Angus Lee L.R.A.M | May 2024 | Hong Kong
Parts of this text were edited and reworked from an earlier conference paper titled In modo molto giocoso: Play, Creativity and Subversion in Music (2024), which was presented at the HKU international symposium, AI, Music, and Creativity: At a Crossroads, in March 2023.
(This article continues from where the previous issue of Vantage left off.)
We might benefit from examining a number of “standard” renditions prior to introducing Gould’s. Daniel Barenboim’s rendition, for example, is an accomplished display of elegance alla Mozart; additionally, he dutifully executes all of Mozart’s repeats, even going as far as varying each section’s dynamics and expressive intensities as they are repeated; one might recognise that, while Mozart did not demand these nuances, Barenboim is here invoking a largely unspoken Baroque tradition with which surely Mozart himself was acquainted. Recognising the repetitive nature of the movement, Barenboim emphasises the articulative nuances characterising each section, and, in so doing, varies the directionality and energies implicit in each phrase, creating the illusion of movement and diversity within the rather static andante framework imposed by Mozart. Despite his best efforts, Barenboim’s performance – lasting 13 minutes – falls short in overcoming the verbosity of this movement. Murray Perahia and Alfred Brendel’s renditions – logging at 14 and 10 minutes, respectively – appear to be based on interpretative frameworks similar to Barenboim’s, thus suffering from the same pitfall of failing to compensating for the problematic dimensions inherent in the musical text.
Here, Gould’s surprising rendition not only sheds new light on Mozart’s work but also demonstrates a form of playful interpretation that would be inconceivable within a machinic frame of mind. With regard to the repeats, for instance, Gould adopts a radical solution: since the repeats appear to obstruct the musical flow on the structural level, he omits them altogether. One might denounce such a preposterous slimming down of the work as irrevocably damaging its textual integrity, though the contrary proved truer. Gould’s strategy, in fact, takes aim at demonstrating the movement’s progressive, structured acquisition of complexity, a process that is implicit in the form of theme and variation itself. While the renditions of Barenboim, Perahia and Brendel are laudable for their distinct characterisation of each variation, they fail in showing their structural evolution from one to the next; Gould, however, by reducing the timeframe inhabited by each variation, is relatively successful in highlighting the processual shift from one variation to another. In this way, one might argue that his rendition is closer in realising the “spirit” of the form of theme and variations.
Of no less interest is the fact that, while most pianists instinctually recognised Mozart’s theme as lyrical, Gould elected to offer an entirely different account of the musical text: Gould began the piece, in a move that directly contravenes Mozart’s andante injunction, with “an incredibly apostrophied”1 (sic) tempo that borders on adagio; rather than playing the theme in a “sicilienne” style that is also hinted by the text, Gould chose to proceed with a deliberately reserved, if not tentative, mode of playing. From the first variation onwards, however, not only did Gould progressively accelerate with regard to tempo but, as each variation grew into one another, he also increased the intensity and rigour of his playing. This progressive “defrosting” of the music cumulated in an interpretative intervention that even Gould himself called “perverse”: in the fifth variation, which Mozart marked clearly as adagio, he exchanges it for an allegretto. This substitution of the fifth variation with an allegretto, an act that, in another context, would surely have been disastrous, instead allowed him to bridge seamlessly into the final variation, which is marked allegro. By “let[ting] out [in] each variation” a controlled amount of musical expression and intensity, a separate though no less valid interpretative trajectory was engendered: the movement thus, in Gould’s words, “gradually took off”.1 While it would be misguided to attempt to replicate Gould’s subversive interpretative methodology – not every work, indeed, deserves, or benefits from, interventions of this nature – what we might gain from such an analysis is the realisation that any given piece’s “musical reality” is, as maintained, far from set in stone.
Through interpretation, the pure facticity of a musical notation becomes nullified; instead, in becoming a process through which our “passions, drives, long-term memories” are given voice that music acquires meaning.
1 “Glenn Gould and Humphrey Burton on Beethoven – Part 2 (OFFICIAL),” accessed 29 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QIbMAWd6nA.
