Glenn Gould (3 page)

We tread on uneven ground, however. Both music history and music are typically structured as forms of what we might call
experienced consequence
. They offer tales of temporal succession explained according to claims of causal succession. However useful or even necessary, such narratives are illusory. They construct, over the negotiation of actual moments in
time, an arc of larger meaning that could not have been available in the moments themselves, that is superimposed.
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Biography, too, is a form of illusory consequence. That is why I have decided to tell Gould's story—really a linked set of ideas about perception, consciousness, time, and silence—not as a story but as a single contested piece considered from a variety of angles.

François Girard's 1993 work,
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,
revealed the pianist from a variety of angles. Why thirty-two? Devotees of Gould's recorded works know the answer immediately. In Bach's
Goldberg Variations,
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the work allegedly composed as an insomnia cure for Dresden's Count Von Keyserlingk, to be played by his court harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, the variations consist of a tonally and rhythmically linked series of thirty variations on the thirty-two-bar aria announced at the beginning. The aria itself, possibly written for Bach's wife, dates from 1725 and is repeated da capo as the final element of the piece. Not only is the overall work a superbly realized exercise in theme-and-variation composition, it was and remains one of the most devilishly difficult pieces ever composed for keyboard.

The thirty variations range from subtle trills to elaborate deconstructions of the theme, arranged in nine interlocked
canons. The progressive variation of ground bass, rather than soprano melody, makes it an example of
ruggiero
, akin to the chaconne or passacaglia forms that Bach also created but with irregular inversions along the way—thus “a passacaglia worked out in chiaroscuro,” as Albert Schweitzer said. With the initial aria reprised as a coda, we have thirty-two works within the work: theme and variation and theme again. It is, Gould himself wrote, “the most brilliant substantiation of ground bass in history.”
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(The film's thirty-two short sections do not exactly mimic the structure of the
Variations
; it is nevertheless an excellent example of fractured biography.)

Famously, Gould recorded the
Variations
twice. The first was in 1955, at Columbia's 30th Street studios between June 10 and 16; the disc was released to immediate wide acclaim, cementing his already growing performance reputation. The second was in 1981, during April and May, just before the same studios were slated for demolition and just a year before his death at the age of fifty. The two versions have been much compared. Perhaps the simplest way to articulate the difference between them is that the 1955 version is the work of a young man, the 1981 that of a mature one. The first is arrogant, almost callow, with bravura displays of speed and chilly dexterity and an overall tone that is brilliant but somewhat uninflected. The second, recorded because
Gould said he wanted to try again to find line in the work, is slower, warmer, almost elegiac; the ground-bass unity emerges more clearly, as do the rubato and dynamic-range possibilities of the piano. Here the trademark humming of the player, clearly audible even on inferior playback equipment, offers a kind of harmonic counterpoint to the sound of the piano's struck keys, man and instrument conjoined in performance.

Or so, in retrospect, we might be tempted to see things. Which of these recordings one prefers is a matter of taste, or temperament, or age. Sometimes it is a matter of the time of day.

In 1955, labouring in the first of countless experiences in the recording studio, Gould struggled with the piece—not the technical details but, as so often later, with creating a version of the whole that matched his inner sense of the music's logic. The engineers at Columbia's studios in New York—who later would tell sometimes exaggerated tales of the young Canadian's evident eccentricities, his pre-recital ritual handsoaks in ice water, the peculiar hunched posture and proclivity for Polar mineral water and arrowroot biscuits— were at once impressed and frustrated by his perfectionism. This stubbornness in the studio would become a defining, to some degree a destroying, feature of Gould's life. And the
eccentricities would be co-opted immediately as publicity fodder: a June 25 press release from Columbia archly summarized the “rituals, foibles or fancies” of its young star, including the bottles of pills and twenty minutes of cold soaking. Also the collapsible chair, described as “the Goldberg (Rube) variation of them all,” with its four adjustable legs: “The studio skeptics thought this was wackiness of the highest order until recording got under way. Then they saw Glenn adjust the slant of his chair before doing his slightly incredible cross-hand passages in the Variations.”
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In the liner notes for the record, Gould's earliest significant publication, he offered the following brilliant if somewhat earnest assessment:

Gould would produce numerous personal manifestos and
ars poetica
summaries in later life. Indeed, the manifesto is high among his favourite literary forms, just as it was for the Evelyn Waugh character in
Put Out More Flags
who, we are told, “had always rather specialized in manifestos. He had written one at school; he had written a dozen at the University; once, in the late twenties, he and his friends Hat and Malpractice had even issued the invitation to a party in the form of a manifesto. It was one of his many reasons for shunning communism that its manifesto had been written for it, once and for all, by somebody else.” Gould never entirely outgrew the particular temptation for the young man, especially of intellectual inclination, to state his personal beliefs as a way of setting the world straight. The paragraph above, though characteristically difficult to follow, remains the clearest expression of his self-conception as a musician, and especially as an interpreter of Bach. Somewhere in the tension
between the analytic desire for architectural coherence and the non-analytic awareness of an underlying singular intelligence lies the secret to his life as a performer and artist.

