THRESHOLDS, COLLARS, AND LONESOME SOCIALITY
“There are architectonic emblems of commerce: steps lead to the apothecary, whereas the cigar shop has taken possession of the corner. The business world knows to make use of the threshold. In front of the arcade, the skating rink, the swimming pool, the railroad platform, stands the tutelary of the threshold: a hen that automatically lays tin eggs containing bonbons. Next to the hen, an automated fortune teller—an apparatus for stamping our names automatically on a tin band, which fixes our fate to our collar.”
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [C2,4]
That “which fixes our fate to our collar” has been on my mind lately, as Yervin’s “Dark Enlightenment” finally begins to percolate through mainstream media which has largely avoided giving substantive, analytic attention to Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA” until now.
Precisely because the MAGA game makes use of postmodernist distances between sincerity and speech, I find myself drawn back to Dada, Situationism, and literature that confronts performativity with humor. Enter the brilliant untelling of Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom, which subtitles itself “a novel” — and gives us the author’s name upside down.
“I had come to the Lonesome Ballroom for this—this singular ideal discourse, this friendliness that didn’t require friendship, this conversation that was perfect precisely because it did not require me to speak,” the narrator tells us in the section excerpted in Cleveland Review of Books.
So what if my fern fell over? It is windy. The speaker’s shadow is lavender. Lavender as the dress Madeline wore when reading at the AWP Midwestern Prose off-site.
NOTABLY, GLENN GOULD COULDN’T CARE LESS WHAT WE THOUGHT ABOUT HIM
A tragic tone often colors the stories we tell of Glenn Gould’s withdrawal from the concert world. But what is tragic to the fern or the fern’s owner may not be tragic to the composer, himself. He had a long love affair with an artist; he made radio documentaries; he wrote criticism and composed music; he wore a scarf that grew into a myth about his extreme hermeticism due to hypochondria. He probably laughed often when encountering the character he’d become in newsprint and text.
Composers often struggle with the demands and travel of performance, exacerbated by pianism. At one point, Gould elected to opt out of the relentlessness. He wanted to play with sound. He wanted to write about music. He wanted to find his true north as metaphor and state of being. He wanted to express his opinions without licking his patrons’ spaghetti straps and mink stoles.
Cait Miller recalls how Gould’s opinions on music caused tension in his performance career, citing his “April 1962 performance of Brahms’ first piano concerto, with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein conducting” where “Mr. Bernstein disagreed with Gould’s interpretation so vehemently that he felt it necessary to warn the audience beforehand.” Bernstein’s comments were preserved in the radio broadcast of that performance.
— which reminds me that one of my favorite literary forms is Gouldian, namely, the self-interview that shapes itself from the shadow of a musical form.
“THE TUXEDOED FALLACY”
Ambivalence and passion meet as text, in the (often unpopular) position Gould assumes before recapitulating it and playing it out. G.G., the performer/composer, argues with g.g., the interviewer.
At stake: the conventional hierarchies in the music world and criticism. The “tuxedoed fallacy”comes up in an interview where the speaker/s jauntily confronts the “noble tutorial and curatorial responsibilities of the artist in relation to his audience”:
I love how Gould plays his ‘persona’ in order to rattle his audience, knowing, of course, that his audiences are multiple, and taking pains to articulate his “tuxedoed fallacy,” pinning it to the act of “display”. The tuxedo provides the illusion that one person stands above the others, not naked at all, but “from a power-base”: the proscenium.
ASIDE ON DIORAMAS AS “DEVICES FOR CHANGING SPACE AND TIME”
“Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, known for his 1839 patent on the daguerreotype photographic technique, began his career as an assistant to the celebrated panorama painter Pierre Prevost. In 1822, Daguerre debuted the diorama, his first device for changing space and time. The diorama differed significantly from the panorama: Daguerre's visitors looked through a proscenium at a scene composed of objects arranged in front of a backdrop; after a few minutes, the auditorium platform rotated, exposing another dioramic opening. The entire diorama building became a machine for changing the spectator's view. Like the diaphanorama— in which translucent watercolors were illuminated from behind— the diorama included semi transparent paintings that could be modified by moving the lights.”
– Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”
"AND I WISH YOU’D STOP USING WORDS LIKE THAT”
Warning: if Gould doesn’t interest you, then the remainder of this post —- devoted to Gould’s self-interview on Beethoven — will be mortifying. “Glenn Gould Interviews Himself about Beethoven” was published In the fall 1972 issue of Piano Quarterly.
In it, Gould teases out the distinction between the “composer”, the “artist”, and the “performer” as constructed by musicology and other discourse:
glenn gould: Mr. Gould, when did you first become aware of your growing doubts about Beethoven?