2 Ibid.
As Benasayag would maintain, to be able to calculate at superior speed alone is an insufficient qualifier for intelligence; one must be able to offer a meaning for such calculations. Since it is impossible to reduce music to pure calculative manoeuvres, we here see the qualitative difference that separates human interpretation from machinic execution: in their disembodiedness, machines precisely lack the very qualities of “affectivity, corporeality, and error”3 that are vital to human music-making and creativity. The example of Gould and Mozart clearly demonstrates that creativity does not consist of the literal fulfilment of an injunction or convention but rather, through their enactment, escaping from their totalising logic. In this way, despite his “perversion” of Mozart’s text, Gould’s rendition remains convincing, even appearing to shed light on hidden architectural dimensions of work,4 of which Mozart himself was unaware; meanwhile, Mozart’s substitution of the first movement’s form, which seems to act as a form of metacommentary on the genre of sonata itself, should equally be lauded: if we can alter a movement’s formal design without compromising the overall balance and integrity of a work, what does that say about posterity’s considerably ossified notion of what a sonata should be? Subversion, then, is ingrained within the interpretative act; interpretation may, in this analysis, be defined as varying degrees of subversion with regard to a given set of conditions.
Subversion, however, by no means implies anarchy, where one might frivolously transpose and work onto any number of other interpretative frameworks or aesthetic codes; that would be the opposite of the critical conscience that drove Gould’s thinking. In a 1966 interview, for instance, Gould pointed out that, since the “greatest performances” of the classical canon by “authoritative musicians” “have been made permanent in the records”,5 the duty of the interpreter should therefore consist of exposing and resisting the reifying influence of institutions and historicity, and in so doing liberate the work of art from conceptual presuppositions that seek to stabilise its existential coordinates. Gould’s interpretative methodology, then, functions not only as a commentary on Mozart’s sonata but also a critical reflection on the conditions through which the dominant trends of interpretative aesthetics of his time are formed. Borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s formulation of the parody and the pastiche, we might observe that a certain “satiric impulse” does seem to underscore Gould’s work; this impulse, however, does not constitute the interpretation itself but, rather, motivates the emergence of an interpretative “style” that, “once … learned, … is not likely to be confused with something else”.6 To interpret, then, would be to discover the unregimented hermeneutic spaces within a work that escape the governance of historical context, institutional traditions, customs and conventions; from these spaces of resistance, the interpreter unravels the inconsistencies inherent to these codes of governance, and, in exposing the ways in which their conditioning of the work of art are, in fact, far from natural and inevitable, thereby frees the work anew.
From this perspective, I am ambivalent as to whether machinic performers may one day rise to the interpretative challenges I outlined above; indeed, I am sceptical as to whether they should. While it is pointless – and indeed impossible – to reject technology, it should be far from objectionable to adopt a cautious and critical attitude in assessing the effects and consequences of embracing, incorporating and utilising technological “extensions of creativity”; and, if the temporality of creation is futural, then we must critically examine whether there has been a commensurate advancement in culture parallel to technological progress. In response to this question, Gould observes that the more a culture engrosses itself in the notion of documenting its own “[artistic] idioms and traits of expression”, the more likely its artistic output would pertain to the “redistribution and reordering of … selected principles”7 harvested from other eras. Gould, from the vantage point of the 1960s, managed to articulate the effects of “big data” and digital “archives” on the foreclosure of our imaginative horizon. The patterns of the future, however, will not be uncovered through indexing the past, and we must not be governed by the fear of uncertainty and unpredictability: it is within these subcutaneous spaces of organic opacity that radically playful creativity is to be discovered. As the example of both Gould and Mozart shows, while it is the interpreter’s birthright to present a work as a window to the past, it is the interpreter’s prerogative to, under the right conditions, sever a work from the past and, through the interpretative act, sublimate the work of art into a living testament, of what it means to break free from the shackles of today’s conditions and forge the genesis of tomorrow. That is the imperative of creation.
3 Miguel Benasayag, Tyranny of Algorithms (London: Europa Editions, 2021), 15.
4 “Glenn Gould and Humphrey Burton.”
5 When probed by Humphrey Burton as to whether Gould’s intention was to create with each performance a “happening” or an “event”, the latter answers in the affirmative, that this is “the only thing performers have left to do” in a time of sophisticated recording culture, where “all the basic statements” of the classical canon “have been made for posterity”; thus, “[i]f one is … to pursue performance at a time when the greatest performances of the past and of the present have been made permanent in the record catalogues … one must indeed recompose [a work]”. Gould concludes by remarking that there is no excuse for “performances that simply duplicate what’s been done before”. See “Glenn Gould and Humphrey Burton.”
6 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 2009), 4.
7 Glenn Gould, “Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process,” Grand Street, No. 50 (Autumn, 1994), 57.