Gould knew early on there was something very, very specific about him, something he’d later understand had historical antecedents. Glenn Gould’s many epiphanies — the music of Fartein Valen, the Norwegian Christian mystic, for example — started early on with understanding his own genius. The word genius seems inopportune now, best worked around or avoided because of its overuse in describing middling talents. Gould himself used the word, but almost exclusively to describe others. Yet there it was, this unfathomable talent. And he knew it.
He hated to be described as a prodigy. Gould rejected that designation his entire life. He knew about prodigies, of course. He grew up hearing about and performing Mozart as musical wunderkind. The first concert he was taken to by his parents — he was just six years old — was by Polish-born pianist Josef Hofmann. Hofmann had been acclaimed as a child prodigy, having given his first concert when he was only five.
There was something slick and superficial in the very idea of the prodigy. In an era of kid wonders, perky little simpletons showing off on amateur-hour shows on radio, Glenn was winning kudos playing serious music at serious music festivals. He had raw potential — at least he’d heard his mother brag about this raw potential. She also spoke of his unbelievably retentive memory, about his sense of perfect pitch that allowed him to sing a precise note without hearing it first. So, early on he knew he was part of a serious undertaking. He believed and trusted in his mother when she said he was on his way to something big, but all in due time. But due time was rapid-paced for both of them. The pages in the beginner music books young Glenn Gould was given, typical of the sort all children are given when they’re starting out, are remarkably pristine, as if each page needed to be open for just the shortest time.
With Mozart — the budgie.
Soon enough, Glenn Gould came across the craziest understanding about himself — or rather, about his abilities. Every school everywhere felt it had its own musical genius in its midst. It was the same with every community, every small rural town. And in each and every instance, the belief was that their kid genius was the one and only.
But Glenn Gould knew it was true only of him. He was that kid.
But I am also interested in another sort of epiphany and in a different narrative of Glenn Gould, which, in my estimation, embraces all others: his role in the creation of Glenn Gould, media star, media manipulator, and Canadian intellectual icon.
Not entirely unnoticed by earlier biographers, this instinct of Gould’s has been downplayed for reasons I understand. The motivation for Gould’s media reinvention of himself had been in place since childhood — he had dreams of being a broadcaster well before he achieved international acclaim as a quirky concert star — and this dream shaped many of his crucial decisions. The attention he attracted — and he both wanted and needed it — by way of his piano playing connected him directly to the burgeoning new world of innovative technologies, bringing the wired city together far more so than roads ever did. Gould became the singular source of a singular signal to be found on LPs, or FM radio, or hi-fi.
The piano, for all its polyphonic potential, in his thinking, was nevertheless designed for acoustic spaces, spaces increasingly unused or unwanted — front parlours once meant for entertaining, saloons, silent movie houses, and, yes, concert halls. In these orphaned spaces, he saw that pianos were becoming another form of furniture, needing polishing as much as tuning. But not yet for Glenn Gould. Not quite yet. For him, the piano was an extension of himself, like an artificial organ connecting past practices with the new. He played the piano and played through the piano to reach his true objective — the transference of sound into impulse and back into sound again.
All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form this “intercom” running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.
— Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Media Is the Message
Gould as the consummate media performer/subject/manipulator has not gone unrecognized, but has been downplayed. Gould “The TV Star” is a chapter heading in one book; “Vaudevillian” is the title in another. Lorne Tulk, one of Gould’s friends and technicians over the years, thinks Gould was fascinated by singer Petula Clark due to her ability to market herself. A number of Gould critics, and not a few admirers, have remarked on how adeptly he handled stardom.
“Can you think of another pianist who had such strong contact with contemporary media, who was so able to use them, to control them, and to make them serve his own ends?” asked French journalist and musicologist Jacques Drillon. “In the twentieth century, the artist without media is nothing.” Drillon was depressed at the thought. He might well have been encouraged.
Van Cliburn, Sviatoslav 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