On 10 April 1964 the pianist Glenn Gould at the age of 32 suddenly left the scene. He was planning a concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles and hadn’t told anyone he’d be the last. The theater was packed: Gould played seven pieces, including four fugues (video here); then he got up, walked away from the piano, a Steinway CD 318, and walked to the exit for never return to a stage again in front of the public.
What does this have to do with this innovation Almanac? Apparently nothing, but a year ago the American cultural critic Virginia Heffernan rebuilt it on Wired this episode connecting him with our pandemic lockdown and the time we had spent at home connected to others only via the network. And I found that brilliant article, not only because it makes us rediscover a great artist, but because it makes us reflect on life; and so I decided to translate some passages.
In short, Gould leaves the Los Angeles theater on April 10, 1964 and a year later gets on a train bound for the desolate Northern Territories, in his Canada. He will never return. When six years after the start of this that many defined self-exclusion another great pianist, Arthur Rubinstein made the bet with Gould that sooner or later he would return to do a public concert, Gould accepted it and won it eleven years later, on 4 October 1982, the day of his death. He was 50 years old. And considered live music a “blood sport”. Music, he said, “is something that everyone should listen to alone”.
Since that evening of April 10, 1964, Gould’s life has been for almost twenty years an ode to the pleasure of electronic media. In his studio he found something gentler, more subtle and intimate than the dominance / submission relationship that exists between an artist and his audience at a concert. For Gould, sound engineering and music production in general gave him, like nothing else, an exciting awareness of the existence of humanity. He rejected as moralistic all the claims that technology was depersonalizing: “I was immediately drawn to the experience of electronic music… I fell in love with microphones; they have become my friends as opposed to those who consider them hostile, destroyers of all inspiration ”.
Gould’s life, Heffernan always writes, is the demonstration that a life strongly mediated by technology cannot be considered a non-life. The problems caused by excessive use of social media are not trivial but the time spent in front of a screen is not wasted time … In the case of Gould, for example, technology has allowed him to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time: his music has appeared on millions of televisions and radios, in theaters and even in space as his stunning 1977 rendition of a Bach piece (Well-Tempered Clavier) was launched out of the Earth, aboard the spacecraft Voyager, along with other sounds, in the unlikely event that extraterrestrials had to intercept it.
From this point of view for Wired Gould “was the perfect example of a pandemic musician“. His friend and music critic Tim Page was asked how he would find himself in a lockdown, and he replied, “Glenn would have loved the Internet. He was terrified of germs, shunned any physical contact, but he would have loved Skype and Facebook and every way to cultivate long-distance relationships”.