Glenn Gould Read Free Page A

as paper is—that is why the mind of Glenn Gould is still accessible to us; it is on the record . At the margins of complexity and innovation, we are all Ottos rather than Ingas: we need tools of notation and arrangement to keep our minds in function. What else is writing except the most ancient and powerful of these tools? Except it is a tool that uses us as much as we use it. Or more precisely, it is us. We speak of these storage devices as media , to signify their position between source and target of meaning, their vehicular status shunting words or music or images from place to place. In fact there is no between because there is no distance, only extension. The medium is the mind.
    The mind is also the medium. We speak of memorized lyrics or songs as known by heart . The ancient Greeks seatedcognition in the largest and most important of the internal organs—courage and identity belonged to the liver, that sustaining organ, and so that is where the gods centred their punishment of Prometheus for the crime of stealing fire, his eaten daily by Zeus’s eagle, only to grow back for further torture. Later the seat of selfhood would move northeast, from the liver to the heart, where it has remained for centuries. We still speak of “eating our hearts out,” and we approve the things that only the heart knows, the reasons it has that reason alone cannot understand, though now we usually mean things about love. And to know things by heart means to record them, from the Latin recordari, from re and cordis —heart. Rendered on the heart, in other words, stored there, a sweet cordial for the mind. What else?
    Gould, like Marshall McLuhan, understood this, just as he must also have appreciated McLuhan’s argument that the world was shifting, almost before their mid-century eyes, from the modern dominance of visual space, with its culture of print and reason and record, to a postmodern moment ruled by acoustic space and its electronic penchant for emotion and visual stimulation. The two men did not see eye to eye on many things, as two such towering egos could not be expected to, but they bothappreciated the importance of mind extension even as they worked out, in their different ways, a philosophy of communication and the acoustic. At a time when their shared home, Toronto, was vibrant with deep thought about technology and culture—the time and place of Harold Innis and Northrop Frye, also the conservative shadow of George Grant, as well as themselves—they dug deep into the strange fact of consciousness and the way technology, even an elderly form of it such as the keyboard, can reveal us to ourselves.
    Neither Gould nor McLuhan was able to appreciate the full force of the insight, however. McLuhan’s notion of media as “extensions of man” gets much right about the nature of the extension, the desire for it, and its various instruments, with their bright promises and dark secrets; but it does not probe deeply enough into the mysteries of mind that man, or woman, is blessed with. 25 Gould, meanwhile, was not rigorous in pursuing his initial, striking insight and so ran into confusions. Like many gifted musicians, he would sometime speak of the music he heard “inside his head” and was given to defending his notorious humming at the keyboard as an uncontrolled echo of that inner music. But the concept of inwardness is misplaced here; it is a misunderstanding of his own memory. Memoryis not the vast aviary imagined in Plato’s Theaetetus, a storehouse of flitting birds we try, with limited success, to catch in hand. Memory, like mind more generally, is the embodiment of a person negotiating a world. Creating a world, indeed; and finding out, in so doing, who else is listening.

CHAPTER FIVE
Existence
    But then: where, or how, does music exist?
    Is music the notes as they are arranged on the score, that is, the physical document? Surely not. By analogy, we would have to say