GLENN GOULD - on recording, technology, giving up live concerts and damning the virtuoso tradition.When Glenn Gould stopped performing in public in 1964, there was little doubt as to the fact that he was making history by being the first major classical musician to abandon a successful concert career. But he was not the first great artist to abandon an established position in concert life : Leopold Stokowski, a musician who was one of Glenn Gould's own idols, left his post as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra for Hollywood (remember the Disney picture Fantasia?). He explained this by saying " I go to a higher calling."
Glenn Gould's own concert career departure had no such sweeping statements, no theatrical press conference. He always spoke about giving up playing in public by the age of thirty-five and said that he hoped to devote his life to composing after that, but few thought that he literally would never play in a piano recital again - in fact, he himself always left open the possibility that he might return.
However, unlike Leopold Stokowski who continued to make guest appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra and other major orchestras, Glenn Gould never looked back. A clean break was what he seeked, and that is exactly what he got. He is referred to, even in this day and age, as the "concert drop out", yet this was as far from the truth as one could get. For Glenn Gould the recording artist, writer, radio broadcaster, television personality and philosopher was even more prolific post 1964 than he had ever been. Though as a composer, Glenn Gould failed to create anything out of the ordinary, and produced a small output of works, perhaps because as he himself said, he lacked a "personal voice".
Music historians and critics, fans and "Gouldians" have argued for over forty years as to why Gould gave up live concerts. Despite the fact that he remained astute, if a little off the mark, when he talked about the future of music (for example, he predicted that the live classical concert would cease to exist by 2000), nobody can accurately determine whether his prophecies as to the prospect and future of recording and technology were the result of his own intense dislike for the "circus" atmosphere of the classical concert stage, or something more perverse.
So, in 2009, twenty seven years after his premature death, and forty-five years after that final concert in Los Angeles, how do Glenn Gould's philosophies reflect upon today's musical life, technology boom and one-click culture? As someone who was born the year Gould died, a child of the 80s and 90s, and yet as someone who was not brought up on a diet of email, facebook, iTunes, MySpace and youtube, I feel that a lot of what Glenn Gould predicted has come true, at least to some extent. Unfortunately, the classical live concert is not dead. Quite the opposite - it is well and thriving despite the fact that arts organisations around the world continue to moan at the declining audiences and lack of funding. Not only is the live classical concert still alive, but little has changed since Glenn Gould's time. It continues to be a circus act, a charade, irrespective of how great the artist, or how incredible the repertoire.
I was a full-time classical musician until a few months ago. Yet, I never went to many concerts. Sacrilege, I know - but there you are. Most of them were too expensive (and the best concerts were always sold out within a few hours, given the corporate entertainment culture we live in, where sponsors are entitled to nearly 90% of tickets before they go on sale), and the ones that I did go to, with a few exceptions, were tedious clichés. Rehashed operatic favourites, the same warhorse piano repertoire, symphonic concerts where the orchestra members look like they would rather be in a dentist's chair than playing Beethoven's fifth.
At twenty-six years of age, I am not even of the "internet junkie" generation (that is, kids that were born in the mid/late-nineties and noughties), so I really have no excuse. Surely devoting a childhood and life to the classical repertoire and study of the same should make it second nature for me to be able to enjoy and appreciate the classical concert, or a classical piano recital. With a few exceptions, I find it easier and more enjoyable to sit in silence, staring at a blank wall for three hours (meditation and solitude are incredibly healing) than I do sitting in the audience at a concert hall. And I'm a classical musician! I genuinely pity the poor kids dragged into a classical concert by their over-eager parents who may be just as bored or disinterested as their eight year old kids, but are there to " be seen". In my own case at least, Glenn Gould's prophecies have been realised. I do listen to nearly all music through the medium of radio, or through recordings (LPs, cassettes and CDs, I don't own an iPod) and even with live performances, I try my best to maintain the integrity of every worked performed, but bring in technology and the spoken word, to turn it into something a little less predictable and bland. Like Gould, I really do not see the point of regarding a certain performer, or a certain recording or performance of a work as the yardstick of performance, because that is exactly what leads to an unmistakably mediocre, and purely spectatorial recital.
