work created since the pianist’s death in 1982 has taken on a life and dimension of its own. The Gould effect and legacy now occupy our minds as much as his immediate history. I would cite David Young’s play Glenn and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould as excellent examples. His Goldberg Variations alone have had a significant afterlife — witness Canadian composer Christos Hatzis’s Gouldberg Variations or Richard Powers’s short story The Gold Bug Variations. Canadian-born French author Nancy Huston’s Les Variations Goldberg offers what is perhaps the most transgressive take on the Bach, when in one early scene of her Paris-based novel the variation in question is sexual.
Arguably the most audacious Gould Goldberg riff is The Goldberg Variations: Aria, BMV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741, Canadian artist Tim Lee’s deconstruction of a film of Gould’s Goldberg performance where Gould’s hands are shown on monitors positioned near enough to each other to give the impression the hands belong to the viewer. Karaoke Glenn Gould.
Gould’s speech to the Royal Conservatory of Music’s 1964 graduation class, where he speaks of “the inner ear,” led to The Inner Eye, a series of quasi-surreal, magic-realist collages by Vancouver artist Joan McCrimmon.
Gould’s Goldbergs have become the fault-line of his legacy with following generations of piano players. Acclaimed Austrian pianist, poet, and author Alfred Brendel famously hated it. Another Austrian, Jörg Demus, who recorded his own Goldberg Variations, used the word detest when I mentioned Gould’s version to him. Angela Hewitt, a Canadian Bach specialist, questioned Gould’s Bach — “it’s more about him than Bach” — but recognized how his playing as a young man “was totally fearless, there’s a ferocity, a youthful exuberance.” Other pianists suggest Gould’s greatest legacy might go beyond his performances. Jon Kimura Parker, the Canadian pianist and professor of piano performance, told me he urges his students to follow Gould’s beyond-the-piano thinking. Still others — the fine Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi, mentored by Brendel, for example — thinks Gould’s embrace of technology opened the eyes of other pianists.
The fact that a Bach prelude and fugue played by Gould is hurtling into infinity on the 1977 Voyager spaceship amazed earlier biographers. These days many would be surprised if it was proven that Gould wasn’t being heard somewhere in space.
And so it’s gone. Hollywood tapped Gould most notably when Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs wanted Gould’s Goldbergs but was served the same piece in the film score by pianist Jerry Zimmerman. Years ago, during my day as a film critic, I heard of plans for Gould to be the soundtrack for a Sly Stallone movie, a decision abandoned along the way.
And writers? There are books channelling Gould for kids, for young adults, and for fellow obsessives — any of Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s novels Der Untergeher (translated as The Loser in English) or Alte Meister, or his play Heldenplatz, for example. French comic book artist Sandrine Revel’s 2015 illustrated biography, Glenn Gould: une vie à contretemps, resolves many of Gould’s apparent contradictions into a very human story.
But something deeper is going on. There’s a sea change in the nature of Gould’s afterlife that can’t be ignored. He has new listeners, ones lacking any standard order classical music training or any shared history with Gould. They hear his playing differently, understand his history differently, and respond differently to him and his music.
Early Gould commentary, arriving during his life or soon after his death, had, like Gould’s own thinking, its basis solidly in the Protestant/European traditions and cultural practices extending to musicology and musical practice. Commentary from and about alternative traditions, non-male, non-white, and non-European, for starters, didn’t figure much early on in the Gould legacy.
Even the very idea of musical progress — such atonality — took place within Eurocentric terms in Gould’s mind. His fascination with technology, which might have been his exit from the traditional, only tightened his embrace on tradition. Technology allowed Gould to stay Gould; to stay distant, in control, ordered. Order was being challenged in the world well beyond his St. Clair Avenue apartment, roiling with unprecedented, society-changing manifestations: Black/Gay/Feminist/Bi/Transgendered power, plugging and tuning in and turning on. No matter. All the while Gould was excitedly imagining how to reach “the enormous audience” that might result from technology’s “creation of a new and paradoxical condition of privacy.”
Yet this new thinking about Gould comes, in its way, from some constraints of his own past. Emerging artists are messing with Gould’s sombre mythology. Some are even parodying his piano playing: Catch Glenn Gould Plays “Invaria” by John Oswald on YouTube. Oswald, a Toronto-based composer-artist, reconfigures a previously filmed sequence of Gould playing, so that the notes of Oswald’s own piece, Invaria, appear to be played by Gould. On YouTube he gets hits like a rock star.
Gould’s two Goldbergs feel like background music throughout Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Various Gould attributes crop up here and there in the story, such as when the narrator’s father, Kai-Jiang, drifts back to memories of himself as a famous concert pianist in China: he would hum along with a Glenn Gould recording, all the while pretending to conduct. I came to realize that Thien, who played the 1955 Goldbergs daily while she was writing the book in Berlin, was measuring her story to create an overarching continuity down to its very paragraphs, the same way that Gould himself uncovered Bach’s hidden continuity in his second Goldberg recording (1981).
I came to write about this new sense of Gould by catching his refraction in what’s called popular culture and in the continuation of so-called classical culture. This book came to life with its feet in both camps. This had a lot to do with Leonard Cohen, the ninth laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize in 2012, and the piece I was asked to contribute to that evening’s gala. It started — the piece, I mean, not the gala — with my suggesting how much poet and pianist had in common beyond their unique singing. Aloneness was an obvious trait, of course: a sun-drenched Cohen writing alone in Hydra “on a table set among the rocks”; a meditative Gould going unnoticed sitting in a Toronto park.
I had met Cohen over the years in my role as a rock critic/journalist and could not help but be reminded how much like Gould he was in certain ways. Gould and Cohen themselves had met only once, and that was in 1963 when Cohen, cash-strapped as only a poet can be, took an assignment from Holiday magazine to interview Gould about the world’s cities. The meeting took place in Ottawa, where Cohen remembers being so transfixed by what Gould was saying that he forgot to take notes, thus leaving the piece unwritten along with his reactions to meeting the famous pianist.
Understand one and you understand the other: that was my thinking as I wrote. I noted how alike they were in their ability to go famously unnoticed. Both had a thing about overcoats. Both cultivated the role of Mysteriously Bundled Figure Silhouetted Against Bleak Canadian Landscape, their mutual riffing on Northrop Frye’s observation about Canada being a “cool climate for heroes.” Both questioned their faith.
“I believe in God,” Gould once said, “Bach’s God.”
“When it comes to lamentations,” Cohen once wrote, “I prefer Aretha Franklin to, let’s say, Leonard Cohen.”
Both men grew enormously famous by claiming to avoid fame. And I knew from experience both could be funny, right?
Right, said Gould’s people.
Cohen’s protectors weren’t so sure. They weren’t sure being funny was right for the occasion. They didn’t want to “upset” him.
So the piece was a no go. That meant stop.
This book is a new start.
