Glenn Gould Read Online Free Page A

it delivers.
    But that idea of anti-utilitarian, or pure, aesthetic enjoyment is itself revealed as a class property rather than a fundamental quality of mind. It establishes the taste position of those rare (usually wealthy) few who can afford to experience music in this fashion. Any taste system based on rarity grows unstable when material conditions alter, especially when there are changes in the basic distribution of availability. The formal concert evening to which Gould would object is, from this viewpoint, merely the last morbid excrescence of an aristocratic system of taste. Falsely democratic, apparently open to anyone’s enjoyment, it is still governed by the lexicalvalues of good taste in music. Moreover, his refusal can be seen as marking the classical concert’s perverse zombie energy, its dying spasm. As a form of canonical taste becomes endangered by real democratization––for example, that of popular music disseminated by radio and recording— the more energetically and desperately it tries to assert its authority. 30

CHAPTER SIX
Genius
    We look for the signs of genius to explain what we cannot otherwise explain. “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness,” Aristotle said, and even a scientific world retains a peculiar faith in the idea that genius is a divine gift, a visitation. Inspiration means to breathe into, and even now, in a more secular and less mysterious age, we may feel that a special air belongs to those who can do something we cannot imagine doing, something high-percentile and rare.
    The romantic narrative of genius works to nudge divine madness, otherworldly and mysterious, into a natural and less explosive category. Genius shall be evident from the earliest moments—or at least the post facto back-story will make it so. Mozart’s childhood compositions are unarguable, as are the sketches of Picasso. In Gould’s case, we grasp at slighter evidence: his father reported that the young Gould would hum rather than cry and would, reaching up his arms, “flex his fingers almost as if playing a scale.” More reliably, from the age of three Gould showed evidence of perfect pitch, identifyingtonality and modulation with assurance—a necessary condition for the vast musical memory he would later exhibit, surely a cornerstone, if not in fact the crucial conduit, for his sense of self, his reliable personhood.
    It has to be conceded that pitch is no guarantee of an ability to compose, let alone compose well. Pitch is neither sufficient nor strictly necessary for musical creation. Though Gould was making up his own tunes by age five, including some that were performed at his school or in church, and meanwhile showed great accuracy and precision at the keyboard, singing the notes as he played them, his own efforts at mature composition are indifferent at best. His one successful recorded work, String Quartet op. 1, was an attempt at counterpoint in which, as he himself admitted, he made all the rookie mistakes of the composer’s game. It was also composed in a classical style that, in the year of its origin (1953), any ardent advocate of twelve-tone avant-gardism such as Gould should have abhorred.
    He liked to insist, instead, that his compositions in “contrapuntal radio” showed his real compositional talent—not least his documentary “The Idea of North” (1967) and, as a small but telling example, his charming 1963 creation called “So You Want to Write a Fugue”—a multi-voice layering of advice for prospective composers ofcounterpoint, first broadcast on CBC-TV as the finale to a program entitled The Art of the Fugue and later released by Columbia on the two-disc Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album (1980): “So you want to write a fugue? You’ve got the urge to write a fugue? You’ve got the nerve to write a fugue? The only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one. But never be