GLENN GOULD: I don't believe I have any doubts about Beethoven—a few minor reservations, perhaps. Beethoven has played a very important part in my life, and I feel that while the warm glow of his bicentennial celebration remains, "doubts" is a singularly inappropriate word.
g.g.: You must allow me to be the judge of that, if you will, sir. But perhaps you'd care to define some of those "reservations" for us.
G.G.: Certainly. Well, there are moments in Beethoven when I'm a bit perplexed, I confess. For instance, I've never been able really to "draw a bead," so to speak, on the finale of the Ninth.
g.g.: That's a fairly common reservation.
G.G.: Exactly, and it certainly doesn't qualify as a "doubt," in my opinion.
g.g.: I see. In your view, then, it's simply an aversion to isolated moments in his music, is it?
G.G.: Well, of course, I don't mind admitting that I have a built-in bias in regard to Wellington's Victory, or even the King Stephen Overture, for that matter, more or less from first note to last.
g.g.: But among what we may safely call the "mainstream" works, you have no such objection, is that it?
G.G.: No, not exactly. I can't claim to be equally enamored of all the most familiar compositions, certainly.
g.g.: Well, then, which of these works fail to meet with your approval?
G.G.: It has nothing whatever to do with my approval, and I wish you'd stop using words like that. But I suppose, perhaps, I'm less fond of the Fifth Symphony, the "Appassionata" Sonata, or the Violin Concerto.
g.g.: I see. All those works are from what we might think of as Beethoven's “middle” years, aren't they?
G.G.: Yes, that's true.
g.g.: And very significant, too. I suppose, however, like most professional musicians, you have a pronounced penchant for the late quartets and piano sonatas.
G.G.: I listen to them a lot, yes.
g.g.: That's not really what I was asking you, Mr. Gould.
G.G.: Well, those are very problematic works, you see, and I—-
g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, with all due respect, we don't need you to tell us that. If I'm not mistaken, even one of Huxley's characters—what was his name?—
G.G.: Spandrell or something, wasn't it?
g.g.: Yes, thank you—even he committed suicide more or less to the accompaniment of Op. 132, didn't he?
G.G.: That's right. Well, I apologize for the clichés, but those works really are very elusive, you know-very enigmatic, very—
g.g.: How about “ambivalent”?
G.G.: Don't be hostile.
g.g.: Well, then, don't you be evasive. What I'm asking, obviously, is not whether you share the worldwide bafflement in regard to the form of the C-sharp-minor Quartet—I'm asking whether you genuinely enjoy listening to the piece.
G.G.: No.
Acknowledging the role of taste or preference makes the professionals uncomfortable. It’s difficult for a critic to admit their “tuxedo style” is just the window-dressing for a personal opinion, or the stroll of a particular interpretive in the rendition.
Little G tells big G that he needn’t “be embarrassed” for admitting that he doesn’t enjoy listening to the C-sharp-minor Quartet, and then he asks which works attract him. Italics are mine.
G.G: I'm fond of the Op. 18 Quartets, certainly, and the Second Symphony is one of my two favorite works in that genre, as a matter of fact.
g.g.: Very typical. This, of course, is the well-known odd-number-symphony syndrome.
G.G.: No, I assure you, it isn't. I can't bear the Fourth, and I'm not particularly fond of the Pastorale, though I will admit the Eighth Symphony is my favorite among all his works in that form.
g.g.: Hmm.
G.G.: You see, I know you'd like to confirm a cut-and-dried diagnosis, but I really don't think it's quite that simple. You're also trying to establish a chronological bias, obviously, and I don't think that's fair, either.
g.g.: Well, Mr. Gould, I admit that our tests are far from conclusive at this stage, but since you've already confessed your admiration for the Second and Eighth Symphonies, perhaps you'd care to enumerate some other Beethoven compositions for which you have special affection.
G.G.: Certainly. There is the Piano Sonata No. 8, the String Quartet Op. 95. Then there are each of the Op. 31 Piano Sonatas and, believe it or not, the "Moonlight," for that matter. So you see, I just can't be typecast as readily as you might wish.
g.g.: On the contrary, my dear sir, I think, in relation to the Beethovenian canon at least, you've managed to typecast yourself, and with remarkable consistency. Do you realize that every work you've singled out has belonged to what we might call a transition phase—or, rather, one of two transition phases, to be exact—within Beethoven's development?
G.G.: Forgive me, but that's just hogwash. First of all, I can't buy this notion of the Beethovenian plateau. You'd probably like to convince me that every work he wrote is either "early," "middle," or "late" in spirit, and I think that sort of categorizing is every bit as unprofitable as it is unoriginal, if you don't mind my saying so.
g.g.: I don't mind your saying so, and I've noted your defensive reaction to the suggestion. But since you yourself alluded to this yardstick—-this subdivision of Beethoven's creative life into periods—-I simply suggest to you that there is perhaps something significant in the fact that all the works you've mentioned, by that very yardstick to which you've alluded, found him at the time of their composition in a state of, for want of a better word, flux.
