CHAPTER ONE
The Enigma’s Variations
A little more practice is in order.
— Glenn Gould, New York, June 1955, while recording The Goldberg Variations
I often wonder about what people new to Glenn Gould, or those who only know his name, think when they come upon the life-size sculpture of the pianist outside the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto for the first time. Perhaps they wonder what exactly the artist is saying about him as they observe how the afternoon light on the folds of the surface make Gould’s clothing look as sleek as silk. This part of the city is about crowds and conventions and baseball fans and fun and chain restaurants. It’s not designed for thoughtfulness. Still, it’s possible. Me, I can imagine the unthinkable stretches of empty space beyond this point as I hear the trains heading east and west; once that was about all that brought anyone down to this part of town — the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways. Those who know about such things know that the CN and CP were Canada’s first radio broadcasters and aired the first music show back in the days when the CBC was still on a drawing board.
I also think about the father of the jazz great Oscar Peterson, who was once a porter on one of those trains running out of Montreal. I remember also the Festival Express, the mobile Canadian Woodstock with car after car jammed with rock stars and wannabes heading out of town, one great collective raggedy-ass party, going west and even deeper into sixties mythology.
Equipped.
Timeless.
Gould and Peterson never played together, although both said they thought about it. But Gould knew about Janis Joplin, who was on the Festival Express. He included her song “Mercedes-Benz” alongside Bach and simple hymns in The Quiet in the Land, his 1977 radio documentary about Mennonite life.
I think of my father, stopping a bit west of here with me, so that I could get out of the car to see a bit of the city before I went on to my piano lesson at the Royal Conservatory of Music, then at the corner of College Street and University Avenue, since moved to Bloor Street.
Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethy’s Glenn offers up a solid, handsome icon that reminds us that the slumped figure was taller in life than is often remembered. The work catches many signature Gould tics: he seems bent into the bench itself just as he melded with his piano stool; his right hand on his cap gives the impression it might fly off at any moment in a gust of Front Street wind; and his expression proclaims a stagey seriousness that might be, maybe, just a little over the top. “Hmm, yes, but, ah, speaking, as well one might, in Schoenbergian terms …”
You can practically hear a professorial Gould muttering on and on pedantically like this as visitor after visitor sits next to the master, deliciously aware that their rendezvous is a camera-ready setup.
Theatre is the key. It’s my theme, in a way. It was Gould’s theme, too. Media awareness: the star knowing where the camera was, where the microphone was. A familiar enough figure on Toronto streets back in the day, Gould could be found performing his own hobo lumpy young/old guy act, padded against the wind as if in a wintry battle scene in a vintage Soviet movie. Walking can be a subversive act, particularly if done with intent. And it certainly was for Gould, private and purposeful all at once. Where’s he going? What’s he thinking? might be questions people asked as he passed. What’s that he’s humming? This memory is now only the property of old-timers, and they’re unlikely to be walking those same streets as often — if they still exist at all, those streets.
Glenn Gould is always in motion in my lasting memories of him, although these images are always in black and white, like the National Film Board newsreels we were shown at school before any of our parents had a TV. Film rolling from the early fifties, when I might see him charging through the halls of the old Royal Conservatory of Music — “the Con,” as my father, a teacher there, called it. He was hugely famous just about everywhere in the world already, but not here, not really, as the rest of us struggled away with our iffy talents in cold practice rooms. I remember seeing him in the Con’s tiny cafeteria arguing away with someone, people coming up and talking to him. It’s still black and white in my memory from almost twenty years later, in the early 1970s, when I’d find myself crossing Glenn Gould’s path late in the afternoon around the old CBC building on Jarvis Street, where I worked for some years. In these memories, and in retelling them, I can’t simply say “Gould” — it’s too detached from the way one felt about him — but certainly not “Glenn” as in “Hey, Glenn.” It had to be Glenn Gould.
Not long after Glenn Gould’s death, Toronto artist Joanne Tod began a series of paintings dedicated to Gould, one showing the pianist looking grim-faced and hunched over the keyboard of a black grand piano — looking as long and menacing as a mob boss’s limousine (see dust jacket).
“I called my painting Idiot Savant,” says Tod. “It’s fixed within the context of the work I was doing at the time, which was to have ironic, double-meaning titles. His Goldberg Variations had been my introduction to the classical music genre — a classicism that sort of dove-tailed with my interest at the time in Manet — so there was some resonance there with him that I wanted to portray. But there were his eccentricities to account for, his ‘idiot-savantry,’ if you wish. I think he’s kind of hip, too. He’s wearing those long, pointed shoes. He has longish hair. If I’d known all about his bad habits I would have made him hot meals.”
We met a few times — he remembered I’d interviewed him on more than one occasion — and we’d stop on the street or in a hall and talk for a bit about what he was doing. One really late night at the CBC he appeared at the door of the second- or third-floor editing room I was using, startling me — “Like a ghost,” I told him.
I bet he liked that. The setting was right. The top-floor rooms in the old CBC building — offices, edit suites, storage, whatever else was there — had the murk and crannies found in attics in horror flicks. This added a little extra frisson for those lovers creeping upstairs for a late-night boff.
“And what are you working on?” he asked, moving close enough to peer over my shoulder. I don’t remember now — probably a segment of a breezy morning show, The Scene, he himself would contribute to.
I flattened a length of tape against the tiny metal block, cutting it at an angle with my razor blade, in the narrow slot provided. After another cut in different place on the tape, I brought the two pieces together.
“You realize, of course, that process will be taken over by a machine,” Gould said, straightening up.
“Probably,” I said. “But it won’t be as much fun.”
Tape splicing — replaced now by the digital edit suite, the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and other goodies — had its own set of quirky tools, including a marker of some sort to indicate where to splice a tape as well as a razor blade held in a special metal clamp to do the splicing, plus tape to piece the parts together. Veteran editors with eyes as sharp as diamond cleavers could fuse together two halves of the identical note recorded at different times with one of their fine tape splices. Gould’s editing prowess was a legend around the CBC. Indeed, as the years went on he seemed far more interested in extolling some frightfully complex bit of tape splicing he’d finished than his latest recording. A listener asked by Gould to guess the number of edits or splices in a finished documentary would inevitably guess far fewer splices than were there.
