In his classic book of art theory, The Hidden Order of Art, psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig wrote about a kind of unfocused attention - an "empty stare of unconscious scanning" - that enables artists and performers to perceive the global arc of a work without becoming ensnared in the detail.
According to Ehrenzweig, attention to fine detail is a spontaneous process that great performers achieve at an unconscious level. The playing of Glenn Gould could be heard as an illustration of this curious polyphonic attention: at one level, an extraordinary integration of technical precision and emotional intelligence; at another level, an ecstatic absorption into the structural wholeness of a piece that goes beyond analysis into bliss. Just listen to this ethereal humming in relation to the piano and the process is laid bare.
Gould was preoccupied with both extremes of his gift. True to his belief that perfection could be fashioned only within the privacy and technological potential of a recording studio, he abandoned public performance in favour of the tape recorder and editing block. Gould mistrusted the relationship between performer and audience, at its worst a mutual feeding frenzy of power and adulation. "Lets' Ban Applause," and essay written for Musical America in 1962, summed up his position in those three words of the title. Yet within the text lay interesting insights into less frequently aired opinions. Famously, he described the justification of art as internal combustion, a deeply personal experience that was infinitely preferable to shallow public display. "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin," he wrote, "but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."
Interviewed for radio by Tim Page in 1982, Gould explained his slower reading of "The Goldberg Variations" as a realisation of maturity. The music that moved him profoundly, he told Page, was played at a ruminative tempo; as he got older (this was spoken little more than a month before Gould died), many performances, including his own, seemed too fast to allow a proper appreciation of the profuse ideas within contrapuntal music. Gould's dismissal of certain composers could be intellectually persuasive or amusingly perverse, yet at some subterranean level, the level articulated by his landscape metaphor of the isolationist North, he seemed to be guided by an instinct in search of the serence.
Mutations, approximations and cheap imitations of this serenity surround us now, many of them provoking not Ehrenzweig's empty stare of unconscious scanning but the glazed look of a person tranquilized into submission. We can only imagine the fun Glenn Gould's sharp, skeptical mind would have had with the impostors, Other aspects of our contemporary context have confirmed some (though far from all) of his intuitions about the future. Almost certainly he would have loved the solitude, anonymity, complexity and control made possible by digital audio technology and modern computers. Gould dreamed of a time when the distinction between artists and audiences, or art and life, was erased. That point has yet to arrive; until it does, his encounters with serenity will remain as life-enhancing as ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment