Glenn Gould

by Mark Kingwell

  21 All quotations from Bernhard, The Loser (1991; English trans. Jack Dawson, New York: Vintage, 2006).

  22 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007).

  23 Quoted and discussed in Sacks, Musicophilia; quotations from Nabokov and Freud likewise. The Amis and Mann references are mine.

  24 The thought-experiment is taken from Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 10–23. Another vivid example: a sight-impaired man uses a cane to find his way. It seems hard to deny that the cane is part of his (extended) mind. The resulting position in philosophy of mind is sometimes called active externalism, and is considered novel. But note that the basic insight can be found already in the phenomenological literature (e.g., Heidegger’s discussion of the lecture hall, which exists as part of my concern before I enter it) and even in McLuhan’s notion of mass media as “extensions of the sensorium.” I have further discussion of this in Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City (Toronto and New York: Viking, 2008).

  25 Nor, for that matter, does McLuhan’s famous distinction between hot and cool media, deployed throughout his magnum opus, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), hold much water. McLuhan is strongest on the shifts in larger effect that changes in media bring to societies, and cleverly shows, among other things, how housing, money, and clocks function as media in the larger sense. More arresting still is the deft cultural criticism collected in his first book of media theory, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951; rev. ed. New York: Vanguard Press, 1967), a book that Gould surely knew well. It is here that the visual space/acoustic space distinction is first mooted. For more, see Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

  26 Huston, The Goldberg Variations, p. 90. The thought actually belongs to the character Bernald Thorer, whose inner monologue forms “Variation XV” in Huston’s thirty-two-part novel, a sequence of meditations entertained while the various characters listen to one of their number performing Bach’s composition on harpsichord.

  27 MacLeish’s familiar claim that “A poem should not mean / But be” is found in his poem “Ars Poetica” (1926). At first this paradoxical poem appears to flatly self-contradict: as with all ars poetica statements, it is a normative manifesto, an argument. Indeed, there are no less than six instances of the word should peppering its lines! Thus its meaning is clear and definitive; it has a thesis. But that thesis—that a poem should not mean—is overturned by the performance, indeed the very being, of the poem making that claim.

  And yet, at the very same time, that thesis is also brilliantly realized, not denied, in the series of deft concrete images: of things and experiences that move us, or (we might better say) that make us suddenly still. A flight of birds; the climbing moon; ripe fruit; an old medallion. A poem should be like that, “palpable and mute,” as it says itself. Mute? But if a poem does anything, it speaks. There it is, after all, sitting on the page (or coming from the speaker’s mouth). It’s as un-mute as almost anything we can imagine. And so it goes, idea and expression at eternal war with themselves within the special paradoxical immanence of this poem about poems, this thought about thoughts.

  Logically speaking, the contradiction can be resolved with a move to deepen the meaning of meaning. That is, poems are evaluated incorrectly if meaning is construed narrowly as propositional content or truth conditions. They have neither, and we make a mistake if we seek them in poetry, reducing living power to distilled summaries or morals. We make an even worse mistake if, failing to find propositional content or truth value, we denigrate poetry. If the notion of meaning is expanded, on the other hand, we can speak of the meaning of a poem, not just its being or its music. Of course that meaning will remain elusive, layered, fugitive; that is part of its appeal.

  28 Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2008).

  29 Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder (New York: Continuum, 2003), in the 33 1/3 series, is an apposite fictionalized memoir of his experience of high school in Boston when music, especially by innovative English bands, was structurally scarce. Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity (New York: Riverhead, 1995) does the same in the English context of roughly the same period (early 1980s). Both make it clear how important access to music, not just choice of it, functions as a marker of personal cultural identity.

  30 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979; English trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu is well aware of potential reductionism in this kind of analysis of taste; ultimately he works to highlight what he calls the paradox of the imposition of legitimacy. This paradox “is what makes it impossible ever to determine whether the dominant feature appears distinguished because it is dominant—i.e., because it has the privilege of defining, by its very existence, what is noble or distinguished as being exactly what itself is, a privilege which is expressed precisely in its self-assurance—or whether it is only because it is dominant that it appears endowed with these qualities and uniquely entitled to define them” (p. 92).

  31 My transcription from the audio disc.

  32 Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Grand Central Books, 2002). Bloom’s choice of one hundred names, organized according to a wacky kabbalistic diagram of his own devising, is controversial, even to himself: “Aside from those who could not be omitted—Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Vergil, Plato, and their peers,” Bloom says in his preface, “my choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. They are certainly not ‘the top one hundred,’ in anyone’s judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about these.” Bloom’s chosen ones include Lewis Carroll, but not Racine or Rabelais; Walter Pater, but not Addison or Hume; Iris Murdoch, but not Nabokov; Browning, but not Marvell. Wallace Stevens, yes; Auden, no. Flannery O’Connor, Hart Crane, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison—all here. Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell— absent. No then-living writers are included, so who knows about Anne Carson (conceded as probable), Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, John Updike, or Michael Ondaatje.

