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Great, GREAT article on Glenn Gould

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 8, 2002 at 09:12:46

Gouldism by Terry Teachout
COMMENTARY December 2002

IN THOMAS Harris's best-selling1988 horror novel The Silence of the
Lambs, Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist turned serial killer, tells his
captors that he is willing to help them track down another murderer in
return for certain privileges. Among them is music in his cell: "Glenn
Gould, The Goldberg Variations? Would that be too much?" Lecter's
request is granted, and (both in the novel and in the 1991
Oscar-winning film version) Gould's recording can be heard in the
background as the good doctor slaughters his insufficiently wary
guards and escapes into the night.

This passing reference in a novel and movie is noteworthy not merely
because classical music usually plays so minor a role in American
popular culture but also because it offers a glimpse of the extent to
which the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who died twenty years ago this
October, succeeded in worming his way into that same culture. At first
glance, Gould seems an unlikely pop-culture hero. A reluctant
performer who suffered from chronic stage fright, he stopped giving
public concerts in 1964, and few of his American admirers ever saw him
play (though he appeared with some regularity on Canadian TV). His
repertoire was narrow and determinedly intellectual, consisting mainly
of the music of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Hindemith, Mozart, and
Schoenberg. No more uncompromising artist has ever lived-yet Gould
was, and is, one of the best-known classical musicians of the 20th
century.

From 1964 on, Gould's reputation was sustained almost entirely through
his recordings, and in particular through his first commercially
released LP. This was the version of Bach's Goldberg Variations done
by the then twenty-two-year-old pianist for Columbia in 1955, five
months after his American debut performances at Washington's Phillips
Collection and New York's Town Hall. The album has never been out of
print, and though Gould came to dislike the interpretation and
re-recorded the work a year before his death, it is the earlier
version with which he continues to be identified. In the words of the
music critic Tim Page:

[I]t quickly became one of those rare classical recordings that were
deemed bona-fide intellectual events by the public at large. If you
were young in the 1950's, and you attended the films of Bergman and
Fellini, were hip to the existentialists in Paris and the "Beats" on
the road, and followed the daunting stylistic twists and turns from
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other modern jazz artists, it was more
than likely that you were a Gould fan as well. . . . His playing had
the same sort of tough/tender dichotomy exemplified by such cultural
icons as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

This somewhat breathless but basically accurate tribute comes from the
liner notes that Page has written for Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder,
a new three-CD set containing remastered versions of the 1955 and 1981
recordings of the Goldberg Variations, a 1982 radio broadcast in which
Page interviewed the reclusive pianist about his decision to re-record
the work, and twelve minutes' worth of hitherto unreleased outtakes
from the sessions for the 1955 version.1 Given the longstanding
availability of both recordings, one would expect the market for so
arcane a reissue to have been limited, but within days of its release
in September, Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder became the
fastest-selling classical album in the world.

What made Gould's Goldbergs so popular that they could be plausibly
incorporated into the cultural décor of The Silence of the Lambs? Why
are they still so popular today? The answers, not surprisingly, have
almost as much to do with extra-musical factors as with purely musical
ones.

As I have had occasion to note previously, Columbia Records seized
upon Gould's myriad eccentricities as fodder for a promotional
campaign designed to publicize its newest artist.2 This campaign
succeeded beyond the label's wildest dreams. From 1955 on, Gould was
as well known for his personal peculiarities-his chronic hypochondria,
his insistence on singing along with his playing and sitting on a
low-slung, homemade folding chair instead of a standard piano bench,
his promiscuous use of tranquilizers and sleeping pills-as for his
piano playing.

Over time, still another side of Gould emerged. He had always liked to
write, and once he retired from the concert stage, his output of
essays, articles, reviews, and radio and TV broadcasts for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation increased sharply.3 Willy-nilly, he
came to be seen as a kind of philosopher, a hermit (in the religious
sense of the word) who espoused a homemade doctrine of noncompetition
and spiritual quietism rooted in the belief that "technology possesses
a mediative power which can minimize or even eliminate the competitive
follies which absorb so large a share of human activity." It was for
this reason, he claimed, that he chose to withdraw from the
artistically self-destructive arena of public performance and devote
himself exclusively to recording and broadcasting.

Such ideas resonated perfectly with the communitarian Zeitgeist of the
1960's. Three years after Gould's retirement from the stage, the
Beatles, the most influential rock band of the period, would record
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album making use of
studio-based techniques that could not be reproduced in live
performance. With its release, the Beatles stopped giving concerts,
thereafter appearing only on record, in films, and on TV. Like Gould,
they had opted out of the most frenzied aspects of pop-culture
celebrity-in the process becoming, of course, even bigger celebrities.

