Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures -- Book Review
Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures
Foreword by Yo Yo Ma, Introduction by Tim Page. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books. 2007. 192 pp.
This is an intimate biography of pianist, Glenn Gould (1932-1982), in pictures culled from a wide variety of sources. Published by Glenn Gould's estate, it is touching and highly personal. The photographs are all black and white and span his entire life from earliest infancy to the last days before his stoke in 1982. It is a complimentary, honorific portrait, but the majority of the photographs are informal snapshots and family pictures, rather than professional studio portraits. It is exactly the kind of biography I like. The captions are informative and detailed. Tim Page's introductory summary of Gould's life spans twenty-seven pages. It is a comprehensive, yet concise, overview that retains considerable depth: a very nice job in a relatively short space. This book is full of interesting quotations from Glenn Gould and other commentators, but the pictures are really the soul of the book. There are pictures of his famous chair, which he continued to use even after the seat cushion disintegrated. There are pictures of him playing cross legged, soaking his arms before a performance, pictures of his dogs, his parents, his relatives, performances. It is an incredibly rich source on the life of Glenn Gould. A real treasure.
Growing up I listened to Gould's recordings of Bach and Brahms. Glenn Gould defined Bach for me and his recording of the Brahms Intermezzi remains the standard. I was never a big fan of the Goldberg Variations. This long, challenging piece is not the most accessible music, and I have never warmed up to it, but the Bach Piano Concertos, The Well Tempered Clavier, the English Suites, French Suites, Partitas, and Inventions, in Gould's fingers became classics for me. I later became acquainted with other interpreters of Bach, such as Andras Schiff and Richard Goode -- I especially like Andras Shiff's renditions of the Brandenburg Concertos, but for the piano solo music and the Bach concertos Glenn Gould remains number one in my heart.
Some comments on Glenn Gould's life and ideas.
"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." (1962) p. 41
This conception fuses art with life. It is one that I wholeheartedly subscribe to, although I differ with Glenn Gould somewhat in that for me the end state that one strives for through art goes far beyond "wonder and serenity." Life is much bigger than just "wonder are serenity," and the human potential and human need is much greater than "wonder and serenity." An art and a life limited to those two objectives creates an art and a life that is exactly that: limited in scope. I agree, indeed, that art and life should be thought of as fused and extensions of one another -- living is itself a creative activity -- but art's potential is to enrich every aspect of life. Because art is fundamentally communication, anything that we are, anything that we can experience, can be communicated and shared artistically. So all of life, is potentially a subject for art. Art enriches every aspect of life because art expands our awareness and enables us to perceive the world and each other in new ways. The breadth and diversity of this potential is literally boundless. Art should never be thought of as confined to circumscribed objectives. People use art in many different ways for an unimaginably broad expanse of purposes. Each individual artist can only carve out a small niche in that vast expanse of possibility. Glenn Gould's quest for wonder and serenity through music is an admirable and worthy purpose. It is not the only or ultimate purpose for art.
"For every hour you spend in the company of other human beings you need X number of hours alone . . . isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness." (p. 6)
"He felt that personal encounters were by and large unnecessary and claimed that he could better understand the essence of a person's thought and personality over the phone. (His monthly phone bill ran to four figures.)" (p. 38)
". . . his fundamental aloneness was overwhelming. He lived by himself, controlled all of his friendships and , so far as can be determined, had only few and fleeting romantic attachments, with women who were ultimately unavailable to him. Indeed, he seemed to have no love life in later years. 'Monastic seclusion works for me,' he said, with no perceptible dismay." (p. 39)
I too find solitude essential. I've come to understand this need in terms of my own background and upbringing, and I see similarities to Glenn Gould's, although Glenn Gould is much more pronounced in his need for isolation than I am. Solitude nourishes creativity. It allows one to listen to one's inner voices, explore one's own inner thoughts and emotions, develop ideas, imagine, fantasize. Isolation enables originality. Being enmeshed in a group fosters a tendency to take on the perceptions, assumptions, prejudices, and behavior norms of the group. Groups by their very nature impose limits on nonconformity. Seclusion reduces those external influences and allows one more control over them. Spending a lot of time alone enables one to see things in radically different ways from most other people. There is an element of danger in this. Glenn Gould's great strength as a musician and as an intellect was his independence and originality, his willingness to make bold departures from accepted norms and assumptions. And yet despite his fondness for isolation, he maintained extensive contacts by telephone. This is another commonality between us. Throughout my adult life I have had many, often intense, personal relationships carried on my telephone that extended sometimes over years. I agree with Gould that the distance of telephone contact does make it possible to explore the inner self of a person in much greater depth than face to face contact ordinarily offers. Page's assumption of Gould's asceticism may be accurate, but it may also be mistaken, and Gould's apparent confirmation may well be a misleading mask. Page did not look closely at Gould's telephone contacts. If he had, he might have found them to be more sexually charged than he realized. He also did not consider the possibility of same sex relationships in Gould's life, which is very common in top level pianists, and Gould appears to have had the classic familial constellation that is very characteristic of exclusively homosexual men: a heavily involved, emotionally dominant mother, and a distant father. Glenn Gould came of age during the height of the persecution of male-male relationships in the English speaking world, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. If he did have same sex inclinations, he was likely conflicted about them and had every reason to keep them discreet (although Gould had a very independent spirit and was not intimidated by conventionality).
