Recall the memory Gould shared two years before the self-interview of the Deller Consort rendition of anthems and madrigals by Gibbons, chosen as his no-contest first choice of desert island discs. Alfred Deller, a counter-tenor who died in 1979, had formed the Consort in the years after the Second World War in order to revive and celebrate the polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance, in particular the many pieces featuring that ethereal male range equivalent to contralto, mezzo-soprano, or soprano. This singing and its music have enjoyed a deserved vogue in the years since Deller’s (and Gould’s) death, but at the time Gould was growing up it was decidedly out of fashion. On this evidence alone, a teenager of 1948 or 1949 who found counter-tenor-led polyphonic Elizabethan church music the most moving thing he was ever to know would have been a very strange creature indeed.
What was it that drew Gould so profoundly to the music of Gibbons? First, I think, the felicitous combination of complex counterpoint and accessible melody: Gibbons’s music has an easy grace that belies its intellectual heft. The results are structurally beautiful, rich in the congruent incongruities that please the listener—here consciousness, engaged in active pattern-recognition, is stimulated over and over again. The themes of the vocal compositions are mostly devotional, given the times, but the other works follow the conventions of dance, the pavan, galliard, and allemande styles imported to England from Italy and France. All of this combines in a small but glittering oeuvre by the leading court musician of his time, and so it exactly answers to Gould’s stated preferences: clear line, contrapuntal depth, and melodic sweetness but without overbearing or predictable motives. This is music of “direct and emphatic” cadence, with “an amazing insight into the psychology of the tonal system.”
But there is also a problem waiting to be solved, at least in the non-vocal works. “Gibbons is an artist of such intractable commitment that, in the keyboard field at least, his works work better in one’s memory, or on paper, than they ever can through the intercession of the sounding-board.”112 In other words, there is a tension even here between the tactile and the intellectual, but one that calls out for an intercession: work still, but this time downhill work.
As we have seen, Gould the philosopher struggled, as most do, to articulate the being of music even as Gould the performer made music almost without pause. Does music lie in the mind, or in the fingers? Neither, really. Arguing with Geoffrey Payzant in his review, Gould wrote that “the mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of the individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.”113 But what lies between the notes is of course nothing, the silence of music’s possibility. Negotiating that space, performing that rite of passage—what a telling phrase that is—is just where mind meets music, and vice versa. The striking of the keys is in a sense no more than a means to that end. No more, but also no less.
What a wonder, then, for a performer to find a composer whose mind is so affinitive to his own that playing his music feels exactly like making it up as he goes. And what a wonder for us to hear playing of a score that is so seamlessly inhabited that it sounds just as it feels. Unfolded in time, it somehow manages at once to surprise us and to tell us exactly what we already know. Great music, like a will in law, is self-proving: its rightness lies precisely in its demonstration and nowhere else. And yet, at the same time—in the same time—this project is never complete or ideal because it negotiates the gaps, between notes, between intellect and touch, only as it acknowledges that they cannot ever be closed.
Since ancient times, philosophers have called this experience of conjoined expansion and recognition wonder. Wonder is that which excites the mind without offering itself to smooth understanding under the power of a ready concept. There is, I think, no better word for the exhilarating, demanding, and self-justifying experience of encountering a Glenn Gould interpretation—even if, sometimes, he has to try very, very hard to find the line of its reasoning for us to consider.
Gould, in an optimistic mood in 1962, on the wonder of art: “The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”114
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Takes
In life, as in concert performance, there is a non-take-twoness that we might well resent. We never have the benefit that the simplest recording studio confers, of doing it over one more time.
The musical take grabs a performance, pins it to the storage/retrieval technology. It is only taken if it can be put away in order to be taken out again and used. Played. Dictionary entries for the transitive verb take are among the longest to be found—perhaps indicating the number of ways and things we are concerned to take. For the noun take, the entry is short—the amount of type set up in a given session (archaic now); the continuous recorded scene or rendering in cinema and music; and the monies collected from a theatrical or sporting performance—and almost always accompanied by the definite article: the take.
The recording take reminds us, as the piece of music itself cannot, of the tension between part and whole that is the essence of music. The take records the moments of negotiation between past and future, held fitfully, contingently, in the loose frame of the present. We cannot see that frame, cannot isolate it, yet we cannot experience music or anything else without its presumptive presence. If presence is even the right word. Its functioning. Its allowance. Its grace.
Music is perception, but it is not only perception; it is also a perception of that which makes perception possible, a glimpse of the conditions making perception possible. Music is thought, but it is not cognition—it has no fixed meaning or even a determinate concept. It does not follow from this, from the non-cognitive status of music, that it is without import. On the contrary, music matters even though it does not mean. Music matters because it does not mean. Any anthropological or evolutionary account of music’s mattering, no matter how nuanced, will not be able to account for this mattering beyond meaning. Music embraces the promise of happiness given by all beauty.115
Music is like conversation, or a joke, or consciousness: all are structures of anticipation and resolution, expectation and incongruity, negotiations with time. We can plot the line of music just as we might plot the structure of a joke or a conversation, but this line or structure will not be the joke, the conversation, the music. Perhaps it is right to say: music is consciousness. Music’s play of expectation and resolution, its set-ups and punchlines, its surprising satisfactions and satisfactory surprises, are the stuff of mind itself. And like mind, a given piece of music must come to its end, must subside into silence. It must die, or die out— bang or whimper does not signify. But to die is not to perish. The performance ends but the piece lives on, to be played again. And again. Taken.