The haunting
Goldberg
aria, not the most technically difficult section of the work, proved intractable. Having delivered masterly versions of the sections demanding tricky crossovers and transitions, Gould could not get it right. He and the engineers recorded it twenty times without avail. On the twenty-first take, Gould was satisfied. “It was a question,” he said later, “of utilizing the first twenty takes to erase all superfluous expressions from my reading of it, and there is nothing more difficult to do.”
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The aria you hear when you play that disc is quintessential Gould: the technical assurance, hinting at the astonishing virtuosity to come, announcing an interpretation of almost clinical precision. But although it comes first on the recording, and is forever the single audible version of this section of this recording, there are in fact twenty-one renderings of the same piece of music. One is the chosen version, the official story. It could not be such without the other twenty. Where, or how, do they exist?

Not thirty-two variations then, but twenty-one takes: same score, different interpretations, seeking the acceptable one, the one to be released as well as recorded.

Other biographies have tried to explain Gould's personal eccentricities in terms of his music, or vice versa. Whatever the conclusion, they are all bound to a standard presumption of biography, that it has to make unified sense of its subject, to find a single narrative line through the life. But life, as Gould well knew, does not follow such linear progression, and even as he was devoted to line in musical compositions, he was hostile to the idea of progressive, sense-conferring narratives.

I take that hostility seriously in thinking about Gould's life and work. There is no unifying theme, no resolution to the tonic, in his life. His ideas about music govern that life, but those ideas themselves are contradictory, paradoxical, mischievous, and deliberately provocative. In fashioning a philosophical biography, I have abandoned standard narrative form and instead adopted a kaleidoscopic frame. Each of my takes is a version of Gould, always partial, always unfinished. Played over and over, always slightly different, always in search of aptness and insight, Gould is here the subject of a sort of bio-philosophical recording session.
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Music arises from silence and subsides into silence. Silence is woven through music, in the space between the notes, without which the notes could not exist. Music seeks and flees silence in the same moment. Thus, indeed, are moments created: the negotiation of the present as it pushes into the future, finding its line. Not all silence is the same, and not just because of duration or placement. “Silence too can be plagiarized,” a music critic reminds us.
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Life arises from non-existence and subsides into death. It is sustained in time by its own suspension. An ancient image of this span: a bird flies through a feasting hall, from one end to the other. Entry, fleeting presence, and then exit. Consciousness is created in memory's uneasy, inescapable conjunction with the nothingness on either side of our lives. What is the silence between the notes? What is the person before or after his death?

Bare life is not the self. The self is as much burden as achievement, a constant weight of expectation and responsibility that we lug through life, the time of life. The self can
be an accuser, a betrayer, a wayward child. The gap we feel in that humping weight is the distance between me as I live and myself as implicated by the other—the one who sees me, who judges me. The weight is also, however, an awareness of a different gap, the one between me as I live and the fact of being itself, the sheer inarticulable being-here of existing.
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Call this the self-alienation effect. Awareness of this existential alienation may be the beginning of shame, of responsibility, of despair. Perhaps of all three at once.

Everyone is subject to this awareness: it is the price of selfhood. We are all performers, having to drag out the self-character for one more show, one more gig, day after day. And if one is a performer, a player, in more than the shared existential sense…

Glenn Herbert Gould was born on September 25, 1932, the only child of Russell Herbert “Bert” Gould and Florence Emma Gould (née Grieg—she was a distant cousin of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg). Glenn's parents were both musical, though not professionally, playing and singing in church and social groups. By trade Bert was a salesman for the family fur business, Gold Standard Furs. They lived at 32 Southwood Drive in Toronto's Beach neighbourhood, then a largely white-bread Anglo-Protestant enclave at some distance from the city's core, especially isolated in winter
when its long lakefront can be bleak, the visible water wide as an ocean.

They also had a cottage north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe, a source of great consolation—and welcome solitude—at all times of Gould's life. In his middle age, the cottage was a cherished haven, often in winter when the summer tourist population had given way to the dedicated loners. In early life, matters were more complicated. Unlike his father, an avid fly fisherman, Glenn did not take to angling as one of his favoured modes of silence. In the summer of 1939, aged six, he caught his first and only fish while out with a neighbour and his children. “I suddenly saw this thing entirely from the fish's point of view,” he recalled later, and in his distress went into a boat-rocking tantrum that ruined the outing and alienated him from the other children. “I immediately went to work on my father to convince him he should abandon fishing. It took me ten years, but this is probably the greatest thing I have ever done.” In later years he was even more proactive, roaring around the lake in his boat, dressed in overcoat and cap, to disrupt the summer bass and perch hunters of southern Ontario.
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Gould entered Williamson Road Public School in grade two after private tutoring. School bored him, and he was the subject of bullying both real and imagined. He skipped
grade three. At age five he announced he was destined to be a great composer. East-end Toronto contemporaries recall a bright and already eccentric child who had a keen sense of his own impressive future. Later Gould attended Malvern Collegiate Institute, where he was a good, if not spectacular, student; he did not graduate because he refused to take the mandatory physical education examination. He studied music at the Toronto (now Royal) Conservatory of Music, including nine years with teacher Alberto Guerrero. He would later claim to be self-taught and did not take on students of his own.

His life was spent performing, first in public as well as in the studio, later in the studio alone. He never married, though he had at least one substantial relationship, albeit with a married woman, between 1967 and 1971. She moved to Toronto with her two children, lived close to Gould, but eventually returned to her husband. Gould asked her to marry him, but she refused, and then he called her every night for two years after the affair had ended. She finally persuaded him to stop calling, and they never saw each other again.