Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell

Author:Mark Kingwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Puritan

Music has been thought sacred. It has been thought edifying. It has also been viewed as a site of struggle, an agon both personal and social.

Despite music’s allegedly divine provenance, its players have, for most of recorded history, met with indifference or even disdain from their audiences, their abilities even sometimes rated as a form of menial labour. Aristotle considered musicians vulgar and untrustworthy—the ancient sanction for the still-common view of the player as, well, a player. Until very late in the history of the West, music-makers could claim a status no higher than domestic servants. “In the 17th century a prince kept his musicians as he might keep his stable,” Johan Huizinga notes. “Everybody knows that even Haydn still wore livery at the Esterhazys and received his orders daily from the Prince.”69 The silent reverence and programmed applause of the contemporary concert hall is of a very recent vintage, and may with time be regarded as one more blip in the history of music’s production and appreciation. What once was a boisterous and sometimes drunken scene of performance and revelry, the medieval banquet hall, developed into the less lively but still unrapt chamber-music evening at court and, from there, via the long inevitable arc of democratization, into the secular church of the modern symphony orchestra or staged piano recital, with its strict rituals and code of manners.

Beneath the polite surface of the audience, in whose number a cough or sneeze may be considered unacceptable, there runs a deep silent current of confrontation. Those who decry—rightly enough—the pressure-cooker music contests of our era, where besuited youngsters, perspiring over violins or pianos, are set against one another like so many performing animals, might care to remember that head-to-head competition has been a feature of music at least since Apollo stood against Marsyas to see whose lyre skills were superior. Centuries later, in 1709, Cardinal Ottoboni set Handel and Scarlatti against each other, wielding harpsichord and organ respectively. In 1717 Augustus the Strong, king of Saxony and Poland, arranged a contest between J.S. Bach and a non-entity named Marchand, who had the grace, or wisdom, not to show up. London society was abuzz in 1726 because of the struggle between rival Italian singers Faustina and Cuzzoni.

Nor is the competition restricted to individuals and their abilities. Musical taste is a social marker, a sign of position and sophistication. Tiffs between schools or composers dominate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Gould himself arrived on the mid-twentieth-century music scene amid a lively battle over twelve-tone composition, of which he was an early proponent despite the apparent bias in his recorded work for baroque and classical styles. His half-century lifespan ranged over the massive proliferation of new popular music styles, together with the arguments, put-downs, fashions, and disdain that are so much a part of anyone’s engagement with popular music, the stuff of late-night disputation and rude magazine columns.70 While Gould, like most classical musicians, was largely immune to the sort of argument that

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