VIII. Final Excerpt of Dr. Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article: BACH, GOULD, AND ACONSPIRATORIAL SILENCE
A young Glenn Gould sat often at the piano and, most relevant to the following, became fascinated by the long decay of struck notes. The progress of Gould as the piano player he was always expected to be was predictable in its conformative arc until 1955. That year, at age twenty-two, he recorded a performance of the Goldberg Variations that still resounds today. Sitting at the piano, his hands oddly moving at almost eye level, Gould attacked the variations like someone barely in his twenties should. The result was a musical maelstrom that seemed to lay waste to the very concept of classical music. I will argue that for our purposes, and in a development that is not unrelated, twenty-six years of silence followed as it relates to the variations.
In 1981 Gould returned to the studio, one enhanced by a quarter-century of human technological development, and again recorded the variations. This time the result was almost ruminative. What you sense in the difference between the two recordings is the prototypical human slowing; the recognition that there are hidden dimensions in life that must be accounted for, that there’s nothing to rush toward and that maybe it’s better to elongate things like the certain wistfulness that emerges from the epiloguey repetition of the aria at the end.
A couple things about these coupled performances.
Know that Gould came to view the recording studio as a kind of musical instrument onto itself. Of course today the studio Gould used would be laughed at by the average thirteen-year-old clicking in his parents’ basement. But it was the best Gould would ever see as the next year he suffered a stroke a couple days after his fiftieth birthday and died shortly thereafter. He was then buried under the aria, its first few measures deemed lapidary and engraved on his marker.
Also: audible in both performances, despite engineers’ best efforts, is the voice of Gould. Somewhere he acquired a habit that proved lifelong of singing the notes as he played them, the effect a kind of ghostly amen to the musical assertions. Of course the reason Gould hums, the reason the listener hums, is he wants the music to enter his body, his lungs; wants it to be the very air he breathes.
It is air that can be lived off of, these performances. Taken together and, I will argue, in necessary conjunction with ancillary facts of Bach and Gould like the spectral humming, they form one of the monumental works of art of human history. In creating this work, Glenn Gould obliterated the line that seeks to separate interpretive art from its creative superior. Consequently, it can be accurately stated that these two men showed Time for the mockery it is and collaborated artfully despite the impediment of more than three centuries’ distance and how many intervening people since? The result is a kind of exhaustion of the piece so that it cannot rightly be played again and someone in search of a similar achievement must of necessity look elsewhere.
Lastly, there’s silence that soothes and the kind that antagonizes. Any silence that brings us dishonor cannot be left undisturbed but must instead be loudly filled. The time for awed consumption of work like Glenn Gould’s has passed and left us in a quiet room, our mouths dumbly open. The filling of silences is left to those with voices but the determination of who does or does not have a genuine voice is only circularly made by identifying those who have filled the silence. But prior to all that the person with the voice knows and that person must at all times emit an agonized Munchian scream. It is the plaintive cry of the damned as they realize they may not win in the little time left and it may seem shrill at first only recognize it for what it is: beautiful in its defiance, expertly and melodically constructed to exform, its notes compose the siren song that may yet lead us home.
IX. What’s Left to Echo
Ed. Note: After much debate and internal hand-wringing we have decided, those of us who didn’t resign from unpaid positions in protest, to post (with one minor emendation) the following. That the death of the described individual is newsworthy is not reasonably disputed. What can be, of course, is the accuracy of the contained account and consequently our decision to post it in our Obituaries section and not say the Arts section. Putting aside for the moment the lively debate that’s been ignited, with animating concepts like the distinction between New and Old Media and what it all implies for society, we’ll simply say for now that we found the following persuasive.
Obituaries
Antonio Arce, 111, Man of Letters
Antonio Arce, who endured a lifetime of struggle and bloodshed that encompassed the tumultuous period in Colombian history known as La Violencia before ultimately landing in New York City where he created divergently powerful works of fiction, died alone last Tuesday in his Manhattan apartment. He was one hundred and eleven years old.
Antonio Ricardo Arce Ochoa was born on February 29, 1900 in Tocaima Cundinamarca, Colombia, in a house with dirt floors that his father had only recently built. (Early 20th Century, damn present-day for that matter, Colombian record-keeping was notoriously iffy. How iffy? Not until March 13, 1934 and Decree No. 540 did Colombia provide for the civil registration of birth, marriage, and death; and even then the provision didn’t take effect until 1940. Always in effect there, however, has been the Catholic Church and its baptismal etc. certificates with their marginal notes. It is mostly that kind of recordkeeping that forms the basis of the specificity you’re now enjoying.) Though generally described as a mild-mannered and kind child there was also ample evidence at an early age of Arce’s almost inhuman will. At the age of six he nearly bled to death following a vicious dog attack that he hid from his parents for a week before almost losing his arm.