Glenn Gould
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64 Alfred Bester, “The Zany Genius of Glenn Gould,” Holiday 35, no. 4 (April 1964), p. 153; quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 95. “Here reason tottered,” Bester had commented at the time, but philosopher Payzant is more astute. He knows that Gould is not being merely mischievous; he is telling us something about how he thinks of music.
65 Quoted in Bernard Aspell, “Glenn Gould,” Horizon 4, no. 3 (January 1962), p. 92; and in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 105. By a curious inversion, his single recording on organ, of the first nine fugues from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, sound awfully piano-like.
66 My transcription from the audio disc Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout.
67 Heard, among other places, on Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout. Two other related anecdotes are labelled “The Last Resort” (Gould’s own name for the expedient of turning on the vacuum or radio) and “The Half Hour” (Gould’s claim that “everything there is to know about playing the piano can be taught in half an hour”; see Cott, Conversations, p. 31). This desert story also includes a backstage encounter with Kafka executor Max Brod and his female companion, who congratulate Gould on his recital of Beethoven’s Second Concerto. The punchline, delivered in a heavy German accent, is that the woman calls it “unquestionably ze finest Mozart I haf ever heard!” (Cott, Conversations, p. 35).
68 Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 88. Payzant’s larger discussion of musical idealism and the issues of tactility versus intellect in music is excellent; see chs. 5 and 6.
69 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 163.
70 The best book I know on the play of taste and distinction in popular music is Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007), not least because of how Wilson, a music critic, manages to weave an analysis of Hume, Kant, Veblen, and Bourdieu through his personal engagement with the music of Céline Dion.
71 It is not, perhaps, surprising that Bourdieu uses Clark as a handy example of “popular taste,” distinct from both “middlebrow” (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) and “legitimate” taste (Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier). With Petula Clark, he says, we find “songs totally devoid of artistic ambition or pretension” (p. 16).
72 GGR, p. 304.
73 GGR, p. 323.
74 Quoted in Bazzana, Wondrous Strange, p. 465; Friedrich, Glenn Gould, p. 225.
75 GGR, p. 415.
76 I thank Richler biographer Charles Foran for this quotation.
77 In fact it is more complicated than that. Susan Sontag, in “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review (1964), suggests that camp is the refuge of the dandy in an age of mass culture, when traditional, hyper-refined aestheticism is no longer a viable option: “As the dandy is the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture” (note 45). Oscar Wilde is the key transitional figure between the high culture aesthete and the hi-lo reversals of the camp dandy. I would place Gould as the dark mirror-image of Wilde’s brightness. He, too, marks the transition to mass culture and has the same preoccupations with aesthetics-as-ethics, though with an opposite valence. His avowed preferences for motels, diners, Detroit-built cars, and the music of Petula Clark may be read as his form of camp engagement with popular culture.
78 GGR, p. 326.
79 GGR, pp. 327–28.
80 My transcription from the audio disc.
81 My transcription from the audio disc.
82 GGR, p. 390.
83 For a sobering treatment of these issues, see Ken S. Coates et al., Arctic Front: Defending Canada in the Far North (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2008). Coates and his colleagues argue for national policies that would integrate and support a distinctively Aboriginal north, best served by designation as a development-free zone, like the Antarctic.
84 Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (1972; rev. ed. New York: Ballantine, 1993), p. 57; quoted and discussed in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 52 ff.
85 GGR, pp. 445–46.
86 GGR, p. 447.
87 GGR, p. 448.
88 See, for example, T.W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (1947; rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Continuum, 1976); also Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed” and “A Matter of Meaning It,” in his Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
89 See Payzant, Glenn Gould, ch. 8, for this illuminating discussion.
90 I will not attempt to cite the vast philosophical literature on this topic, including psychoanalytic, critical theoretic, and existential works, but two books are worth singling out: Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), which argues persuasively that we moderns are more concerned with authenticity (being true to oneself ) than those in earlier eras, say, Shakespeare’s Elizabethan time, when the central issue was sincerity in speech (being true to another); and Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), which includes a crisp analytic treatment of the desire-ordering that goes into the human project of wholeheartedness. My thanks to Lauren Bialystok for discussion of these issues.
91 GGR, p. 368.
92 GGR, p. 354.
93 GGR, p. 216.
94 GGR, p. 219.
95 Botstein, a violinist, essayist, and college administrator, articulates in a manner now almost unknown this strain of barbarians-at-the-gates cultural critique; see his “Outside In: Music on Language,” in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, eds., The State of the Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
96 This may be signalled by the sad fact that Stockhausen’s clearest contemporary identity is that of the man who declared the 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to be “the greatest work of art” imaginable. That he meant art in the sense of sublime Luciferian violence was naturally lost in the ensuing controversy.
97 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979; English trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). It is worth remembering that Lyotard’s focus was neither technology nor art but knowledge: his argument is epistemological.
