Growing up with music all around made me all the more determined to find a life that was somewhat distant from it. I was playing in rock and blues bands in my teens, but no matter: I’d had it with music, at least as a way of making a buck. I was determined to go in a different, non-musical direction. Oh, well. Things happen.
Thwarted in my determination — the different directions I mentioned weren’t impressed at all by my marks in high school — I ended up back in music at the Royal Conservatory when Gould could still be found walking its halls. I eventually studied musicology at the University of Toronto under Harvey Olnick, the formidable lecturer who championed Gould to American music circles after the public debut of the Goldbergs in Toronto in 1954. Olnick rarely lacked certainty. Rocked by Gould’s Toronto performance, he was absolutely sure of the great career that would follow (as he stated on more than one occasion). Olnick was spot-on when he compared Gould to Bohemian-American pianist Rudolf Serkin (as well as to Wanda Landowska) in an unsigned piece in Musical Courier, which would be Gould’s debut in the American press. Serkin was the muscle-boy powerhouse of piano playing in these years, and this quality would have appealed to Olnick’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach. To Olnick, Gould had a similar macho presence.
The first essay Harvey Olnick assigned to us asked us to consider the question “What is music?” After two years of wrestling with that question, I was led to a course in aesthetics taught by Geoffrey Payzant, an organist and University of Toronto philosophy professor. Payzant, who claimed to be able to identify any movement from any of Haydn’s 106 symphonies, penned the book Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. The biography focused on Gould’s way of thinking. Even Gould liked it, going so far as helping the author correct the proofs and select photographs. When asked to review the book for the Globe and Mail, Gould gave it a quiet rave.
Payzant and I talked on occasion as he was writing the book, although I was unaware of that fact at the time. Then he sent me a copy of the manuscript. “This book is not like the other books about pianists,” it begins calmly. “How could it be? Gould is not like other pianists. He is a musical thinker who makes use of all available means to thought, including the piano.” Few shorter or better summations of Gould had appeared before Payzant’s book, or, perhaps, appeared after it.
By the early seventies I’d also crossed paths with Gould at the CBC, where I worked off and on in radio for some years. And as a music critic at the Toronto Star I interviewed him on a handful of occasions.
Approaching Glenn Gould in any guise is still intimidating. So much has been written already. So many experts. So many doctoral theses. So many opinions. So many books. So many books about other books. And so much of Gould’s own writing about Glenn Gould. Tackling his recording legacy is another large-scale undertaking, which continues to grow increasingly monumental due to Sony Records’ ongoing repackaging enterprises. (I’ve just come back from being given a peek at the latest iteration of The Goldberg Variations, which promises “The Complete Unreleased Recording Sessions, June 1955.”)
Then there was the prerequisite visit to the Gould archives in Ottawa, Ontario. At Library and Archives Canada you’re made aware of the vastness of the Gould holdings, which spread to yet another building (or two) in another part of town (who knows?). The unofficial king of the archives is Gould biographer Kevin Bazzana, who isn’t on the library staff but seemingly knows more about the collection than some of the librarians. (“Well, Kevin says …” was often the start of the answer to my questions.)
Bazzana, a music historian from British Columbia, authored Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, the research-rich 2004 biography. He told me there was a lot more to find in the archives; I think he meant this as encouragement. Gould’s Canadian intimates like Wondrous Strange because they feel it brings the appropriate Canadian spin to what they felt was the “Americanization” of their man in the more mainstream Gould biography, Glenn Gould: A Life in Variations, published in 1990 by Otto Friedrich, formerly of the Saturday Evening Post and Time.
This Canadian-American divide on Gould is not to be dismissed, although the Canadian concern about Friedrich’s take is overstated, in my opinion. Gould’s Canadian-ness is impossible for anyone to ignore or dilute. If Gould were a fictional figure — as he did emerge in his own writing and broadcasting — he might in my mind be compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, whose longing for the American dream went nowhere because the dream had come and gone before he had the goods to make it his own. “I was reminded of something,” Gatsby says when thinking out loud of his passion for Daisy, the love of his early life, “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago.” Gould is Gatsby’s opposite; he realized his dream at all costs. Gould found there was a boundless future for him.
Reckoning with Gould’s mystical side can also be intimidating. So, too, the bedrock of Ontario Christianity that marked his upbringing. He was never far from a Bible, we’re told; but rarely did he quote from it.
Gould dealt with his ongoing physical misery, real or imagined (the difference seemed to mean little to him), much the way a man might have to deal with a demanding, petulant mistress who could nag him to distraction (or to a hotel during a 1958 European tour).
“My hysteria about eating,” he said in 1955, “it’s getting worse all the time.”
In 1956 he’s taking anti-psychotic medications like Thorazine, as well as reserpine, another anti-psychotic, though it is also taken to lower blood pressure.
In 1959 people are spying on him, he reports. He says he hears voices.
Most interpretive disagreements regarding Gould begin with what’s found, or not found, in a diary he maintained throughout 1977 into early 1978, which is thick with his notations about things going wrong. With regard to pain, he wrote on June 23: “For the last several days right wrist had been unbearably sore after any 10–15-minute practice session.”
A reading of these entries led Frank R. Wilson, an American neurologist, to write a 2000 article suggesting that things were wrong with Gould from the very start; that “for virtually his entire career, Gould struggled against and adroitly finessed critical limitation in upper body, forearm, and hand movement.” Focal dystonia, the term for this condition, indicates abnormal hand and finger functioning. In Gould’s case, it suggested certain fingers tended to bunch in certain ways, minimizing how broadly he might be able to stretch out his thumb and fifth finger. When I went through some of his annotated scores, with correct fingers listed below each note, I noticed a lot of middle fingers were used. A professional-grade pianist I asked to look over it said his fingering was very odd indeed.
His score, his scribbles.
Gould-inspired 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