Gould eventually began to attract admirers whose interest in his work
and thought had cult-like aspects. In 1978, a Canadian professor of
philosophy named Geoffrey Payzant published Glenn Gould: Music and
Mind, a book whose animating premise seemed to be that Gould's
philosophy, were it to be widely adopted, might redeem the world:

Glenn Gould's writings and recordings are evidences of his intention
to separate music from cruelty, to show that competitiveness is not a
law of civilized life. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and
competition in the struggle for survival may be a law of nature, but
technology (Gould says) intervenes in human culture between man and
nature, between man and the beastliness that is in men (at least in
the hearts of men such as sit in audiences at concerts and
bullfights).

Since his death, Canadian cultists have also produced such articles of
worship as Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould
(2001), an anthology whose contents are adequately described by its
title, and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), a
pretentious feature film directed by François Girard in which Gould's
oft-catalogued oddities are dramatized with a cloying affection that
makes them seem like nothing so much as the characteristic behavior of
a higher form of life.

IT IS no accident that Gould's homeland should have become a center of
"Gouldism." He is, after all, the only indisputably major classical
instrumentalist to have been born and trained in Canada, a country
whose provincial culture is widely felt, not least by expatriate
Canadians themselves, to be inimical to world-class achievement in the
arts. Very often, ambitious Canadian artists who feel stifled by their
society's comfortable and self-consciously noncompetitive atmosphere
go elsewhere-generally to the United States-in order to advance their
careers, a decision for which they are invariably resented by those
who stay behind. By contrast, Gould not only chose to live in Canada
but glorified its cultural values, of which he plainly considered
himself a shining exemplar.

In fact, Gould's philosophy of noncompetition was nothing more than a
rationalization of his fear of public performance-or, indeed, of
anything that might threaten his deep-seated need for rigid control
over every detail of his life. (In a rare unguarded moment, he told
the violinist Yehudi Menuhin that "what technology is all about is the
elimination of risk and danger.") Accordingly, he shunned physical
contact with other people and lived largely as a recluse. When he gave
"interviews" to the press, he wrote out the questions and answers in
advance. His "friendships" consisted of endless late-night monologues
conducted by telephone, and the surest way to lose him as a friend, by
most accounts, was to contradict or correct him. Most disturbingly, he
was a lifelong prescription-drug abuser who refused psychiatric
treatment even when his emotional problems effloresced into psychotic
episodes.4

The radio interview included in Glenn Gould: A Sense of Wonder offers
an unintentionally revealing look at how Gould chose to present
himself to the world. His stilted exchanges with Tim Page bear no
resemblance to the informal give-and-take of an actual conversation;
even if one did not know that the interview was fully scripted, it
must be plain to the most naive listener that at the very least it was
carefully rehearsed. Nor is it possible for Gould to conceal his
obvious discomfort at the necessity of interacting with another human
being. Instead, he sounds like a humorless, self-obsessed man
attempting without success to simulate wit and warmth.

It is no less revealing to turn from this interview to Page's
recollections of the circumstances under which the event took place:

Glenn was dressed in his usual summer wear-two sweaters, a woolen
shirt, scarf, gloves, a long black coat, and a slouch hat. Moreover,
he looked decidedly unwell: his face a mask of bleached parchment, his
hair coming out in clumps. Gone was the extraordinary-looking
youngster-ethereally beautiful rather than traditionally handsome-who
had once dazzled audiences throughout the world with the brilliance
and audacity of his playing. In his place was a wise, gentle, stooped
man who seemed much older than his 49 years, with the air of a
delicate visitor ready to cast off his wasted body and metamorphose as
pure spirit.
Tim Page, it should be noted, is a music critic of high distinction,
not given to inappropriate enthusiasms or easily dazzled by mere
charisma. Yet he writes about Gould (who was, to be sure, a personal
friend) less as a cool-headed observer than as a wholehearted
celebrant of the cult of Gouldism, confident that his idol is not as
other men.

