The brittle egg of late September
The world is full of creeps who love Glenn Gould, why do I have to be another one? I do, I love him, but what is the need, what is the purpose of this affection, what is the USE? Well: for one thing, any hypochondriac with a back injury is a friend of mine. For another thing:
“Gould's writing style was highly articulate, but sometimes florid, indulgent, or rhetorical. This is especially evident in those works in which he attempts humour or irony, which he did often.” And
"He seemed to equate long, tortuous sentences with seriousness and sophistication, and he was prone to false formality—playing professor. He could not resist using two words where one would do”. And
“[T]emperamentally he was not a scholar—he was an enthusiast. He retained some of the excitability of adolescence all his life, and he could not take up some new idea or cause without quickly fancying himself an authority on it. To make a case for a pet love or against a pet hate was a major motivation of his writing.” [1]
oh I had better stop before I crack my own ego like the brittle egg of late September. You can see the spiritual kinship I feel for him. sisters under the skin is what we are. Besides all that, there’s a video clip you should see, two minutes long maybe, of Glenn in his ratty bathrobe playing little snatches of one of the English suites, I think, to finish his sentences, sitting down abruptly and stopping just as abruptly, while all the while a little dog wanders in and out: patient; loyal. That little dog stands for the Soul; the bathrobe stands for Humility; and Glenn Gould stands for what you can achieve when the one hangs on you negligently and the other attends you faithfully.
Another thing I like about Glenn Gould is just his musical business. There are those who call his playing robotic and inhuman because they haven’t got any ears on, or because they read that in an article sometime, same as one reads somewhere that Bach is a divine sewing machine and repeats it until one dies. But I think that he, Glenn Gould, is most like himself when playing things other than Bach, because the supreme appeal of Gould as a pianist that cannot be replicated by imitators is his skillful, insistent and pointless disrespect. When playing other composers, he does it in the style of someone telling a laborious joke to an audience which will not laugh, convinced that they aren’t laughing because they don’t understand it, determined to repeat the joke louder and with more emphasis until they do. Alberti bass…get it? GET IT? Glenn gets it.
His Mozart is the best example of this and his Beethoven isn’t far behind. I hear some people think he plays them the way he does because he hadn’t got the ability to do it any better than he did, or that he had a serious interpretation in mind that just happened to be very interesting and extremely bad. Both of those things are probably true, too, but the disrespect is what gets me. When I want to insult a composer in some specific way I have to do it with my words, translate my feelings into sentences and belabor some metaphors, but Glenn could do it all with his hands without ever opening his mouth. Not that he didn’t open his mouth as well, because, as indicated above, he didn’t know the value of saying something in one way and leaving it alone instead of saying it two ways or two dozen. Neither do I.
I have my own difficulty with Beethoven and it causes occasional friction between me and my piano teacher, who is as protective about Beethoven and Beethoven’s miserable childhood and stifling romantic obsessions as you might be over a small hedgehog you raised from infancy and looked at as your own child. I have a great regard for his judgment, but we differ on this. Look, I spent some time in my youth lying on the floor with the Emperor Concerto and the Hammerklavier blaring out of the gramophone, the way children did who were born into the close of the Belle Epoque to enjoy a brief idyll before the opening of the Great War, such as I was. I am not immune.
but Beethoven expresses the innermost soul of the angry writer of Letters to the Editor; to submit yourself to him is to lie down in a field in front of a squadron of soldiers marching across it stomp stomp stomp; the shape of Beethoven is a Square and the literary twin of the Beethoven is the Frankenstein’s Monster, too heavy to pet a kitten without crushing the breath out of it, and angry about it. As a point of principle I will play him but not take him seriously, and I am not a Glenn Gould who can communicate anything intricate by playing unseriously. I am just an Adult Piano Student with a twenty-year hole in my progress who is never going to be very good.
(I fall quiet to leave space for a thousand voices crying out that I AM going to be very good, that I CAN be, that the only difference between the young & the eld piano student is quantity of devotion and time for practice. but no voice comes, because it isn’t true, and even if I hadn’t quit in my early teens, I still wouldn’t be very good. This is the termite colony that chews the widening hole in the hull of my self-esteem; this is the thrashing fox cub I clutch to my bosom, though not being a Spartan boy I complain about it all of the time, I want everybody to see my precious fox cub, his scrabbling paws, his powerful jaws.)
