far corner of the room.
At the root of such low-level anxiety is not the thought that Glenn Gould, lost somewhere in the bowels of Columbia’s New York recording complex, had actually gone mad. It is, rather, the growing awareness that, toward the end of his life, Gould was no longer willing to maintain the fiction of a single narrative self. Instead he enjoyed the peculiar play of multiple selves that is short of fractured identity but some fairly long toss past what most of us would
allow ourselves to perform in front of other people, at least while sober. Glenn Gould is having a party in his own head. Everybody is invited, but he is the only person who gets to play.
Striking, in this connection, is an ostensibly stray remark from an article he wrote about fellow Columbia Records breadwinner Barbra Streisand for High Fidelity in May 1976, the same year as the self-interview, comparing her to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. After some overwrought analysis of the diva of boystown, then at her professional peak—to mention just her films, 1976 was the year of A Star Is Born, following Funny Girl in 1968, The Owl and the Pussycat in 1970, What’s Up, Doc? in 1972, and The Way We Were in 1973—Gould revealed the following cunning thought:
My private fantasy about Streisand is that all her greatest cuts result from dressing-room runthroughs in which (presumably to the accompaniment of a prerecorded orchestral mix) Streisand puts on one persona after another, tries out probable throwaway lines, mugs accompanying gestures to her own reflection, samples registrational couplings (super the street-urchin four-foot pipe on the sophisticated-lady sixteen-foot), and, in general, performs for her own amusement in a world of Borgean mirrors (Jorge Luis, not Victor) and word invention.108
Both imagery and presentation are telling here, from the self-consciously jokey reference to Borges’s labyrinthine self-referential fictions (Gould could not resist the now-dated near-pun with Victor Borge) to the personification of register ranges with organ pipes and stock characters. Then there is the central conceit of imagined mirror-front mugging. This last must surely call to mind scenes of fractured selfhood: tortured adolescents, drag queens, deteriorating Norma Desmond icons, even, nowadays, a serial killer’s preening psychosis. Here we confront the odd coincidence that Thomas Harris’s fictional killer Hannibal Lecter has a fondness for Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations. In film adaptations of the novels the music plays—albeit anachronistically—while the young Lecter injects himself with sodium thiopental as a medical student in 1951; it is also heard while the mature Lecter is mutilating a prison guard’s face as part of a later escape plan.
The serious part of Gould’s “private fantasy”—itself a phrase straight out of the adult-bookstore lexicon—is that which also concerns himself: namely, that the most interesting results in art may derive from a play of personae rather than the disciplined deployment of some unified aesthetic standpoint. The central irony of art would then be that unity is an emergent property rather than a precondition, an enacted but not intended distillate of crazy multiplicity.
From many takes, one recording. From many voices, one speaking. From many personae, one person.
Even more plausible is that, like Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes, Gould was lost inside the mirror-house of his own images, a prisoner of sprawling self-conception. Or that, like James Dean or Bobby Fischer, his fracturing was a function of the nascent late-century mediascape, an incandescent talent burning brightly and then out under the harsh light of public fascination. Perhaps we must say that Gould enacts elements of all these sick mini-narratives—the talent and paranoia of Fischer, the dark beauty of Dean, the creepy withdrawal of Hughes, the tortured self-medication of Presley? In any event, it is clear that he joins them as one of the first clear casualties of postmodern life, shattered remains of the cult of celebrity hastened by the very technology that made his success possible.109
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wonder
But, but—there is only one voice, not many, in the playing. The playing is not fractured and the playing is, finally, the thing.
Gould lived not only in his music, but as his music. The busloads of Japanese pilgrims, the academic conferences, the panel discussions, the mounting scholarly paper trail, the coffee-table books, films, commemorative stamps, devotional tattoos, and a bull market in personal relics—the whole apparatus of Gould’s cult of personality, his posthumous iconic existence—amount to nothing except a puzzle. And that puzzle is, How did a performer of other people’s music, however brilliant, a person who in another era would have been considered little better than a court hostler or an able cook, achieve a status of almost mythic dimensions?