G.G.: Every artist is in a state of flux or he wouldn't be an artist.
g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, don't be tedious—-in a state of flux, as I say, if not between the early and middle years, then between the middle and late ones.
In this kerfuffle over “periods,” Gould toys with the structures of critique. And then, he turns around and interrogates the difference between performing and listening as an aesthetic experience. “Of course, you played a great deal of Beethoven in your concerts, didn't you?” g. g. asks.
Notice how this interview moves? Notice how it leans into the fugue as a form? It’s hard for me not to hear it, especially since the fugal form weighed so heavily in Gould’s sense of theory and sound. Speaking of “playing” v. “listening to”:
g.g.: Does this suggest, then, that you found his music, by and large, more fun to play than to listen to?
G.G.: Certainly not. I've already told you that I listen with great pleasure to—
g.g.: — to the Eighth Symphony and the Op. 95 String Quartet, I know. But in your concert-giving days you did play, let's say, the "Emperor" Concerto fairly frequently, after all, yet I haven't noticed it on your list of all-time favorites. So does this suggest, perhaps, that such performances simply provided you with tactile rather than intellectual stimulation?
G.G.: I think that's really uncalled for, you know. I tried very, very hard to develop a convincing rationale for the “Emperor” Concerto.
g.g.: Yes, I've heard some of your attempts at rationalizing it, as a matter of fact, but it's interesting that you say “tried.” I assume this means that you found it difficult to realize a spontaneous musical experience in relation to such performances.
G.G.: Well, if by “spontaneous” you mean an occasion when every note fell into place as though programmed by an automaton, obviously not.
g.g.: No, don't misunderstand me. I'm not speaking of technical felicities or anything as mundane as that. I simply suggest that if you were to play a work by—-who's your favorite composer?
G.G.: Orlando Gibbons.
g.g.: Thank you—by Orlando Gibbons, that every note would seem to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.
G.G.: I don't think I've been guilty of any such differentiation.
g.g.: Ah, but you have, however inadvertently. You see, this armchair analysis of yours compels you to keep trying to like Op. 132, or whatever, but you don't feel obliged to undertake any similar probe in behalf of Mr. Gibbons's Salisbury Pavan, do you? And similarly, the elaborate rationale you concoct in behalf of the Fifth Piano Concerto—whether if you do it very slowly or very quickly it might suddenly and miraculously hang together successfully—isn't matched by any similar apologia when you play Gibbons, is it? Now, I'm sure you'll agree that it's not because Gibbons is less intellectually demanding—
G.G.: Indeed, he's not.
g.g.: —and indeed, given the passage of time from his day to ours, he might even be said to pose the greater re-creative challenge.
G.G.: That's true.
g.g.: But despite that fact, you see, I'm fairly certain that if you sit down to your piano, late at night, let's say —for your own amusement, in any case—it's Orlando Gibbons, or some other composer in regard to whom you evidence no such schizophrenic tendencies, that you'll play, and not Beethoven. Am I right?
G.G.: I don't really see what that proves, and I think—
g.g.: Am I right?
G.G.: But surely I'm entitled to —
g.g.: Am I right?
G.G.: Yes. Can you help me?
g.g.: Do you want to be helped?
G.G..: Not if it involves giving up Orlando Gibbons.
g.g.: That shouldn't be necessary. You see, Mr. Gould, your problem—and it's a much more common one than you realize, I assure you—relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of the means by which post-Renaissance art achieved its communicative power. Beethoven, as I'm sure you'll agree, was central to that achievement, if only chronologically, in that his creative life virtually bisects the three and a half centuries since the demise of your Mr. Gibbons—
G.G.: True.
g.g.: —and it's precisely during that period of three and a half centuries, and specifically at the Beethovenian heart of it, that the creative idea and the communicative ideal began to grant each other mutual concessions.
G.G.: You've lost me.
g.g.: Well, look at it this way. All the works that you've enumerated on your private hate list—
G.G.: It's not that at all.
g.g.: Don't interrupt, please. All those works have in common the idea that their ideology, so to speak, can be wrapped up in one or more memorable moments.
G.G.: You mean motives.
g.g.: I mean tunes. I mean, quite simply, that you, as a professional musician, have clearly developed a resentment pattern in relation to those tunes— forgive me—which represent and which characterize the spirit of their respective compositions.
G.G.: Well, there's nothing very special about the tunes, if you want to call them that, in the "Emperor" Concerto, since you're challenging me on that ground in particular.
g.g.: There's nothing special at all. There is, however, something readily identifiable about them which, by definition, threatens to undermine your interpretative prerogative, don't you see? You resent the fact that, in a work like the "Emperor" Concerto, the elaborate extenuations relevant to those motives have indeed been left in your hands, literally and figuratively, but the raison d'être of those extenuations inevitably devolved upon the kind of motivic fragment that automatically came equipped with certain built-in interpretive biases by virtue of which they can be sung, whistled, or toe-tapped by anyone—any layman.