  33 Henry Perowne, for one. Ian McEwan’s fictional neurosurgeon and Angela Hewitt fan says he cannot make sense of the notion of writing of genius. Bloom himself passes over the likes of “Einstein, Delacroix, Mozart, Louis Armstrong.” Also, let it be said, Edmund Keane, W.G. Grace, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, Curtis Mayfield, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Wayne Gretzky. He does include Plato, the Yahwist, Saint Paul, Kierkegaard, and Freud. (For the record, in his Fred Astaire [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], Joseph Epstein considers and rejects the claim that Astaire was a genius, though he acknowledges that the dancer “was immensely, charmingly, winningly talented” [p. 185]. So much for that.)

  34 William Gass, “The Test of Time,” in Tests of Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 102–26. Gass speaks in the end of the incalculable value of “the combination of occasion, consciousness, and artful composition” that makes for art. “Don’t take the test,” he advises. “For works of art, the rule reads: never enter Time, and you will never be required to exit” (p. 126).

  35 The distinction is so common as to arise even in popular culture. In the 1963 film The War Lover (based on a John Hersey novel), Robert Wagner and Steve McQueen play rival B-17 pilots both in love with the same woman (Shirley Anne Field). McQueen’s character, aggressive and obsessed, steals her away from Wagner’s but, in the end, attempts a dangerous manoeuvre that results in his death. Trying to explain McQueen’s undeniable appeal over his own more reliable demeanour, Wagner attributes it to “the difference between talent and genius.” A New York Times reviewer of the day was not convinced: “Altogether [the three] make what at best is an average drama of love and jealousy into a small and tepid exposition of one man’s absurd
cantankerousness.”

  36 All quotations from Kant, Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790; English trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kant considered poetry the highest of the arts, followed by representational visual art and sculpture; music he regarded as too often noisome. “The case of music is almost like that of the delight derived from a smell that diffuses itself widely,” he said. “The man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief out of his pocket attracts the attention of all around him, even against their will, and he forces them, if they are to breathe at all, to enjoy the scent; hence this habit has gone out of fashion.” Well, no it hasn’t, for neither music nor scent.

  37 Again for those so inclined, it is worth noting here that this cluster of concepts aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the possible/actual. The virtual is neither possible nor actual, but instead the background concept of a range of possibilities itself; the possible is limited by its dyadic relation with the actual; it is the not-yet-actual and so, in a sense, always already determined by the actual.

  38 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 36. It is a curious omission in Agamben’s otherwise nuanced text that, taking so much care analyzing the notion of quodlibet and explicitly mentioning Gould in this connection, he does not seem to notice the connection to Goldberg Variation 30 and its classification as a musical quodlibet.

  39 Quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould, pp. 13–14.

  40 Quoted in Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), pp. 170–71; and Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (1989; rev. ed. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002), p. 153.

  41 Quoted in Bazzana, Wondrous Strange, p. 172; Peter Ostwald, Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 155–56; and mentioned in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 17.

  42 Jonathan Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould (1984; rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 106.

  43 Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (1998; rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 87, 90, 92. I am grateful for the experience of knowing and working as a teaching assistant to Natanson in the Yale College literature and philosophy class that informs this wise and brilliant book, the last he completed before his death in 1996.

  44 Slavoj Žižek, “Notes towards a politics of Bartleby: The ignorance of chicken,” Comparative American Studies 4 (2006): 375–94, at p. 381; reprinted in Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), ch. 6. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Bartleby in Manhattan,” in American Fictions (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 8; the essay was first published in 1981.

  There are of course multiple Bartlebys, even speaking only politically; Armin Beverungen and Stephen Dunne, in “ ‘I’d Prefer Not To’: Bartleby and the Excesses of Interpretation,” Culture and Organization 13, no. 2 (June 2007): 171–83, suggest that this interpretive fecundity is itself a site of textual surplus or excess. The story generates an ungraspable and always unresolved remainder not exhausted by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Žižek’s “political” Bartleby, Gilles Deleuze’s “originary” Bartleby, or Agamben’s “whatever” Bartleby. “On the basis of these interpretations we derive a concept of excess as the residual surplus of any categorical interpretation, the yet to be accounted for, the not yet explained, the un-interpretable, the indeterminate, the always yet to arrive, precisely that which cannot be captured, held onto or put in place” (p. 171).

  The character Bartleby refuses to be assimilated within the story; the philosopheme “Bartleby” likewise refuses to submit completely to any single interpretive assignment or form of consumption! For more on this issue and its relation to political critique, see Mark Kingwell, “Masters of Chancery: The Gift of Public Space,” in Kingwell and Patrick Turmel, eds., Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space (Kitchener-Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009).

