Glenn Gould Read Free Page B

that a book is just its physical manifestation as type upon a page. Do we want to say that?
    Is this music?

    Is music the sum total of its performances and recordings, the always-in-progress lifetime of a piece as it moves from gestation to debut to interpretation and perhaps canonization? This sounds more convincing.
    And yet, any brute summing of performances, though it might appear to free the piece from its mere embodiment on the page, breaking the shackles of matter and re-investing music in time, seems by the same token to make it a prisoner of temporality. At the very least, inthis view a piece of music can never be finished, its essence forever deferred.
    Is music, then, something else altogether? A transcendental reality, perhaps, sustained beyond mere performance or material, rendering these the simple vehicles or reflections of true music? In this view, music might be something like the Platonic Forms or, better, the sound of the celestial spheres as they slowly perform their eternal, harmonious, cosmic dance. What we hear on this mortal plane, the mundane passing of air past a reed to cause vibration, a bow of sheep’s hair passed over a piece of catgut, a taut string deftly plucked or struck with a hammer, are only pale shadows of the divine chords. At best, they are capable merely of hinting at the beauties in a realm beyond human hearing.
    Or is music more like language, where meaning is captured by the play of sameness and difference? We hear the same note now and later, when it does not perform the same function or take on the same significance. We see the same letter in this word and that, we hear the same word here and there. Meaning, in music or in language, is never reducible to any single element of its enactment. It is, instead, an emergent property of the structures of iteration and reiteration, performance and repetition.
    That sounds fine, except that, though we sometimes speak of the language of music, and music meets language at more than one juncture—poetry, chorale—music itself does not seem to mean the way language does. Its singularity is more resistant, and its significance more pliable. The novelist and poet Nancy Huston: “Meaning is hard as a rock, but music is porous like soapstone.” 26 Music seems to be non-parseable, not to be translated or otherwise rendered. Indeed, it does not seem to mean at all. (Perhaps a poem does not either? Archibald MacLeish thought so.) 27
    Is music perhaps none of these philosophical fictions, these conceptual chimerae, at all? Is it rather a feature of complex brain function, like the relations of mathematics or the sense of viable composition? What we recognize as the beauty of the piece is analogous to the perceived elegance of a logical deduction: the demonstrated truth of Occam’s Razor in action, as we reach the conclusion in fewer steps or retain identical functionality using a smaller number of moving parts. Music has structure. We might even say it is structure, audibly revealed. Our conscious minds, themselves structured to recognize structure, respond to music as a hungry man does to food. The rich pleasure we experience at perceiving music’s play of pattern—theme and variation,anticipation and resolution—is what we mean when we say we are moved by music.
    Or is music a social and cultural phenomenon, like the rituals and religions with which it is so often associated? Seen this way, music is an elaborate semiotic system, a network of human communications grids. It thus has the ability to exhibit a wide range of functions that we class under the contested notion of human nature . As neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin has categorized it, for example, music can do some or all of the following: facilitate friendship, excite joy, convey knowledge, provide comfort, bolster religion, and communicate love. 28
    All true. And yet what does that tell us about music ? The emphasis is a mark of frustration, the