Glenn Gould - The Last Puritan?

Glenn Gould is one of the figures in 20th century music who truly deserves the title of 'cult figure'. For each person who cares about his output, his message seems to have a unique relevance. Those who admire his music-making often do so for different, and contradictory, reasons. Those who can't stand it often criticise him for the same ones. Gould is labelled as an egotist who superimposes his own personality over the music he plays, and also someone who becomes the composer whose music he is playing. In his writings and interviews it becomes clear that he was someone in search of a coherent philosophy, yet the more one attempts to analyse the character, the more difficult it is to reconcile different strands of his thinking into harmonious unity. Gould the philosopher-musician is in some ways a paradox, and this might explain the varying and deeply personal ways audiences react to him. To begin with, it is interesting to note that Gould disapproved of such words as 'artist' and 'audience', because of hierarchical connotations. In this we find embodied much of the personality which strove for some kind of purity in musical presentation. 'Purity' is perhaps the last word which would be called to the minds of many critics in relation to Gould, but he does indeed say, in the humorously titled 'Glenn Gould interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould', "On a previous occasion I remarked that I ... am 'the last puritan'". The self-mocking tone of the 'interview' suggests anything but a serious look at Mr Gould from the point of view of Mr Gould, but it is here most clearly that he discusses some quasi-religious views on the relation between morality and art, and how this justifies for him the need for recording as creative vehicle. Gould describes how he feels that unity of spirit between listener and musician is a rare event, and that the recital is rather an exercise for the performer in exerting power, or an occasion for audiences to release some of their more boorish instincts ('blood-sport'). One might call to mind biographical details from his youth - inability to play with others as a child, unwillingness to participate in group activities: products of a feeling of isolation which often comes hand-in-hand with the non-conformist mind which he obviously possessed. His parents did not hesitate to let him know as a child that he was special, a sense of separation could be a logical development of this. This sense would give a comfortable psychological explanation for Gould's rejection of the concert experience - indeed in an interview he jokes that he stopped playing concerts because of the personal discomfort it caused him, and later conveniently found an aesthetic basis for this career move to justify it. Maybe such statements are not to be taken very seriously; instead they are a part of the self-mocking façade Gould liked to put up in an attempt to make himself more human to those around him. Gould describes recording as a way to bypass the interference between listener and music created by the concert platform. He describes an idealistic vision that eventually technology would give consumers the power to alter a recording to suit their own needs of the moment, changing tempi and dynamic relations, for example. For Gould this would create a medium through which people could more easily relate to the music, and end the 'servile dependency' of the audiences - art would become a more truly communal experience. But it doesn't end there. Ultimately, "I feel that art should be given the chance to phase itself out ... art ... is potentially destructive. We should analyze the areas where it tends to do least harm, use them as a guideline, and build art into a component which will enable it to preside over its own obsolescence." Is he being serious? It's a good question to ask - to me, at least, it isn't clear whether Gould wants us to take these supposed convictions seriously. In this format of the self-interview alone is expressed a statement about man's conflicting elements, an idea so relevant to his self-proclaimed 'puritanism' - one part striving in the progression to a greater good, attempting to transcend the earth-bound flesh, but unable to escape from sensual attachments, ("I couldn't live without Sibelius' Fifth"). Hence his fear of corruption from what he sees as a raw, tainted, uncontrolled form of music making embodied in the concert experience. "... the Western world is consumed with notions of qualification ... until physical and verbal aggression are seen as flip sides of the same coin, until every aesthetic decision can be equated with a moral correlative, I'll continue to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic from behind a glass partition." He gives an example: a man's decision to paint his house red in a grey town might induce violence, thereby making his aesthetic decision a moral one. How would this be translated into music? It seems strange for someone with such a non-conformist and colourful personality to advocate grey uniformity, ("The Orwellian world holds no particular terrors for me."); and the myriad colours to be heard in his playing poses some problems in this regard. Indeed, a live recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1957 has a sparkling vitality and wit which does not give the impression of a man enduring terrible suffering. Then again, an important part of the Puritan ideology is the conception of man as naturally imperfect; Gould does not strike one as a character who would want to claim any kind of perfection in himself. Gould links the 'perfectibility of man' to the 'obsolescence of art'. As mentioned, a stage in the mission to attain this would be the facility for listeners to manipulate recordings to suit their needs. Yet, making recordings, he would sometimes manipulate listeners with deliberate thwarting of psychological needs, create sensations of aggravation in order to show some new emotional-structural functions in the music, for example, as can be heard in his recording of the first movement of Mozart's A major sonata with the theme and variations, which begins in a deliberately slow, stilted style, and becomes gradually faster, more flowing, as the movement progresses - in direct contradiction of some performance directions. While disobeying the text, it could be argued in fact that Gould brings us closer to Mozart - in same manner as he sees word and deed as 'flip sides of the same coin', technical and emotional mechanics of compositions are inseparable in his mind, and he uses this awareness in an attempt to create something which will have universal sensual power and relevance - if listeners are able to divest themselves of preconceptions and pedantry. In this way, Gould was able to bind earthly sensuality to his higher moral goal of unity. In an interview with Bruno Monsaigneon, he describes how the chromaticism in Bach's last fugue gives an image of an 'infinitely expanding universe', and how this borrowing of older compositional styles represents Bach's transcendence of the world 'thrust upon him' - a phrase Gould used also in relation to himself. Bach had unity with God, Gould had unity with Bach... In the same conversation, Gould describes the need to write fugues as a composer's need to write a work which has formal justification, (it either works or it doesn't), in order to give shape to the more vague creative drive which comes from 'inspiration'. With Gould's equation of justification through structure and moral integrity came his attraction to contrapuntal music, his dismissal of Mozart as a hedonist, (for him the most derogatory comment), derision of Chopin's unapologetic self-indulgence, ('falling inside the instrument'), and active attempts to show the faults in some music, for example his 'infamous' recording of Beethoven's 'Appassionata' sonata. The concerto form especially represented elements of sin - the competitive instinct embodied in a 'piano versus orchestra showdown'. Hence his performance of Brahms' d minor concerto is, for the most part, played at a consistently slow tempo, in order to reduce egotistical virtuosity, and to show unity in thematic elements instead. Gould's personal ideals were not in fact met in Bach - the composer most commentators would associate with him - but the late Renaissance/early-Baroque English composer Orlando Gibbons. Gibbons' music represented a purity of thought, pre-'quest for identity'. The sophistication, yet apparent simplicity, of the writing was possessed of 'spiritual-entity-like' qualities for Gould, music which 'serves a higher purpose than itself' - something Gould certainly wanted to be able to say for himself. If in his quest for world-betterment Gould strove for self-betterment, is this a form of egotism? Wishing to generate unity among people he sought self-isolation, so as not to be influenced by them; hoping to find a moral backbone to musical events, he nevertheless admitted that music possesses undefinable aesthetic qualities; he presented his raison-d'être as the abolition of the ego, yet in some senses he certainly enjoyed his ability to manipulate others' emotions. As discussed, he was painfully aware of these paradoxes; one could say he accepted them as part of the 'original sin' man is born into - an ideal is pointless, if it has been already realised. The effort of trying in itself represents something of value, and he dealt with these discrepancies in good humour:

g.g.: So you don't expect to see your death wish for art fulfilled in your life-time. G.G.: No, I couldn't live without the Sibelius Fifth. g.g.: But you are nevertheless talking like a sixteenth century reformer G.G.: Actually, I feel very close to that tradition. In fact, in one of my better lines I remarked that - g.g.: That's an aesthetic judgement if I ever heard one!

The interviewer Gould demands he be a martyr to his cause, the interviewee Gould complains "I'm not ready yet". His chronic need for control and subsequent eccentricities arose from quasi-puritan feeling of constant personal deficiency, a product of the inability to reconcile his quest for unity with his awareness of his own extraordinary personality. Yet, although he saw himself as part of a larger chain of events, the culmination of which would take place some time after his death, it is the recorded proof of his unique musical personality which makes the world a richer place. Although many misunderstand the motivations behind his musical decisions, and deride his recordings for all the wrong reasons, open minds certainly do feel the sense of unity with and through music when listening to Gould, a sense of the religious to what he is doing, which was the driving force behind the creation of his huge recorded output and subsequent influence.

Sources: Tim Page (ed.) (1993), The Glenn Gould Reader, London: Faber & Faber. Glenn Gould: The Alchemist (DVD) Glenn Gould: Hereafter (DVD) Conversations with Bruno Monsaigneon (youtube)