G.G.: That's nonsense. Mendelssohn's tunes are every it as good as, and far more continuous than, Beethoven's, and I have no objection to Mendelssohn whatever.
g.g.: Ah, precisely substance n's are far more continuous because they relate to a motivic substance which is at once more extended, more complex, and-don't get me wrong, now-more professional.
G.G.: You think so too, then?
g.g: Everyone does, my dear fellow. It's precisely that impossible mixture of naiveté and sophistication that makes Beethoven the imponderable he is, and it's precisely that dimension of his music-that mixture of the professional's developmental skills and the amateur's motivic bluntness—that is at the heart of your problem.
G.G.: Do you think so?
g.g: There's no doubt of it. And it's not at all a bad thing, really—a bit anarchistic, perhaps, but, in a way, it's even rather creative—because when you reject Beethoven—
G.G.: But I'm not rejecting him!
g.g: Please! When you reject Beethoven, as I say, you're rejecting the logical conclusion of the Western musical tradition.
G.G.: But he isn't the conclusion of it.
g.g: Well, of course, chronologically he isn't. As I've said, he's really the center of it in that sense, and it's precisely those works which are in the center of his own chronology that disturb you most. It's precisely those works in which an elaborate exposé with which only a professional can cope is related to material with which anyone can identify.
G.G.: Hmm...
g.g.: And that disturbs you, Mr. Gould, because it represents, first of all, a comment upon the role playing, the stratified professionalism, of the Western musical tradition that you, and not without reason, question. No, it's no accident that you prefer those works in which Beethoven was less emphatically his logical-extremist self—the works written on the way to, or in retreat from, that position—the works in which the predictability quotient is lower, the works in which the composer is less concerned with making the mystery of his art explicit.
G.G.: But on the way to, or in retreat from, that position, as you put it, you encounter a much more professional kind of art— Wagner's professionalism, or Bach's, depending on which way you go—and you have to move a long way back, or forward, as the case may be, to encounter a purely amateur tradition.
The self-exposing “gotcha” is central to the fugal motion of Gould’s self-interviews. In fact, one might even be inclined to note that Gould places form first in his writing on music, and he does so in a Platonic manner that plays both with and against Samuel Beckett’s own dialogic modes. Ignore me. Here’s the notorious Emperor penguin!
G.G..: Hmm. Well, do you mean, then, that if I do reject Beethoven, I'm on my way to being an environmentalist or something like that? I mean, I think John Cage has said that if he's right, Beethoven must be wrong, or something of the sort. Do you think I'm harboring a sort of suicide wish on behalf of the profession of music?
g.g.: My dear fellow, I don't think you should be concerned about it, really. Besides, you're quite a moderate, you know— you didn't choose Op. 132, after all . . . You're vacillating. You're not quite sure whether in making that mystery explicit, in exploiting the dichotomy between layman and professional, we do our fellow man a service or a disservice. You're not quite sure whether in opting for an environmental course, which, after all, puts an end to professionalism as we know it, we're getting at some truth about ourselves more immediate than any professional can achieve, or whether, in doing that, we're simply reining in our own development as human beings. And you shouldn't be embarrassed, because Beethoven himself wasn't sure. After all, he didn't write many "Emperor" Concertos, did he? He vacillated, to a degree at least, and I don't see why you can't. It's just that in celebrating Beethoven, you're acknowledging one terminal point which makes your vacillation practi-cable, and now you have to find another one.
G.G.: Well, I feel consoled by that, actually. But there's one thing I don't understand: How did you know I had these doubts?
g.g.: Mr. Gould, it was perfectly obvious— you wouldn't have requested this interview otherwise. You'd have authored the piece as you were asked to do.
G.G.: I see. Well, thank you very much—is there anything else?
g.g: No, I don't think so. Oh, yes—if you don't mind, on your way out, turn down the PA, will you? If I hear another bar of the Eroica, I'll scream.
EN FIN.
A few of my favorite Beethoven performances by Gould, for no reason at all.
Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor "The Tempest": III Allegretto.
Sonata For Piano And Cello in A major: I Allegro ma non tanto.
15 Variations And Fugue in E-flat major: Variations I-XV.
“Ecstasy”. This is the word Gould used to describe his relation to music— to the worlds it opened and created. Rapture can be painstakingly disciplined, a function of heights within constraints, and so I leave you with Gould playing Gibbons. For the ecstasy so palpable that one feels it is almost private, something erotic occurring between two bodies in a world we cannot imagine, except by shadow.