A Duet on Gould, Distance, and Closing the Gap

In June 2021, we were delighted to read an insightful article on Glenn Gould in Wired Magazine by the renowned podcaster, columnist (Wired, Politico, NY Times) and author, Virginia Heffernan. Entitled “On Microphones, Music, and Our Long Year of Screen Time,” the piece discusses Gould’s ideas on technology and solitude and their consolations in the context of the COVID19 pandemic.

When we reached out to Virginia, we were surprised to learn that her teenaged son Ben Samuels had introduced her to Gould, and that Ben’s introduction to Gould came not primarily through his Bach recordings but his performance of the Liszt transcription of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Intrigued, we suggested that Ben and Virginia collect their thoughts on Glenn Gould, his aesthetic, and impact as an artist and cultural icon. We are pleased to present the following dialogue.

A Duet on Gould, Distance, and Closing the Gap

by Ben Samuels and Virginia Heffernan

Virginia: Ben, I don’t know if you know this, but when we first started talking seriously about classical music, in maybe 2018, before the pandemic, I was still mostly in thrall to a single Schubert impromptu that I had come to love (in both a wholesome AND a neurotic way) after it was featured in a movie called Trop Belle Pour Toi, starring a pre-cancellation Gerard Depardieu.

Ben: I did not know that.

Virginia: Well, it’s true.

Ben: I don’t believe you were able to listen to anything by Schubert more than once.

Virginia: I know we’re supposed to talk about Glenn Gould, but while I write this I am watching Krystian Zimerman play Opus 90 Impromptu 2 on a YouTube square the size of a human palm (856,358 views!) and it’s so beautiful and merry and tender that it now seems utterly heartless to prefer Gould and Bach to Zimerman and Schubert.

Ben: Nothing at all bothers you about listening to recordings of “Impromptus”?

Virginia: I hadn’t thought of that. Recordings of impromptus played after rehearsals at concerts from sheet music. Takes a world of effort to make something sound spontaneous, I guess. But it’s not like Gould is spontaneous. I’m guessing you’d say his strength is in never pretending to spontaneity. He doesn’t hide the fact that his performances are the product of intensely cerebral considerations—even calculations.

Ben: He’s honest, but also, unlike Zimerman, he made recordings for me to listen to. Obviously, I’d love to see Zimerman live. But “Krystian Zimerman” as I know him, is, like “Glenn Gould,” just a name that appears before a song, the difference being that Zimerman hates himself as a recording while Gould seems perfectly happy. There is this immense feeling of absence and loneliness which I get from Zimerman. His Emperor Concerto is always stunning for eight minutes before I start to prefer Gould’s version again, because I don’t feel the same contempt for me, an asynchronous listener, oozing from every note.

Virginia: It’s true that Gould, in spite of his astringent and unsentimental style, always seems somehow pleased to cross paths with me on the airwaves that bridge the musician and the listener, the living and dead. I wonder why that is. Maybe his refusal to condescend inspires me to rise to the occasion, and meet his intelligence with more refined attention. I don’t mind musicians who pander to audiences as much as you do—Zimerman live, Lang Lang—but I possibly come away from their performances somewhat enfeebled. Gould’s admonition to listeners is: Grow up.

Ben: I don’t think of Gould as astringent at all. I definitely don’t think of Lang Lang as condescending. For me it’s about the distance: Zimerman’s Emperor Concerto, which I mentioned, was a Deutsche Gramaphon recording with a big sound—that blasting E-flat that opens Emperor—which Gould talks about in some of his letters…

Gould had an idea, I think in the early 70s, to make a recording using staggered mics—having rows of microphones closer and farther away which got faded in and out to produce this zoom effect. He handles the insecurity about our metaphorical distance with these very earnest attempts to close the gap whenever he can.

Virginia: The problem of distances is pervasive in Gould’s recordings, audible. And it’s a romantic problem. How to draw the other closer, to be understood by the beloved, while not becoming unintelligible to oneself?

Canadian artists seem to be—and you know I start with media theory often, and McLuhan and of course the all-important beaver trade—preoccupied by distance, almost by nature. Which is maybe how the idea of what was branded “distance learning” led you to Gould early in the pandemic.

Ben: Yeah, by nature, in nature, from nature. There is something eerie and special about the way in which Gould understands information, in the music and the radio plays. It is baked into the way he’s thinking even before he plays. It feels like a place to take refuge, like a bunker or something, just like Canada’s the only country that’s supposed to come out of the climate apocalypse temperate and above water.

Virginia: Do you hear something of the apocalypse in Gould’s playing? I think I hear it being staved off. In the studious 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations,his fingers sound determined to understand something that Gould appreciates all the more for its being out of reach. And that stretch—it’s there, just ahead, and I will never stop longing for it—it seems like education, which just might keep death at bay. Proust said music sometimes makes death “a little less probable.”

Also: knowing that an LP of Gould’s strange, ghost-android performance of Well-Tempered Clavier is in that Voyager time capsule makes me think he’s already way out beyond the event horizon.

Ben: No, I don’t hear the apocalypse being staved off. Gould doesn’t seem worried about the apocalypse. All the apocalypse would do is send us all into bunkers and knock out the power lines and cell towers, which is not an idea which I hear worrying him very much. Maybe that indifference comes off as robotic, but I don’t think he thinks anything is “dead” in the arctic that’s “alive” in the real world, or that we make can make distance less real by ignoring it.

Virginia: Understood. Provocative. Now that we have to wrap this up, I want to say I’m grateful for your inspiring me into Gould-land. I still remember watching “The Idea of North” when holed up on our pandemic movie bender, and just feeling so open to sonic and other possibilities. That feeling has not left me. So thank you.

Virginia Heffernan is a columnist at WIRED, and the host of “The Is Critical,” a cultural talk show on Stitcher. She is also the author of “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art” (Simon & Schuster). In June, she wrote about listening to Gould during the pandemic for WIRED.

Benjamin Samuels is the editor of The Underground, Bard High School’s samizdat newspaper.