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He apparently had the
most un-lonely life, largely over the telephone in the middle of the night. I
think if we try to evaluate his life from our experience and our standards,
we're doomed to come to the wrong conclusions.
I've written before about aspects of
his abandonment of the concert stage. City after city, hotel after hotel,
airport after airport is a brutal kind of life, and at a very young age, he
rejected it. Mostly we talk about his interest in the technical and artistic
possibilities of the recording studio, but I'm convinced there were deeply
personal reasons for leaving the concert stage as well as musical and aesthetic.
Touring was making him sick, physically and soul-sick. He wanted instead to
haunt his beloved Toronto, which energized rather than sapped his soul. He knew
he had only one life to live, long or short, and he came to the conclusion that
touring was a kind of violent robbery of that finite life; Toronto gave him the
particular gifts of a rich life that he wanted.
He was no more lonely than he wanted to
be. If he'd wanted, hundreds of admiring people would have swarmed around him;
he could have had a salon full of people if that was the kind of artistic and
intellectual environment he wanted. But whatever his desires were in life, for
Gould, they required a great deal of introspection, and a great deal of
insulation against Noise and Disruption and Trivia. Many people want some of
these things, but just never work up the nerve to demand as much of them as they
want. Gould did; some people find it repellent, some shocking, some sad. I find
it courageous and, at the end of the day, it gave us the magnificent treasury of
his music and his remarkably original radio documentaries.
Ned Rorem said: "There's too much
music." He meant that the constant explosion of music from multiple public
sources in modern electronic times makes it nearly impossible to isolate and
focus on beautiful and important music (by one's own choice). Every hour of
Britney Spears on car radios, every hour of Eminem on a boombox in the park is a
theft of time and concentration we might have wanted to pay to the LaBeque
Sisters or Caruso. What some may see as Gould's loneliness and isolation was
partially some very brave choices to protect his musical environment so he could
concentrate on what he thought was important. I would grudgingly call it a
strange life if someone could tell me what a normal life is, and what treasures
await this normal life.
Elmer
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