The eccentricities always helped. They were the signs of Gould’s exchangeable identity, the tics and tropes of talent, if not genius. We recognize them instantly, and so they constituted a large part of the assumed identity of Gould as it passed from hand to cultural hand. Humming, hunching, finicking, bundling up. Gloves and scarf and cap. Voices in the head. Seclusion, isolation, hermitage. Later, as we learn more, hypochondria, complaints, phantom illnesses, pharmacological free fall. The real Glenn Gould, whoever he was, is replaced by a loose assemblage of odd traits and strange behaviours. These stand in for the real person. No, we can go further than that: they are the person insofar as that person is thought about, wondered at, revered.
Hence these non-narrative takes on Gould, this forbearance from the resolved explanatory account. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about Gustave Flaubert, said that the central issue in any biography of a creative mind is this one: how did this man become this great artist? But any such account one could offer for Glenn Gould would be finally in vain, because the name Glenn Gould is less a stable signifier of a person and more the call-sign of a blooming simulacral economy. Glenn Gould is everywhere and nowhere. He enacts the initial disappearance of self, priming the pump of this spectral transaction system, and then it acquires a growing energy of its own generation. Gould fascinates in part because he is so fascinating to so many. And it is of course beyond my power to hold the present book above this economy, in which it is inevitably implicated. There is nothing outside the text of Glenn Gould.
There is more to it even than this. To appreciate the full force of the issue, I hazard a cautious return to the idea of the formative moment. Cautious because we must not overestimate our ability to explain, even as we seek illumination of the life lived. So—we may first distinguish this category from that of defining moments, of which there are several. Gould noted the instant when he fell in love with the microphone, and so with recorded music, in 1950. He expressed his feelings of exaltation in solitude during the month-long sojourn in the Hamburg hotel room in 1958. He defended articulately at length, if sometimes contradictorily, his withdrawal from the concert stage in 1964. The turn to radio documentary in 1967 may be regarded as almost as significant. But he also hinted at a moment when his love for music—his peculiar version of it, I mean—was excited. The moment takes us back to Mr. Gibbons, who emerges as his kindred spirit and something like his occupying muse.
In the 1972 self-interview, Gould queried himself about his famous likes and dislikes. He expressed doubts about Beethoven and most of the later Mozart, works which he played often and recorded. To understand this, the interviewing Gould suggested a distinction, namely that “such performances simply provided you with tactile rather than intellectual stimulation.” The interviewed Gould resisted this, saying he “tried very, very hard to develop a convincing rationale” for a given Beethoven performance. The operative word is tried, and the first Gould did not hesitate to jump on this: there is a resistance there, an argument; the rationale may have been developed, but it was a chore—uphill work. By contrast, if the second Gould were to play a piece by his favourite composer, Orlando Gibbons, “then every note would seem to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.” That is, there would be no need to try to rationalize, still less to try to like, Gibbons’s “Salisbury” Pavan. And so, were the second Gould to sit down late at night, just him and CD 318 alone in his room, to play some Gibbons rather than some Beethoven, no “schizophrenic tendencies” between thought and deed would be in evidence.110
The self-analysis here gives way to a larger theory of musical history, just the sort of thing that Gould enjoyed sending up. Interviewed Gould cannot reject Beethoven, interviewing Gould argued, because that is to abandon a logic of historical progression
that moves music more and more into an expressive mode. Post-Renaissance art “achieves its communicative power,” he said, by creating a sort of tune-bath into which the listener is invited to sink. The player may massage an interpretation to his own ends, but the larger ideology cannot be evaded. And this is what the second Gould resented, and so has formed a pattern of hatred and rejection.
Of course, Gould did not reject the post-Renaissance composers at all, but this schizophrenic conversation about schizophrenic tendencies in his playing allowed him to communicate that idea even while not enacting it. He acknowledged he was not prepared to assert, as John Cage famously did, that “Beethoven was wrong!”111 That is, he did not believe linear motivic development in music was at a dead end, in need of replacement by Zen not-quite-silences such as Cage’s composition 4’33”. But he did want to say, in effect, that Gibbons was right. And that rightness, properly understood, combined with the memory of a formative moment, makes for a revealing insight about Gould the thinker, Gould the musician.
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