Glenn Gould talked about the "non-take-twoness" as being another one of his gripes with the concert hall and all that goes with being a concert artist, in that there are no second chances, and no method of fixing something that needs fixing in a live performance. Of course, many have dismissed this as being a ridiculous statement by saying that Glenn Gould was very insecure, disliked the high pressure environment of the concert stage, and did not respond well to criticism. I did not know Glenn Gould, and very, very few people actually did, and even those that knew him intimately will never know exactly how he felt about playing in public, but the fact remains that the "non-take-twoness" that Gould talks about is exactly what has made the classical piano recital a completely pointless farce. Audiences go in expecting two fundamental things 1) that the performer will play his program through without any errors (no obvious ones anyway) from memory, and 2) that the performer will be able to play extremely fast, extremely loud, thereby defying any technical challenges the music might throw at him. The more well known or highly regarded the artist, the more predictably enthusiastic the final applause (though modern day audiences continue to love their child prodigies). This in itself is insane, because nobody (not even Rachmaninoff who not only performed, but also composed some of the most incredibly challenging music in the piano repertory) can be a hundred percent perfect all the time. And even if they do play all the right notes (something that even a computer can do, if instructed properly) there is no guarantee that they will be in top form musically speaking, or that a mobile phone does not go off in the quietest bit in the second movement. Whatever reasons Glenn Gould had for giving up the concert hall, and for claiming that recording would be the way forward, this surely is one of the most significant of them all, because a recorded performance takes away any of the dangers of the piano recital circus.
Despite the fact that the word "Puritan" comes to mind when one thinks of Glenn Gould, it is fascinating to note that the technological advancements predicted by him in the 1960s have materialized fairly quickly. An experiment like Wendy (then Walter) Carlos' "Switched on Bach" can be taken much, much further, it can be performed live, the listener or audience member is now free to choose just how they want to hear music and where they want to hear it. Even operas from the Met are being screened in cinemas across the world, and the availability of everything from archive recordings to film footage through the internet means that we, the "New Listeners" can control what we want to hear and how we want to hear it. Johann Sebastian Bach himself exercised tasteful freedom with Vivaldi's music, and Carlos did the same with Bach's. And Glenn Gould did the same with Bach's music too, though not in the radically obvious way that Carlos did.
However, there is still one thing that Glenn Gould spoke about that will probably not be realised in this century. The quest for greatness of art that goes beyond the technical brilliance of the performer, beyond the mechanical, that which Gould defined as "ecstasy" is something that made him completely and utterly unique. This solitary condition where only the performer could merge his entire being with the innerness of the music itself is something that could not be experienced in a concert auditorium. For Glenn Gould, the hope that this could be experienced by the listener through a recording was something of a revelation. The fact that Gould resented competitions of any sort, despised the graded music exam system and all the music festivals that exist, generally unchanged, to this very day, meant that he was constantly on a quest to seek this state of wonder and ecstasy that could only be possible in the solitude of the recording studio. So all the scholars, all the historians, all the music teachers and professors, all those who talk about this technique and that style, and award marks and prizes, and all those who write lengthy essays on the interpretation of a certain work, or those who compare 10 recordings of the same piece of music, and those who dismiss Glenn Gould as an eccentric who was out of his mind for ever thinking that a true musician could thrive without an audience, in the sterile, cold recording studio, is missing the point! As Gould himself said, "the purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity". NO other artist has come close in achieving this through a live performance or recording, and no other artist has come close in making it possible for the listener, for the audience to share in this ecstasy. Until then, we can look back at this remarkable man who would be bemused, and a little irritated no doubt, that as a people we spend such a large portion of our lives in cyberspace, watching concerts on youtube, listening to music on our iPods, writing to people through txt msgs and twitter, releasing music on MySpace and yet we are so backward as an audience! We refuse to budge when it comes to finding new ways of live performance, and being far more involved in the artistic process as listeners. The classical concert is not dead, nor is the piano virtuoso recital. So the state of "ecstasy" and the serenity that we so desperately crave will always elude us the minute we step into the auditorium. But as one thirty-something amateur piano student once told me after discovering Gould's recordings fairly late in life, listening to his Bach Partitas made the crowded bus ride to work a serene experience. Even now, listening to Glenn Gould makes it possible for the listener to experience that state of wonder irrespective of the surroundings, irrespective of the commotion and the mediocre, bland world around us. And because of that, in a few hundred years, Glenn Gould will be remembered as Mozart and Bach are, for through his recordings, through his art, he transcended the possibilities of his time and ours.