Glenn Gould gave his last public performance in April of 1964 to devote the rest of his musical life to recording. He had made some 50 hours of commercial recordings by the time of his death, in addition to films, radio and television programs. He had hated public performance from the beginning.
"It is my firm conviction that the concert experience . . . will not likely outlive the twentieth century . . . It is being cultivated so exclusively for its museum potential that however worthy that may be, one can no longer consider it too seriously in relation to the significant trends of art in our time . . . The relationship between music and the various media of electronic communication is the key to the future not only of the way in which music will appear or be encountered, but also key to the manner in which it will be performed and composed." (p. 134)
"It is interesting to compare Gould's feelings about performing with those of Arthur Rubinstein. In 1970, the two men met, and the resulting dialog was published in Look magazine. Rubinstein spoke excitedly of 'the feeling at the beginning when the audiences arrive -- they come from a dinner, they think about their business, the women observe the dress of other women, young girls look for good-looking young men, or vice versa -- I mean, there is a tremendous disturbance all over, and I feel it, of course. But if you are in a good mood, you have the attention of all of them. You can play one note and hold it for a minute -- they will listen like they are in your hand. Was there never a moment when you felt that very special emanation from an audience?' Rubinstein asked Gould. 'You never felt you had the souls of those people?'
'I didn't really want their souls, you know,' Gould replied. 'Well, that's a silly thing to say. Of course, I wanted to have some influence, I suppose, to shape their lives in some way, to do 'good,' if I can put an old-fashioned word on it, but I didn't want any power over them, you know, and I certainly wasn't stimulated by their presence as such. Matter of fact, I always played less well because of it.'
'Then we are absolute opposites, you know. We are absolute opposites!' Rubinstein said." (p. 30)
This is consistent with Gould's preference for the telephone over personal, face to face contact with people. Gould needed distance, not physical closeness. Music is itself a kind of emotional closeness without physical contact. Music expresses the inner world, both of the composer and the performer. In a musical performance one makes emotional contact with the audience through music, but one does not physically embrace the audience. Gould took one step further back and made that contact through recorded music rather than live performance. It is consistent with the need for originality and independence without regard to the approval or disapproval of the audience. In a performance the feedback from the audience is immediate: whether they show up or not, whether they applaud or hiss. But in a recording you simply put it out there. You don't know if anybody listens to it or not, and if they do, you don't know what their response is. The important thing is putting it out there and making it available. Whether it is loved or hated is less important.
It is very similar to my own attitude toward my creative work and it is exactly the approach I take in these discussions on this website. I put them out with total indifference to whether they will be liked or disliked, agreed with or disagreed with. I don't know if anybody even reads them. I don't concern myself with that. I don't promote them beyond indicating their existence to friends and acquaintances who might want to get to know me. They are fish hooks akin to Friedrich Nietzsche's metaphor in his Prologue to Beyond Good and Evil:
"From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks. Perhaps I am as good a fisherman as any? If nothing is caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish."
Those who find them may come in to my world if they are so inclined. It was the same with Glenn Gould. Gould recorded the music that he loved and believed in. He wanted people to listen to it and appreciate what he had done. But if they didn't, his isolation and diffidence protected him from disapproval and rejection. It was beneath his dignity to play to the crowd. He was not trying to be popular. He felt confident that what he liked would also be liked by others. Whether many or few did not concern him. Rubinstein wanted to please and be loved for it. He wanted to touch a wide swath of humanity. They truly were opposites.
My own tangled relationship with the piano and music over the course of my life resonates with this. In my early years I wanted to perform. I wanted that immediate response of love and adulation for producing something that pleased the audience. Over time I have become indifferent to that response, and I no longer care about pleasing people. I retain a strong need to share my inner self, thus these reviews and other writings that I publish for anonymous audiences. But the need for immediate contact is much reduced and the need for approval and validation much abated.
"The most basic premise of Gould's aesthetic was that music is primarily mental and only secondarily physical . . . For Gould a musical work was an abstract entity that could be fully comprehended in the mind in the absence of performance, without even the recollection of sounds or of physical means of production. -- Kevin Bazzana" (p. 146)
I don't know that Glenn Gould believed this. Bazzana does not support it with any quotations from Gould himself, and further, it doesn't make sense. In fact, it is contradicted by Gould's own behavior.
"When he is in the studio, he likes to play as many as ten or fifteen interpretations of the same piece -- each of them quite different, many of them valid -- as though examining the music from every angle before deciding upon a final performance. . . . One thing is certain: a Glenn Gould performance is unmistakably original and the result of extensive study and consideration, both at and away from the piano." (p. 32)
If it could all be done in the mind, he wouldn't go through all of this and he wouldn't choose one final recording to present to the public. In fact, he made a second recording of the Goldberg Variations that was completed just before his death that was very different in character from his early recording that launched his fame. If music was simply abstraction, this wouldn't be necessary. If you didn't need sounds or pianos to comprehend music, you could just print scores, and people could look at them. Glenn Gould didn't do this. He played the piano and recorded. He still wanted contact. Although solitary, he was not a recluse. He was not solipsistic.
This book is an excellent overview of Glenn Gould's life that includes his discography, a timeline, biographical sources, and the sources of the photos presented. It is an outstanding, very personal biography. Anyone interested in classical piano music should have it.