THAT THERE was, however, far more to Gould than Gouldism is made
incontrovertibly evident by listening to the 1955 recording of the
Goldberg Variations, the first CD in Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder.
No matter how thoroughly one knows this miraculous performance-and I
have listened to it any number of times-the textural clarity and
rhythmic propulsion of Gould's playing never cease to come as a
surprise. In Page's words:

[I]t was unprecedentedly aggressive on one level, searching and
achingly vulnerable on another. The recording heralded a new approach
to Bach's keyboard music-it combined the stark, separate contrapuntal
voicings so easily delineated on the harpsichord with the tone color
and dynamic calibration available from the modern piano. Never before
had this music been played with such dazzling and incisive virtuosity.
. . . Gould's Bach swung like mad.5

Gould's Bach did indeed represent a new approach, one that had little
in common with any existing Bach performance tradition-though to call
it anti-romantic, as many have done, is to miss the point. For while
he broke with older styles of Bach interpretation, playing with a
lightness and crispness of articulation unheard-of in the 1930's and
1940's, he did so not as a baroque-music specialist seeking to
reconstruct "authentic" 18th-century performance practice but as a
radical individualist beholden only to his own musical ideas-in other
words, as a romantic.

To hear Gould's hushed, inward playing of the intensely chromatic
minor-key Variation 25, the emotional center of the Goldbergs, is to
recognize the truth of his own claim that his playing aspired to the
condition of religious ecstasy:

I believe that 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 rather the gradual, lifelong construction
of a state of wonder and serenity.

Paradoxically, Gould's repudiation of then-current ideas about how to
play Bach was made easier by the provincialism of the musical culture
in which he was reared. Had he studied at New York's Juilliard School
or Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, like most of the well-known
American pianists of his generation, he would have been indoctrinated
in the "international style" that dominated classical-music
performance after World War II, one in which regional idiosyncrasies
of style were largely suppressed. While there was nothing specifically
Canadian about his style, which was wholly of his own making, it must
have owed something to his having grown up in a country that was off
the beaten path of musical modernity.

But what worked to Gould's advantage in his youth became problematic
later on. After 1964, he never again performed with other musicians
except from a position of absolute artistic control. Nor did the
producers of his records dare to challenge his artistic decisions,
however bizarre they might be-and some of his later recordings of the
music of Mozart and Beethoven are quite comprehensively bizarre.
Having cut himself off from the exterior stimuli that most artists
require in order to grow, he could draw only on his interior
resources, and in the end these proved unequal to the task of
self-renewal. His last significant recording, the 1981 remake of the
Goldberg Variations, is not an improvement on its predecessor but an
arbitrarily alternative interpretation, more studied and less
spontaneous (especially in the opening aria, which he plays almost
exactly half as fast in 1981 as he did in 1955).

IN THE end, and despite all the problems posed by his life and work,
Glenn Gould is as central to the culture of classical music today as
he was a half-century ago-not because of the triumph of his half-baked
ideas, or because he has become a pop-culture icon, but solely on
account of the enduring fascination exerted by his records. For in an
age of homogenized interpretation, and at a time when the classical
recording industry is all but dead, Gould's best recordings are making
a powerful impression on a new generation of listeners. In that most
important of senses, he is as alive in 2002 as he was in 1981, or
1955.

One may quarrel with much of what he wrote about music, just as one
may dismiss many of his recordings as misbegotten and unconvincing.
Above all, one may take the strongest possible issue with the cult of
Gouldism, whose appeal is essentially nonmusical. But even at his most
obstinately perverse, Gould never failed to be interesting, and when
he was good, as he was in the incomparable 1955 recording of the
Goldberg Variations, no pianist-and no classical performer of any
kind-has ever been better.

This is why he is still remembered, and will continue to be remembered
long after most of his contemporaries have been relegated to footnotes
in the history of musical performance. Apocryphal though it no doubt
is, the remark attributed to the conductor George Szell after his
first encounter with Glenn Gould is nonetheless the exact truth: "That
nut's a genius."

1 Sony Classical Legacy S3K 87703.

2 See my essay, "Two Fallen Stars" (Commentary, July 1998), which also
contains a selected discography of other important Gould performances
currently available on CD.

3 Gould's prose writings are collected in The Glenn Gould Reader
(1984), edited by Tim Page.

4 Disturbing descriptions of Gould's behavior can be found in Andrew
Kazdin's Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying (1989), a memoir by the
producer of most of Gould's recordings, and Peter F. Ostwald's Glenn
Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius (1997), a biography-memoir by
a professor of psychiatry and amateur musician who was friendly with
Gould from 1957 to 1977.

5 "He had time like a jazz musician," the jazz critic Gene Lees (who
also knew Gould) has similarly observed.

TERRY TEACHOUT, our regular music critic of, is the author of The
Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, reviewed by John Gross in last

month's Commentary.

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