Music is not the food of love, it is the food of life. Music is eros, basic life energy, existing before parseable meaning and not reducible to it.
On October 4, 1982, at the decision of his father, the systems supporting the life of Glenn Gould—the bodily life, at least; perhaps not the consciousness he never recovered— were withdrawn. He was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery next to his mother; his father, having suffered the tragedy of outliving a child, would later join them there. On Glenn’s marker there is carved a piano, as well as the first two and a half bars of the aria from the Goldberg Variations.
A person is not one thing. A person is a composition improvised by the maker. We each can try to play it.
Start again. Da capo. From the top.
SOURCES
1 Geoffrey Payzant, in his Glenn Gould, Music and Mind (Toronto: Key Porter, 1978; rev. ed. 1984) will note the relation in reverse, namely that “Gould displays astonishing control over these consonants [of individual musical notes] in his piano playing (just as he does, incidentally, in
his speech)” (p. 117).
2 My transcription from the audio disc Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout (Columbia BS15, 1968).
3 Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 5. The narrator is noting the depression the main character, a London neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne, feels while reading a biography of Charles Darwin in order to please his literary daughter. This same neurosurgeon likes to play piano recordings of Bach while in the operating theatre. “He favours Angela Hewitt, Martha Argerich, sometimes Gustav Leonhardt. In a really good mood he’ll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould” (p. 21). Later, considering his four recorded versions of the Goldberg Variations, Perowne “selects not the showy unorthodoxies of Glenn Gould, but Angela Hewitt’s wise and silky playing which includes all the repeats” (p. 257).
A commentator has noted that this reference indicates Gould’s 1955 debut, “which is notable for its unorthodox tempos and for ignoring the ‘A’ section repeats” in the canons, the Fughetta, and the other fugue-like elements. This interpretation is looser in intellectual, not technical, terms; and that only arguably. Hewitt’s deliberately paced Goldberg, at 78 minutes, 32 seconds, is almost a half-hour longer than Gould’s 1981 version—that is, the slow Gould, which clocks in at 51 minutes, 18 seconds (the 1955 record is just 38 minutes, 34 seconds long). Hewitt, the recent Canadian star with a special genius for precise but emotional renderings of Bach—some find them overfond of rubato—has grown understandably weary of comparisons to Gould, whom she remembers seeing on Canadian television and thinking rather strange.
4 Tim Page, ed., The Glenn Gould Reader (Toronto: Key Porter, 1984), p. 438. [Hereafter GGR.]
5 My transcription from the liner notes; also GGR, p. 11.
6 Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (1997; rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), offers an accessible philosophical engagement with this problem.
7 BWV988, first published in 1741.
8 GGR, p. 23.
9 Reprinted in the liner notes to a reissue of the 1955 Goldberg Variations (Columbia MS7096); quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould,
p. 15. This chair can be heard creaking in most of the recordings of Gould’s career and so becomes, as Payzant notes, “as much a secondary trademark of his performance as his vocal noise” (p. 77).
10 My transcription from the liner notes; also GGR, p. 28.
11 CBC Radio broadcast (April 30, 1967); quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 37.
12 The art of interpretation is situated, on Gould’s own understanding of it, in critical, improvisational, and multilayered territory. There is no single correct interpretation of a piece, only a host of choices and references; as a result, any given musical interpretation speaks of and to the world at large, not just of and to the musical score. Gould’s writing shows the same range and complexity, the same serious playfulness. We could therefore say that he is more a hermenaut than a hermeneut, and conclude that we must incline ourselves likewise if we are to recite the score of his life. (My thanks to Joshua Glenn for clarification of this point.)
13 A fictional one, as it happens: the narrator of Christopher Miller’s Gould-inflected novel, Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); see note 18.
14 For those so inclined, this is a crude way of characterizing the difference between Sartrean existential alienation (the other as presumptive accuser or threat) and the existential recognition found in Levinas (other-being as forever calling me to ethical account).
15 Dennis Braithwaite, “Glenn Gould,” Toronto Daily Star (March 28, 1959); quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 3.
16 See, e.g., Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (English trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
17 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 69.
