:: Jayati Ghosh

The Goulden Treasury

Jayati Ghosh

Augest.25 : The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould had something like cult status in the late 20th century musical firmament. This was not only because he was an extraordinary performer who provided many new insights into the music he performed, but also because he just so very eccentric.

Gould, who was born in 1932, was a musical wunderkind who was already performing at major concert halls with internationally renowned orchestras by the age of 20. He quickly achieved superstardom and was widely feted for his highly proficient but very unique musical approach. Even then, his personal idiosyncracies were much talked about, but even so the musical world was startled when, in 1964 after just nine years of an amazingly successful concert career, he abruptly announced that he was withdrawing completely from live concert performances and henceforth would only make recordings.

This decision appeared inexplicable to many, but Gould explained that this was a logical culmination of his approach to music and indeed to life. As a perfectionist, he disliked the inherent imperfection, the impossibility of correction, in a live concert experience. He also hated the hectic life of the itinerant performer. In a comment on Yehudi Menuhin (a violinist) he would speak of how "futile and irrelevant" it could be, with "the banal drudgery of its routine… the constancy of its anxiety, the certainty of its frustration". He complained that "at concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillean".

He also had a distaste for the competitive nature of such events, since he abhorred competition as the source of all true evil. He even had a problem with the concerto form, because of his perception of it as a form of competition between soloist and orchestra!

This rejection of the public concert was accompanied by a positive embrace of the enabling possibilities of technology, which allowed for exploitation of broadcast media and playback recording. In a typical Gouldian intervention — a review by Glenn Gould of a biography of Glenn Gould by Geoffrey Payzant — he spoke of "his almost mystical belief that technology possesses a mediative power which can minimise or even eliminate the competitive follies which absorb so large a share of human activity".

His subsequent discography is naturally, therefore, of immense interest. It too, much as his live concerts did earlier, has achieved cult status, with fervent admirers and detractors in almost equal proportion, and has even survived his tendency to sing rather loudly while he played. His early recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations has become a landmark, while his subsequently huge recording output is bound to remain as stimulating for future generations as it was for those who first heard it. His early death (at just 50 years) came when he was still at the peak of his powers as expressed in his recordings of the time.

Glenn Gould almost seemed to revel in controversy, in cocking a snoot at the most established and pious musical traditions. Many of his assessments are not merely surprising but downright shocking and inexplicable. Thus he described Mozart’s piano concertos as "unfixable" and declared himself to be "absolutely at a loss" as to how some of Beethoven’s best-known works such as the Emperor Concerto, the Violin Concerto and the Fifth Symphony ever became popular or retained their appeal. For him, Frederic Chopin was not a very good composer, and "the whole central core of the piano recital repertoire is a colossal waste of time". He claimed an affinity for composers of the baroque period, but even here his favourite composer was not the obvious master Johann Sebastian Bach, but the little known Orlando Gibbons!

But some of his philosophical insights into musical activity can become a useful guide to an attitude to life itself. In a speech given at a graduation ceremony of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Gould argued that "the most impressive thing about man, perhaps the one thing that excuses him of all his idiocy and brutality, is the fact that he has invented the concept of that which does not exist". He found the principle of negation to be the most important concept in the history of human thought, because it teaches restraint, and "is the concept which seeks to make us better — to provide us structures within which our thoughts can function — while at the same time it concedes our frailty, the need that we have for this barricade behind which the uncertainty, the fragility, the tentativeness of our systems can look for logic".

How does this relate to music? It relates deeply, because according to Gould, "the more one thinks about the perfectly astonishing phenomenon that music is, the more one realises how much of its operation is the product of the purely artificial construction of systematic thought". This is not meant as criticism of music, since the artificiality itself springs from the wellspring of human invention. But it is important always to be conscious of that artificiality and not be overwhelmed by what Gould called "the dangers of positive thinking", so as not lose sight of its more significant other.

As with music, so with much else in life. This is why Gould’s argument on the importance of imagination is so persuasive: "What it can do is serve as a sort of no-man’s land between that foreground of system and dogma, of positive action, for which you have been trained, and that vast background of immense possibility, of negation, which you must constantly examine, and to which you must never forget to pay homage as the source from which all creative ideas come".