Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

Aaron Copland once said what made Glenn Gould unique among performers
was that when he played Bach, it was as if the composer himself was
performing. Yet, Kevin Bazzana’s admirable inquiry into Gould’s
keyboard art shows that Copland’s compliment would probably have meant
little to Gould. Gould was never concerned with fidelity to the
composer’s intent or historical perspectives on performance practice.
Rather, he regarded each musical work as autonomous in its own right.
The performer’s mission was to cast the architecture in a revealing
new light, not unlike a potter sculpting clay.

This “composerly” orientation impelled Gould to evolve a
distinctive and original musicianship. Bazzana’s examination of
Gould’s performances, which the accompanying CD helps document, points
to such features as the equality of voicing in contrapuntal textures,
idiosyncratic ornamentation, “proportional rhythms” to shape
large-scale works, arpeggiation of blocked chords, a modified form of
terraced dynamics, and nonlegato “détaché” touch (the latter
Bazzana describes as “a poetry of the North”). Bazzana critically
assesses the “aesthetic cross-breeding” that comprised Gould’s
views on art, repertoire and performance, as well as his veneration of
mostly German composers of high ambition and complex organization,
notably J.S. Bach and Arnold Schoenberg.

Ultimately, Bazzana argues that the auteur theory of film direction
should be applied to Gould’s work, and in fact Gould’s approach to
studio recording resembled that of a film director. Accompanying plates
show Gould’s markings on his music for “acoustic choreography,”
where different ranks of microphones were to be positioned in the studio
to capture the music’s expressive content.

The only caveat of this brilliant analysis—the most important since
Geoffrey Payzant’s landmark Glenn Gould: Music and Mind (5th ed.,
1992)—is its tendency to disparage the other dimensions of Gould’s
art, especially his writing. Bazzana says we would not care for
Gould’s work and ideas were he not a great pianist, but the converse
might also be true.