Glenn Gould Read Free

time completely awake.” Later: “At 9:40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” 23 Not even the gods who punished Sisyphus could have conceived a more devilish sentence.
    But then: music. Wearing no longer remembers anything about the composers he wrote about, nor can he name pieces when they are played to him; but he can still play and can even conduct. Arising from silence, music is his sole refuge, memory or no memory. Representing nothing, as composer Arnold Schoenberg asserted, music creates anticipation, expectation, promise, and resolution. We call music a time-based medium, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that time is a music-revealed condition .
    Clive Wearing would not remember this sentence by the time you finish reading it. Only music retains the power tocradle and wrap him in its measured moments. Sacks quotes T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “You are the music / while the music lasts.”
    Reflect for a moment on the relation among memory, mind, and identity. The standard story goes this way: I am only able to be myself if I can remember, from moment to moment and day to day, the story of my self. The narrative of singularity. Remove that and I am not I; I am not at all. But memory is a complex property, and not just because it can be broken into short-term, long-term, and contextual. The last is most persistent: Clive Wearing could remember that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister—though actually she no longer was—when he could not remember whom he was talking to from moment to moment. Memory is not all in the mind, however; or rather, more precisely, mind is not all in the head.
    Inga and Otto are going to a museum. Inga, in good health, has memorized the directions to get her there. Otto, suffering from memory loss, has written down the directions because he knows he will forget. What is the difference? We want to say that Inga knows how to get there while Otto does not because he has forgotten. But are written directions not in a sense an extension of Otto’s mind, functionally identical to Inga’s memory? She, after all, consults hermemory just as Otto does his notes; indeed, in way-finding, many people rely on what is known as eidetic, or image-based, memory. That is, Inga may well call up in her mind a visual image of the map she consulted before leaving home. Otto’s notes are part of his mind, even though they exist physically apart from his brain. He and his notes are part of a coupled system that is cognitive in its own right. 24
    Gould had a prodigious memory for music, possibly the most highly developed memory of his generation. It is impossible now to know just how his memory worked for him, but some generalizations can be hazarded.
    Musicians rarely, if ever, employ eidetic memory to play music: that is to say, even if they learned a piece from its score rather than aurally, they do not conjure up an image of the notes scored on bars in order to play. Musical memory is more organic: it depends on felt structure, so that progressions in notes can be executed smoothly, correctly. A piece can only be remembered in the playing , not all at once. Players who sight-read from scores are thus engaged in a complex cognitive feedback pattern, whereby their eye-mind is processing information one way even as their finger-mind is producing results in a structurally different manner. Part of the joy we take in great performance is cognitive, somethingwell beyond our admiration, however real, for mere dexterity in fingering or sureness in attack and release. Playing a piano, whether from memory or before a score, is an enacted demonstration of the mind’s power, extended in space and across time.
    No mind is unextended. The score serves to render the composition, to fix it in place when it can no longer be held merely in mind. Also to communicate it to others. The same can be said of a recording. Tape and disc are extensions of mind just