98 See Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Danto pegs the death of art to the year 1964 and the exhibition of work by Andy Warhol, that well-known Asperger sufferer, though one might think Duchamp’s readymades had already hammered the spike in part way.
99 GGR, p. 358.
100 GGR, p. 355.
101 GGR, p. 353.
102 Notably that of Scarborough native Mike Myers: see Shrek and its sequels, the Austin Powers movies, So I Married an Axe Murderer, and justly forgotten Saturday Night Live sketches about a store that sells only Scottish items, including the inherently hilarious foodstuff haggis.
103 All quotations here are my transcriptions from the audio disc and liner notes.
104 He is called Teddy Slotz in Jonathan Cott’s 1974 conversation with Gould about the “doppelgänger syndrome” and tricksterism running through Gould’s thought (first published in Rolling Stone magazine). Cott hazards that Slutz/Slotz is a takeoff of Lorin Hollander, the celebrated American pianist and conductor. Gould insists on his New York cabdriver provenance. To my ear, the closest cultural analogue is a somewhat obscure one: Slutz sounds like the drunken occult writer Sidney Redlitch, played by Ernie Kovacs in the 1958 witch-love comedy Bell, Book, and Candle (d. Richard Quine).
105 Online amazon.com review.
106 GGR, p. 399.
107 Herbert Fingarette, “Insanity and Responsibility,” Inquiry 15 (1972): 6–29.
108 GGR, p. 309.
109 The psychologist Jordan Peterson suggested this reading of Elvis
Presley at a conference on new classical music (Royal Ontario Museum, 2005); the reading of Hughes as driven mad by postmodernity is nicely portrayed in Steven Carter’s novel I Was Howard Hughes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).
110 GGR, p. 47.
111 The story is that Cage made his first version of the remark during a lecture about Erik Satie at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in 1950. He then repeated it often, notably to the poet John Ashbery during a Manhattan cocktail party; Ashbery spread the tale further. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), music critic Alex Ross’s accessible account of music’s later development, Cage’s view is discussed as part of a general avant-gardiste turn in the United States during the 1950s; see ch. 14.
112 My transcription of the liner notes; also GGR, p. 13.
113 GGR, p. 447.
114 GGR, p. 246, as part of the general argument of the 1962 essay “Let’s Ban Applause,” first published in the journal Musical America; also quoted in Payzant, Glenn Gould, p. 64.
115 This promise may be disappointing as well as moving: see, for example, Alexander Nehemas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and, for an optimistic but finally unconvincing extension of the argument, Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In writing about this remarkable artist I have tried to create a vision of his thought suitable to the contradictions and complicated pleasures of the post-historical world. Along the way I have been aided by many works: several useful biographies of the narrative kind, especially Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (2004); Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (1989; 2002); and (advisedly) Peter Ostwald, Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius (1998); the indispensable Glenn Gould Reader (1984), edited by Tim Page; Jonathan Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould (1984); and the illuminating early philosophical study by the late Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould, Music and Mind (1978; 1984). I have not attempted to document, let alone assess, the vast volume of scholarly Gouldiana that grows by the year, but various books and articles of larger philosophical interest are cited in Sources.
My thanks to Diane Turbide at Penguin Canada and general editor John Ralston Saul for the opportunity to be part of the Extraordinary Canadians series. Esther Shubert provided extremely valuable aid with research, permissions, and proofing. The Glenn Gould Estate and Key Porter Books were generous with permission to quote directly from Gould’s published writings. Discussions with many friends have been useful, sometimes especially when not explicitly about music. A conversation and performance by Angela Hewitt in February 2009 clarified for me the ways in which interpreting J.S. Bach is so challenging and rewarding.
Small portions of this work appeared first in The Globe and Mail and in volume ten of Alphabet City: Suspect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). Audiences at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2005), Groningen University in the Netherlands (2008), Trinity College, University of Toronto (2008), and Cornell University (2009) listened patiently to early versions of some ideas and offered valuable feedback. Finally, my students in several recent seminars on philosophy of art have been important and I would like to think mostly willing participants in thinking about the mystery that is music. Thank you all.
All the words in this book were composed with Gould’s music audible in the background. I do not count that as listening, except merely factually; but it may be understood as an optimistic osmotic gesture. Listening to Gould in a real sense—that is, playing every recorded piece of his at least three times and some, such as the 1981 Goldberg Variations and his single Byrd and Gibbons disc, too many times to count—has been the great gift of this project. In 2007 Columbia Records released a boxed compact disc set of every LP Gould recorded for them, reproduced with facsimile covers. This treasure is something no Gould fan can be without; in a perfect world a version of it would accompany each copy of this book.
CHRONOLOGY
1932 Glenn Herbert Gould is born on September 25 to Russell Herbert Gould and Florence Emma Gould in their home at 32 Southwood Drive in the Beach, Toronto. He is their only child.
1938 At the age of five, Gould gives his first public performance for the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the Business Men’s Bible Class (of which Bert Gould was a member) in Uxbridge, Ontario, on June 5. He also accompanied his parents’ vocal duet.