18 Miller’s Simon Silber is sometimes included as a fictional treatment of a Gould-like pianist. In fact the main character, though entertainingly eccentric, bears no resemblance to Gould and has none of his playful oddness; but there are some enlivening jokes about the connection. The novel, a series of commissioned biographical liner notes for Silber’s compositions, includes an explanation of the “Babbage” Permutations, a work dedicated to the mathematician Charles Babbage, inventor of the computer. Allegedly “inspired by the Schumann work, [it] is simply an exhaustive computer-generated set of permutations on the sequence ‘B-A-B-B-A-G-E’, played here in the evenhanded manner of Glenn Gould— whom my friend admired and resented to the end” (pp. 9–10). The narrator, an out-of-work philosophy graduate, was born on February 29, 1960, and “in off years” celebrated his birthday on March 1—my own birthday, incidentally, and not far off on the year (1963).
A more evident fictional treatment is David Young’s 1992 play, Glenn (rev. ed. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1998), which breaks Gould’s character into four alliterative facets (prodigy, performer, perfectionist, puritan) and explores the dimensions of his thought, like Girard’s film, with a repeated aria and thirty variations (scenes). Gould also makes a caricature appearance (along with Josephine Baker, Fred Astaire, and Django Reinhardt) in the 2003 animated film Les triplettes de Belleville.
To take just two recent works by Canadian writers that feature a fictional or inspirational Gould: (1) Gould makes a cameo appearance in Jonathan Bennett’s novel Entitlement (Toronto: misFit Books, 2008) encountered at the Fran’s all-night diner on St. Clair Avenue and—somewhat implausibly—heard quoting from memory the lyrics to a Clash song. And (2), in Jeramy Dodds’s poetry collection Crabwise to the Hounds (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2008), Gould features in four different poems: “Dictaphone reel of Glenn Gould’s last gasp” (p. 53); “Modulated timbre and cadence for baby grand” (p. 57), which quotes his “resentment” of concert playing’s “non-take-twoness’” as an epigraph; “Glenn Gould negotiates the Danube in the company of a raven” (pp. 63–66), a long prose poem; and “The easiest way to empty a seashell is to place it on an anthill” (pp. 48–51). The last begins, “At first his right and left hands hover over the keys / before falling to the ivory / like a luggage-bombed Boeing” and continues with a series of ever more elaborate metaphors for the attack style of the two hands: “His right skis to the North Star, seeing-eye dog of explorers. / His left pivots at the star and stumbles in perfect harmony / like an actor playing the Bullet-Riddled Man” (p. 49).
A reviewer who noted that appearances of Gould in Canadian poems are now so frequent as to amount to “a verse cliché” forgave Dodds his move only because the poet showed “the same idiosyncratic brilliance that the famed concert pianist injected into his own art.” Well, maybe. In any event, a non-exhaustive list of recent poets, not all Canadian, who mention or enlist Gould in verse form would include J.D. Smith, Kate Braid, Bruce Bond, Ann LeZott, Richard M. McErlean, Jonathan Holden, and Janine Canan.
The Goldberg Variations, in a related movement, have themselves inspired artwork in other forms, from Nancy Huston’s satirical debut novel Les variations Goldberg (1981; English trans. Montreal: Signature Editions, 1996), wherein one character deprecates “the frenzied charge of a Glenn Gould” attacking the piece, to a 1984 painting by Gerhard Richter, Goldberg-Variationen, in the shape of a long-playing vinyl disc. (I thank Angela Hewitt for the last example.)
19 This might be considered the inverse of the standard situation, whereby someone is inspired or elevated by the same music. For example, in the ultraviolent 2008 remake of the science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still—popularly dubbed “The Day Keanu Reeves Stood Still”—the visiting environmental clean-up alien Klaatu (Reeves, in an exquisitely expressionless performance) is in part persuaded to spare humanity when he hears the aria da capo and Variation 1 played (out of order) by Ryan Franks. “It’s beautiful,” he says. A good-looking scientist (Jennifer Connelly) hugging her stepchild also gives him pause. Humanity brutally exploits the planet, yes, but we’re not
all bad.
Meanwhile, the situation whereby a musician of talent is sent into despair, perhaps suicide, by overhearing or witnessing a musician of genius is a familiar one. Versions of it can be found in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979; New York: HarperCollins, 1981) and Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows (New York: Viking, 1956). Other stories, possibly apocryphal, have the songwriter Gerry Coffin pushed into madness by the example of Bob Dylan, and guitarists Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend overpowered and shamed by a Jimi Hendrix performance. The American novelist Mark Salzman, son of a musician, planned a musical career and entered Yale at sixteen to study it; after hearing cellist Yo-Yo Ma play at Tanglewood, he gave up in despair and majored in Chinese instead—surely a common experience. The sculptor Richard Serra, in a different dynamic for which we may be thankful, allegedly gave up painting after seeing Velázquez’s Las Meninas, despairing of bettering him.
20 This is how Martin Amis defines alcoholism, not philosophy, in his novel Night Train (New York: Vintage, 1997), perhaps after the remark made by Sara Mayfield that her friend F. Scott Fitzgerald was killing himself via layaway. Procrastination has also been so defined. My version has the historical sanction of the Socratic definition of philosophy as learning how to die. Cf. Plato, Phaedo Book I: “The philosopher desires death—which the wicked world will insinuate that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is the separation of soul and body—and the philosopher desires such a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth.”
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