Richter, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli were Gould’s pianist rivals for a time, a type of rivalry that he disparaged in public and but never lost sight of. Before last-minute replacement of the suddenly vexatious Michelangeli for a CBC recording session of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Gould reportedly said, “Just think that the Number One pianist is substituting for the Number Two.”
Seen from outside the somewhat conservative world of classical music, Gould might be said to have more in common with postmodernist writers or visual artists, where art’s production had yielded to interest in art’s reproduction (Robert Rauschenberg’s migration from assemblages to silk screens; Gould’s from live performance to entire reconstructions via editing). John Rea, a leading Montreal composer and teacher of composition at McGill University, points out that less than a decade after the 1955 release of The Goldberg Variations, there appeared an early Warhol silkscreen, Thirty Are Better Than One, consisting of a grid of multiple images of the Mona Lisa, most likely a comment on the grid of multiple Gould images on the famous Goldberg album cover, with Gould talking about the music but not shown performing.
Gould fashioned a beloved media figure out of his manufactured multiple personas. In this regard he rivalled Marshall McLuhan’s love of performing and media-readiness. For many artists the media was the new performance space.
John Cage, who once appeared on prime time American TV as a benevolent Zen dreamer, had funny ideas about what music was. Cage’s and Gould’s paths crossed on occasion, and Cage’s ideas were never entirely off Gould’s radar. For Cage, an idea could be performed, not only notes or sound. His forty-minute Lecture on Nothing contains the famous line: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Based on the notion that art can never be possessed, it would have rattled the possessive Gould. (Elsewhere, Cage says: “Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.”) Gould didn’t always get Cage, but nevertheless he wanted the American composer as part of the lineup for his Arnold Schoenberg documentary. In a letter he wrote to Cage to ask him to contribute to the project, Gould acknowledged that he knew Cage’s feelings about Schoenberg were “perhaps rather ambivalent.” In fact, Schoenberg and Cage operated on different musical planets, which Gould well knew.
However, Gould and Cage held in common a deep-rooted understanding of music’s potential to be the soundtrack for political upheaval and radical change. Cage’s 4’33” is three movements of silence — or rather, four minutes and thirty-three seconds during which a pianist doesn’t play a single note, leaving the audience to listen to its own sound: its own music, as it were. Cage’s “dismantling of the hierarchy between musical sound in particular and sound in general” was “arguably the single most decisive influence on our current preoccupation with the sonic environment as a suppressed but vital aspect of the social world,” observed American art critic Ina Blom in her 2010 ArtForum review of The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2009. Gould, by turning his back on what he called the “penitentiary sentence” of being a touring concert artist, offered a radical alternative to the entire classical music apparatus and its insistence on the hierarchical superiority of the live concert. Gould, like Cage, understood the enormous power in silence; Gould just meant his own. (One is also reminded that musical “revolutions” have an extra-musical framework. Beethoven, arguably the first indie classical artist, understood that musical independence meant following the money, more easily found with the burgeoning mobile middle classes than with the politically vulnerable aristocracy.)
Back to the statue for a minute. Each Gould narrative is located where it should be. Abernethy’s statue places Gould’s media being at the CBC, which was home to him — another home. He had a desk at the CBC Radio offices. He sent letters on CBC letterhead, correspondence to fans from Bloomington to Auckland or to Madame Pablo Casals. As a return address he gave CBC Radio’s, 354 Jarvis Street. He kidded with the chatty ladies in the basement cafeteria: they were more likely the reason he was there than the food itself. Some nights when he was working on something, he could be found pacing up and down the CBC corridors, his very own version of Batman, coat flapping. A story I heard during my days there was how Gould, on a whim, intended to fill in for a newsreader when the one on the schedule was late turning up. He understood — he felt — his CBC audience, a crowd already familiar with his lightly mocking tone, his role-playing, his quirks and prejudices and love of words. There’s an intimacy there.
As well, the statue remains resolutely in the present tense through the varied, unpredictable, yet inevitably joyful interactions people have with it, a contrast with the image of him in his final years, with everyone hearing more and more reports of his poor health, torn soul, wrecked body, nighthawk hours, unfulfilled loves, and sunken dreams.
The last time I was passing by the CBC — when music was on my mind and not the Jays’ relief pitching (the building’s nearness to Toronto’s baseball stadium notwithstanding) — what I found myself thinking about wasn’t any of Gould’s iconic recordings — the Brahms Intermezzi, say — but his late-sixties recording of Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This playing could’ve made the rock ’n’ roll charts because it’s soaked in show business swagger and sweat, starting with the motor-rhythmic drive worthy of Oscar Peterson riffing at full throttle right from the signature Da da da — DUM opening. (“You are too dumb,” Beethoven is supposed to have said when asked about the meaning of the opening.) And something more: the Beethoven is another crazily brilliant choice on Gould’s part, a retro choice given that playing transcriptions died out when the arrival of recording gave everyone the chance to hear the real thing. Cheeky, this.
Chilly Gonzales sure understands. The energetic jazz pianist shows his love for Gould in a YouTube tribute for Gould’s birthday. This passion, as Gonzales points out, is a love of caricature and parody, “the superficial aspect” of Gould, who “paved the way” for other generations of eccentric piano geniuses. Gonzales is talking about Gonzales, of course, he of the Gould-like emerging paunch and receding hairline. But he’s also channelling Gould’s own practice of self-parody. In Gould’s liner notes for his recording of the Fifth — written by a Gould seemingly connecting with his inner tweedy Brit music critic — he writes: “Mr. Gould has been absent from British platforms these past few years and if this new CBS release is indicative of his current musical predilections perhaps it is just as well.”
Gonzales’s Gould riff is not isolated either. Young deejays are remixing Gould tracks. YouTube surfers are blown away listening to the relentless, heartbreaking attack of Gould’s strafing technique. Gould’s name pops up in rock star interviews from the likes of Neil Young and producer Bob Ezrin and Patti Smith. The latter claims “a deep, abstract relationship with him. You can feel his mind.”
Discovering Gould is an ongoing adventure on the internet. I came across a posted vignette that sounds so much like Gould. The story came from a piece that appeared originally in the September 1998 issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines’ in-flight magazine. It’s by an American writer, Barbara Abercrombie, and she describes the last months of her mother’s life. When she went into the hospital, Abercrombie says, “I bought her a CD player and she listened to Glenn Gould’s Beethoven piano sonatas over and over. But she wasn’t just listening; she was working — figuring out how to improve her own playing. ‘I play this part too fast,’ she said. ‘Oh, listen to how he does it.’”
CHAPTER TWO
Altered Egos
April 1, 1951, 8:00 p.m. EST
Max Ferguson (the announcer): We hope you enjoy Startime!
Orchestra: THEME UP FULL … FADE … HOLD
Ferguson: Every Sunday evening, the trans-Canada network of the CBC brings you Startime … an hour of entertainment especially designed to please the families of Canada …