1945 Gould makes his professional debut on organ at the Eaton Auditorium on December 12, playing Mendelssohn’s Sonata no. 6, the Concerto Movement by Dupuis, and the Fugue in F Minor by J.S. Bach.
1946 After passing both his piano exams in June 1945, with the highest marks of any candidate, and his written theory exams, Gould is awarded the Associate diploma at the Toronto Conservatory of Music (later the Royal Conservatory of Music) on October 28.
On May 8 Gould gives his first performance with an orchestra, playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 4 at Massey Hall with the Conservatory Symphony Orchestra.
1947 Gould makes his professional debut on piano in the Secondary School Concerts series on January 14 and 15 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, playing all four movements of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 4.
On October 20, Gould makes his official recital debut as a professional pianist at Eaton Auditorium as part of the International Artists series; the recital includes works by Scarlatti, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn.
1949 At age sixteen, Gould has his original work played in public for the first time, during a student performance of Twelfth Night by the Malvern Drama Club on February 18; he plays his own piano suite.
1950 On December 24 at 10:30 A.M. on the CBC, Gould gives his first professional radio broadcast, playing a Mozart sonata in B-flat Major [K 281] and a Hindemith Sonata in B-f lat, op. 37. Gould recalled this event as the beginning of his “love affair with the microphone.”
1952 The first public performance of the Goldberg Variations is broadcast on the CBC on June 21.
1953 Gould tapes his first commercial recording, of Berg’s Sonata, at the Bloor Street United Church with Hallmark Records on November 3; this is also his first opportunity to publish writing, in the form of liner notes.
1955 Gould has his American debuts, in Washington, D.C. (January 2), and New York City (January 11), playing works by Gibbons, Sweenlinck, Webern, Beethoven, Berg, and J.S. Bach. The day after the New York performance, David Oppenheim, director of artists and repertoire for Columbia Records’ Masterworks division, contacts Gould’s manager to offer Gould an exclusive recording contract—the first time Columbia signs an artist based on one hearing.
Gould signs a three-year contract with Columbia on May 1, making him the first Canadian to sign with this label; he announces that he wants his first recording to be of the Goldberg Variations.
Gould records the Goldberg Variations in Columbia’s 30th Street studios from June 10 to 15. Even before the album is released, word of Gould’s talent and eccentricities spreads: the disc becomes the most anticipated recording debut in classical-music history.
1956 The Goldberg Variations is released in January— an instant popular and critical success.
On May 21, the world premiere of Gould’s String Quartet in F Minor, op. 1, written between April 1953 and October 1955, is performed by the Montreal String Quartet on CBC’s French radio network.
1957 During the summer, Gould embarks on his first overseas tour, beginning in the Soviet Union, the first Canadian musician and the first pianist from North America to appear in post-Stalinist Russia. His performances in Moscow and Leningrad are overwhelming successes. Among other stops Gould also performs in Berlin with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan.
1958 After the first performance, in Salzburg, of Gould’s second overseas tour in late summer through to winter, he complains of a cold due to
the air conditioning. He feels well enough to perform in Brussels, Berlin, and Stockholm but cancels all performances for October, citing bronchitis. Later he describes his month-long stay in Hamburg as the best month of his life.
1959 During Gould’s December 8 visit to Steinway in New York, chief technician William Hupfer playfully slaps Gould on the back. Soon after, Gould begins complaining of a major injury and begins daily orthopedic and chiropractic treatments. He also cancels three months of concerts, including a European tour scheduled for February 1960, and files suit against the company and Hupfer, demanding $300,000 in personal damages.
1960 Gould gives his first Canadian public performance of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in December.
1962 On August 8, Gould broadcasts his first attempt at a radio documentary, Arnold Schoenberg: The Man Who Changed Music, on the CBC.
1964 Gould’s last public performance is on April 10, a recital in Los Angeles, where he plays four fugues from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue and the Partita no. 4 in D Major, Beethoven’s Opus 109, and Hindemith’s Third Sonata.
1965 In June, Gould takes CN Rail’s Muskeg Express to Churchill, Manitoba; while aboard he meets and befriends Wally Maclean, a retired surveyor. The trip becomes the inspiration for “The Idea of North.”
1967 “The Idea of North” is aired December 28 on the CBC Radio program Ideas. “The Latecomers” (1969), about Newfoundland, and “Quiet in the Land” (1977), about Mennonites, complete the so-called Solitude Trilogy.
1974 Gould wins the only Grammy awarded in his lifetime, for Best Album Notes—Classical (Hindemith: Sonatas for Piano, performed by Glenn Gould).
1975 On July 26 Gould’s mother dies of a stroke at eighty-three; unable to overcome anxiety about hospital visits, Gould has final conversations with her by telephone.
1979 Gould’s film about Toronto, including a scene of him singing Mahler to the elephants at the Toronto Zoo, debuts on September 29.