Prescience

18 Jun 2008, 4pm

It’s funny how many people, on learning that I’m Canadian, presume I must therefore have an opinion on Glenn Gould. As it happens I do, but the likelihood of any Canadian having one is up there with, I don’t know, a Russian with something to say about Yakov Smirnoff; as accomplished individuals it’s not easy to compare the two, though at least Glenn Gould was funny.

Gould died in 1984, at fifty years old. I was eighteen at the time, and as a typical CBC-listening Globe and Mail-reading pseud I understood then that the condensed mythology of his life formed three distinct acts: the young, fine-boned, freakishly talented pianist who could read music before text, who wrapped himself in sweaters and gloves even in hot weather, whose childhood back injury led him to prefer playing, no matter the setting, seated on a low, crudely homemade chair; the eccentric adult superstar, touring and recording fuelled by a battery of pharmaceuticals, the first concert pianist to eschew formal dress when playing before an audience, driving recording engineers insane because he couldn’t/wouldn’t stop singing along when he played; and finally, the mature Gould, who at age of thirty-two told the concert music establishment in essence to go fuck itself, and happily never performed in public again. His reasons to stop were many and varied, but you can’t help but admire this sort of clear-headed defiance toward being forced to create on someone else’s terms; like how Artie Shaw – another musician whose talent and hard work earned him the right to lead a bullshit-free career – used to revel in taking unannounced sabbaticals for years at a time at the height of his fame, just to spite those making money off of his work.

It’s that last act – the eighteen years leading up to Gould’s death – where academics and critics do most of their forensic work, and rightly so: having been set free from ownership by promoters, executives and the really rather bizarre celebrity system of concert music, he dabbled to great result in writing and broadcasting, the very best of the latter is found in three radio documentaries for the CBC which came to be known as The Solitude Trilogy (an excerpt from the first, The Idea of North, is available here). For the former, look no further than Tim Page’s excellent volume The Glenn Gould Reader.

Probably the most famous piece in that book is a quick ditty Gould wrote for High Fidelity magazine in 1974, ‘Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould’. While very funny and verbally dextrous, I’m always struck how beautifully Gould, in this pre-postmod meta-meta interview, scores a direct hit on the culture industry he so loathed:

G.G.: Well then, I’ll try to answer likewise. It seems to me that if we’re going to get waylaid by the numbers game, I’ll have to plump for a zero-to-one relationship as between audience and artist, and that’s where the moral objection comes in.

g.g.: I’m afraid I don’t quite grasp that point, Mr. Gould. Do you want to run it through again?

G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public – and let me get on record right now the fact that I’m not at all happy with words like ‘public’ and ‘artist’; I’m not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology – that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with – or, better still, unaware of – the presumed demands of the marketplace – which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of ‘public’ responsibility, and his ‘public’ will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay!

G.G.: No, they’ll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level…

What an enormous pity he didn’t live another twenty years.

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