Anyway and so I had a difficulty with a passage yesterday. I have general difficulties with anything that requires me to cross one hand over the other because I forget which hand is which when they go in unfamiliar places, and remembering your right hand from your left is something you need to know, for the piano. My teacher suggested me an exercise that I think will work but that pains my extensors, or my flexors, because of my excess of vigor & want of refinement. Stop, he said; come over here for a minute, beckoning me to the kitchen counter, where he was coring a large number of halved red Anjou pears. Here, he said; I am going to put feta and Gorgonzola into the cavities of these pears, and then balsamic vinegar and a sprinkling of allspice and cinnamon, and he finished it off with agave nectar in place of honey, which was a mistake in my opinion, but I said nothing about it because tact is an important part of piano technique.
(This is my second try at purchasing my own musical instruction as an adult, and very successful. My teacher is very learned and part of that is keeping certain pedagogical tricks in reserve for special difficulties so they don’t go stale. He made me a bourbon cocktail with a fresh orange slice once, but only once, to get me over some left-handed troubles; that was last year when my right arm was still in a sling and I was struggling some and feeling a lot of resentment against poor Paul Wittgenstein. [2])
Then he put them (the pears) to roast for twelve minutes and had me play the passage a time or two more, and then told me to eat a roasted Pear and give my opinion on it, although I could see he was very pleased with them with or without my opinion, which is part of the essential confidence in one’s own skill that, along with delicacy of touch, is an essential part of the competent musician’s inventory. Then he had me play the passage again and There! he said, you see, it’s better now.
It isn’t all the way better, my hands still come apart at the wrong times, but you don’t fix these things all at once in a single lesson, that’s what practice is for. I gave up manipulating pears in fancy ways years ago when I tried and failed to poach some in red wine like a feudal Lord, and if it were up to me, I would leave pears alone. but learning to do what you are told and disregard caution is nine tenths of the point of Adult Lessons in anything. You go to the trouble of paying for an expert’s guidance, you had better open your spirit to new ideas and listen to what he has to say about the fruits of Autumn.
—Long ago and before I was born, my dad bought himself a piano, and left it behind him when he died, which is the reason I was privileged to take piano lessons as a child, which is the reason I believe that the right selfish use of windfall money is to put it in pianos instead of gold bars or mutual funds. His was a fancifully carven Louis XIV style Baldwin baby grand of 1970-something, which he ordered in a sophisticated walnut. One time I tracked down the original catalog number and found out that the standard model of this piano was white with liberal gold accenting, a sight to shock the conscience. This was big news to me, that my own father was capable of being attracted by such a thing, even if he did have to spoil it by special-ordering a finish in better taste. Big news to me because my father was a completely sober (metaphorically) and heterosexual (literally) man all the way through, and I mean both of those adjectives in the most pejorative way imaginable. He was the kind of person you would expect to have liked Glenn Gould for all the wrong reasons. Bach, too. But we all have hidden virtues, even my dad.
& since piano is character and character is destiny, let me tell you about mine. I call it a piano because I want it to be one, but it is a digital replica, the best in its class. On the outside it looks like any other keyboard slab, but inside is an intricately constructed real grand piano key action (allegedly), made out of wood and pivot pins and everything, connected to some wires and electrodes and electronic samples. You press the key and everything inside happens, invisibly, just as it does in a real piano, everything is there but the strings. Everything is real until you depress the key all the way, and then the voices of a hundred ghost pianos sing into your ears and a chill runs down your spine as you fall into the uncanny piano valley and take your place among the lost. If you bought it mainly so that you could play the Goldberg Variations late at night while pretending to be Hannibal Lecter, you could do worse.
It is seventy pounds of lies because of all its weighted & balanced mechanical innards, and my lower back is mostly made of popped corn kernels, so when I had it delivered a year or two ago I should have waited for help to set it up but I didn’t, I took it in my arms and heaved it up onto the stand, trusting to God to protect my lumbar regions. It didn’t kill me, and I love it even though it isn’t real, like the artificial bird in the casket covered over in rubies and sapphires that sings fruitlessly in Andersen’s The Nightingale until it runs down. Like that bird, it lacks something of life and spontaneity, there is always something lacking in the tones it produces; but it is beautiful, and I love my liar’s piano no matter how little it loves me, because it has no heart. It suits me pretty well.
[1] Bazzana, Kevin. Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould.
[2] Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the other, minor Wittgenstein, is responsible for commissioning a lot of the left-hand piano repertoire that there is, because he mislaid his right hand in the War and rehabilitated himself by making Ravel write him a concerto. His taste is not mine, and if I were him I would have gone about my commissions in a different way, and the existing left-hand repertoire would be quite different. but there is no help for that now.