Glenn Gould Read Online Free

special italics of impasse. The more we seek to define music, the more it evades us. We know it when we hear it, to be sure. Increasingly, we can hear it anytime and anywhere, for, unlike in previous eras, music is now comprehensively available. So much so, indeed, that its rarity in daily experience—once the chief feature of music’s presence in cultural and individual life—is now almost as unimaginable as a world without internal combustion or running water. But what do we think we know when we know that ?
    It is a fallacy to assume even that love of music is universal. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim Dixon is surely the exception when he complains about being subjected to “some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart” and then “some Brahms rubbish,” followed by “a violin sonata by some Teutonic bore.” Unlucky him, we might think, at least for the Mozart. But that some is indicative: these are curses, not philistinism. Dixon takes the canonical names in vain as a way of letting out his particular cri de coeur, that of a man who spends his life being bored by other people, especially his employers.
    But what about Vladimir Nabokov? In Speak, Memory he wrote that music sounded to him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.… The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.” Sigmund Freud professed himself a fan of art but found music without pleasure because some “turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”
    Most of us are not so afflicted, or so resistant. Love of music is universal across all human cultures—though not without considerable variation—and the large majority of us enjoy it daily, usually deeply and without question. Theancient Greeks thought music was celestial and eternal, like mathematics. Modern cognitive science suggests it answers our “appetite for gratuitous difficulty.” Teenagers everywhere know that music is identity in its easiest form, invidious distinction based on taste.
    As Gould ardently wished, music is now easier to get than ever, easier to have with us at every moment, not any music but all music, the iPod-fed soundtracking of everyday life the logical outcome of our deep animal pleasure in the aural. Almost inconceivable now to recall how we used to have to take a bus across the city to visit the guy who had sub-woofers and a good record collection, sitting around the basement rec room to listen to London Calling or Armed Forces, or the way mix tapes were passed around like secret tokens of cool in an era before nearly instantaneous MP3 downloads. 29 And how much more bizarre those scenes in The Magic Mountain, where a gramophone and a stack of records utterly transform life in Thomas Mann’s alpine sanatorium?
    Purists complain still, as they did when Gould was among the first to advocate recording techniques over performance, that ubiquity of music lessens our regard for it, but there is no evidence of this. Hans Castorp plays a recording of Schubert’s “Linden-tree” over and over, his love renewedtimelessly each time. But the implications go further than this. Musical taste has for centuries been structured by the matrix of technological availability. Music could be enjoyed only by those who could afford to create it, and those with less pressing relations to the conditions of necessity could afford to create it complexly . Thus the emergence of legitimate musical taste around the classical music of formal experimentation found in the European religious and court traditions. Music moves from its homes in liturgy and dance to become an aesthetic end in itself, an art form. And increasingly it is subject to the claims of Kantian disinterestedness—that it should be appreciated for other purposes than the inherent beauty