“Glenn Gould Variations” by himself and his friends

The more I read and learn about Glenn Gould, the more mysterious seem his life and art—almost as if, rather frighteningly, he were a visitor from another planet—which is the only way some of us can account for Jesus Christ. That Gould was, or decided to be, a Canadian makes the mystery even more acute, for we Canadians are as unlikely to produce this sort of being as the Swiss or the Icelanders would be to produce a W.B. Yeats. To our credit, however, we not only let him live; a lot of the time we admired him and bought his records (although we reacted to his abandonment of the concert stage as if he had gone out of his way to insult his supporters), and when he suddenly died two years ago at the age of 50, a large number of Canadians knew that something extraordinary—not to be explained in the terms available—had been happening in his life, his death, and now with his after-life, in his art. Of course we Canadians, if not exactly full of surprises, have an occasional one to flourish before the world. It seems unlikely, in the ordinary course of nature, that we would even consent to a courtly and witty intellectual as our Prime Minister for 16 years. Many people, of course, couldn’t bear the idea of Gould or Trudeau, but still we had them, to our credit; quite in the way our best selves, as Matthew Arnold said, can at least occasionally put our normal natures to shame.

This handsome book is not a biography, although it contains a number of biographical details which were unknown to me. But like Geoffrey Payzant’s Glenn Gould: Music and Mind (1978) it deals with what Gould has given us, and does not bother with what he has, with the reserve of the last Puritan, withheld. The book is by “himself and his friends,” and therefore we get as close as perhaps we ever will to the heart of the matter. It’s respectful all right but not sycophantic, and its friendliness is on the whole very charming. It gives one a good feeling to see that so many of the contributors who aren’t musicians write so intelligently about music. The musicians also write well, with a general absence of the pomposity and stiffness so native to their prose. The Gould “circle” (never very close to its centre) was extraordinarily civilized—grateful enough to have been touched by genius but with enough good breeding not to pry into the isolation of another, be he ever so beloved.

He, the centre, on the contrary, never held back from intruding on his friends—for long hours and at any time of the day and (especially) night. I am sure that the friends occasionally came up with something that Gould considered bright enough to be remembered, but mostly he just wanted oral company, by telephone wire—not just to be there, of course, but to provide a tinglingly appreciative presence as listener. That was just one example of the control that he had to have for all the details of the strange life that Providence had placed at his disposal. And when he was deliberately out to listen, when he was collecting material for his CBC documentaries, he wasn’t about to give himself to the sociological doctrine of ‘mass observation.’ In his own way he would later spread all these disparate materials on his desk (really in his tape machine) and, like T.S. Eliot, pick exactly what he wanted in order to create an expressive counterpoint and form. Control.

Like Clive Bell, then, Glenn Gould believed in the significant form that could lay its magic hand on the one damned thing after another that is ordinary existence and give it meaning, not only in art but in the art of life. The only trouble was that in making The Idea of North and The Latecomers he had devised, or instinctively accepted, the notion that words could be counterpointed like musical sounds. It wasn’t so much the fact that a lot of the words in these ‘documentaries’ had no special interest or tune, but that (though the brilliant Gould claimed the opposite) even the most receptive listener simply could not grasp several lines of prose (or verse) going on at once. Particular meanings inevitably interfere with this process, by which, paradoxically, the silent stare of the North was supposed to deliver its grave beauty. Some people find in counterpoint the most difficult listening skill to acquire, but that it is far from impossible all lovers of Bach will aver. That there is no added meaning attached to the sounds clearly makes it more practicable to follow several lines at once. When, in The Music of Poetry, T.S. Eliot writes that in modern verse “there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter” he is anticipating Gould’s passionate attachment to the theory of simultaneous lines in language. But Eliot’s own verse, in perhaps striving for this, seems content with witty juxtaposition. And yet Gould could, after all, be right. In a chapter entitled “Glenn Gould: Bach in the Electronic Age,” Richard Kostelanetz tells us:

Gould watches a lot of television, exploits his hi-fi set, reads several newspapers (products of wire services), carries a radio with him all the time, and at home sometimes listens to both the AM and FM simultaneously. “Quite mysteriously, I discovered that I could better learn Schoenberg’s difficult piano score, Opus 23, if I listened to them both at once, the FM to hear music and the AM to hear the news. I want to stay in touch.” Gould can learn a Beethoven score while carrying on a conversation; and often he reads one of the many magazines to which he subscribes while listening attentively to someone on the telephone.

All this may sound disagreeably excessive or incredible, but there is no reason to believe that we are on his level just because we like his playing.