  45 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 36.

  46 My transcription from the audio disc Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout.

  47 My transcription from the audio disc Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout.

  48 Jarrett hums and moans, sometimes sings wordlessly, at various moments in his astonishing free-form concert in Köln, Germany, in 1975. Later studio recordings of jazz standards, done in 1983 with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette—a trio still recording and performing together a quarter-century later—feature even more marked vocalizing, sometimes to the point of irritating the listener (well, this listener). Cf. Setting Standards: New York Sessions (New York: ECM, 2008), the multiple-disc reissue of the original releases from 1984 and 1985.

  Jarrett has not recorded a great deal of classical music, but he has released some Bach performances, and his version of the Goldberg Variations offers yet another distinct interpretive argument for that great work. His choice of harpsichord rather than piano is curious, if historically accurate, and makes for a somewhat churchy (or maybe lair-of-the-evil-genius) rendering—what Gould would disparage as the “sewing-machine” effect.

  49 GGR, pp. 35–36.

  50 I can certainly recall the baffled rage that erupted at a 1979 Toronto concert by the British pop group Queen, who walked off the stage during a playback of their monster hit “Bohemian Rhapsody”—they wouldn’t even pretend to realize its overwrought lushness live. In a different but related category are those artists who are reviled as frauds for either (1) not singing on their own recordings (e.g., the dreadlocked 1980s duo Milli Vanilli, exposed as gyrating mannequins fronting other people’s voices) or (2) trying to pass off a recorded performance of their singing as a live one (e.g., Ashlee Simpson appearing on the television show Saturday Night Live and having her lip-sync routine spoiled by a technical glitch).

  51 Of course this is just the barest beginning in Kant’s a priori investigation of human knowledge in The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781; English trans. Werner Pluhar and Patricia Kitcher, New York: Hackett, 1996). There must also be “categories of understanding” (twelve in total, broken under the four headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality) and the so-called ideas of reason (self, universe, God), not to mention the resolution of various antinomies via analytic reasoning.

  52 GGR, p. 92; the immediate context is a 1962 High Fidelity essay in praise of Richard Strauss.

  53 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (English trans. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre’s expansive “critique of everyday life” includes reflections on music, architecture, and the relation between them under the sign of consciousness and the city.

  54 GGR, p. 237.

  55 My transcription from the liner notes; also GGR, p. 13.

  56 Quoted and discussed in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 2: Studies in Social Theory (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1964), p. 199.

  57 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1944; English trans. 1950; rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); quotations from pp. ix, 3, 6, and 11.

  58 Stephen Potter’s deadpan satires on this topic are instructive. In Gamesmanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1947), Lifemanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), One-Upmanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), and Supermanship (New York: Random House, 1958), he provides all the essential tactics for true gamesmanship, which is the art of being one up by putting the other fellow one down.

  59 See James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987). Carse views the distinction negatively: finite games, preoccupied with winning and finishing, dominate in life as well as sports; infinite games are, for him, revelatory of deeper human possibilities. Carse has larger metaphysical ambitions, not always so well judged. For example, he solves the genius question in the book’s third section, “I Am the Genius of Myself,” by claiming that each one of us is, well, the
genius of him- or herself. There you go.

  60 For more, see Huizinga, Homo Ludens, ch. 10; also Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn, The Idler’s Glossary (Emeryville: Biblioasis, 2008). To be sure, the standard Greek view at the time of Aristotle was that music was straightforwardly useful, a form of moral education.

  61 Gould’s love affair with this instrument—“It’s quite extraordinary, it has a clarity of every register that I think is just about unique. I adore it,” he told Jonathan Cott (Conversations, p. 47)—has been well documented by himself in various liner notes and interviews, and discussed ably by Katie Hafner in A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); see also the crisp discussion in Payzant, Glenn Gould, pp. 104–108.

  62 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_famous_people_have_ Asperger’s_Syndrome

  63 If one includes fictional characters who might have Asperger syndrome, the list welcomes, among others, Bert from Sesame Street (not Ernie), Lisa Simpson, Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes), Dilbert (of Dilbert), Pippi Longstocking, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Ignatius Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and—yes—who could forget the poster boy for social withdrawal, Bartleby the Scrivener. Alert readers will notice that the title of Toole’s novel is itself a reference to Swift’s dry version of how we may spot the genius.

  And in case none of this is convincing, note how one possible Asperger case, Gould, is drawn repeatedly to the imagery of another, Schulz: in a liner note from 1973 the pianist notes that “as his career came to a close, Hindemith drew consistency around him like a Linus blanket” (GGR, p. 148). Then, in a 1974 Piano Quarterly article about the eccentric musician Ernst Krenek, Gould mentions how he goes outside only after “mobilizing my backup scarf as a Linus blanket” (GGR, p. 189). Coincidence?