I mean love, worship, his playing. I am very proud that I recognized its quality right away in a CBC broadcast many years ago. Of course I wasn’t the only one there at the beginning by any means—but the interesting thing was that there were, almost immediately, many dissenters, and right up to the time of his death there was a good deal of admonitory finger-wagging from academics, who tend to distrust invasion and recreation of their favorite areas. On the other hand one cannot but admire unprofessional and zealous music-lovers, but they are no doubt also subject to that habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies which men share with sheep. Gould’s vocal involvement with the music during performances particularly annoyed them, and though he was eager to confess that their irritation in this matter was justified, he could not change. But along with this irritant there was always the nagging feeling that what was being done, though ‘technically’ perfect, was heretical. All the Muses care about, however, is for their chosen one to come out from the shadows of habit and to be utterly himself. Gould risked pretty well everything in his commitment and was rewarded with monstrous powers of concentration and facility. One heard of flawless performances of complicated music at sight, of incredible feats of memory and recall, of public (or studio) presentations of piano works (often in several versions) without any more ‘practise’ than is covered by thoughtful consideration. It was not surprising that he was put out if a fellow artist pointed out a ‘difficult passage.’ What had ‘difficulty’ to do with the music?

Though Gould had a wide and frequently eccentric range of interest among composers, it was his playing of the contrapuntal Bach that became his most characteristic area, in the service of which all ten fingers of equal strength and individuality read their parts like a group of expert chamber musicians. The Master who controlled all the lines did not always achieve what he wanted (hence the celebrated ‘take twoness’ and the harsh dissatisfaction with the easy victories of some early recordings), but when he did, the playing emerged with transcendental purity—a condition of wonder, freshness, cleanness, and serenity which Gould called ecstasy. There are some very odd byways indeed in the intense musical journey (really a pilgrimage, and really much more than simply musical), but in his audacity the prophet’s weakness is always eccentricity. The late recordings like the 1977 Sibelius and, especially, the Goldberg Variations, may never be equalled in their completeness and virtue. And, of course, with the strange logic of Providence the last Goldberg (1982) complemented the first (1955), so that the short life closed with formal propriety. The extraordinary luminosity of this last recording was apparent to so many listeners that it has evidently memorialized a moment of grace in the history of music, a kairos.

Glenn Gould has said and written so many provocative and at times profound things about music—and many other subjects—that his playing, as compared with that of the familiar concert star, must always have a plus sign attached to it. There are other pianists in the category of philosopher-players, like Charles Rosen, but even among them there is no one who seems to be so much more of a creative artist than just a performing one. We were not surprised to hear, pretty early on, that Gould wished to compose and then actually did. We were surprised, as his brilliant life unfolded, at the small number of these compositions, their almost perverse conservatism, and at the nature of his Opus 1, the String Quartet, which was not, with all its other good qualities, really promising. But Gould read music as William Blake read the Bible, and when he uttered the results in his playing it became, just as inevitably, a creative act. Every note counted, exactly in the way composers think of their textures, and so it was as if he were the composer—reading as an imitation of making. In the end therefore it was not so much of an anomaly to refer to ‘the Music of Glenn Gould.’

Whatever the books that are to come on Glenn Gould, Variations will no doubt remain the most charming and humane, and the closest to a remarkable life that darts in and out of these chapters so that subject and object form a counterpoint of the type our hero loved. The book is splendidly put together by John McGreevy, and there is no contribution that does not add its own illumination, its own variation on the theme of being touched by greatness. All these men—were there no women?—discovered in Gould some pristine memory of what had seemed in youth a possibility, only to fade as tough maturity clamped down. But this time it did not fade, and the sense of wonder remains in the book, freely confessed by the toughest of minds. Apart from the contributions of Gould himself, which are uniformly brilliant and often profound—once you get used to the ornate vocabulary and the studied humour—the sections I liked the best come from those who are not professional musicians: Robert Fulford, Robert Hurwitz, John Dann, and John Roberts. Perhaps there was something in Gould’s being essentially self-educated that established a temperamental tuning with those who do more listening than playing. In any case their contributions are unusually natural and perceptive. The essay called “Reminiscences” of John Roberts is something else; the quietness and beauty of his friendship give a quality to the article that I found extraordinarily moving.

As might be expected, one of the features of Variations is a large number of fine photographs, some of them providing a more revealing commentary than prose on the various facets of genius.

One of the lessons that Glenn Gould left us concerns the basic silliness of emulation and public rating in the development of one’s talent. What he discovered, in silence and alone, cannot be imitated. Gould himself was fiercely anti-competitive, and he not only despised musical competitions, he called them wicked. In the matters to which he was committed there is no competition. As Eliot puts it:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious.

This great and positive book ignores what might have been normally expected in an unpropitious time and place, in order to celebrate a Canadian mystery. ♦

Chester Duncan is a Winnipeg composer and critic. An interview with him about his own music will appear in Arts Manitoba, Vol. 4, No. 3.