HE WAS A LITTLE CRAZY. Canadian Glenn Gould (1932–1982) attracted as much attention for his personal oddities as for his brilliant playing. He sat on a rickety old chair that placed him lower at the instrument than any piano bench. He wore hats, gloves, and scarves even in summer. Incessantly fearful that death was just around the corner, he popped pills like candy mints. And at the height of his popularity he made a complete retreat from the concert stage—a place he had come to dread like a Christian facing the lions.
Gould burst on the international scene in 1955 with a recording of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a work that had been little recorded or performed until then. Once considered austere and too academic, in Gould’s hands it was suddenly spellbinding, filled with drama, heartbreak, and jauntiness, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of pianistic color. The recording became a landmark and a best-seller. Important Bach performers like Rosalyn Tureck (1914–2003) suddenly seemed too rarefied in comparison.
Pianists Glenn Gould and Arthur Rubinstein, relaxing together in New York in 1969
EVA RUBINSTEIN (Illustration credit 15.1)
Of course, the recording set off heated arguments throughout the music world. Nothing is more contentious in the ivory towers of Baroque specialists than a Bach interpretation. (Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who could whip Bach’s notes into a swirling maelstrom, famously remarked to Tureck, “Look, you play Bach your way, and I’ll play Bach Bach’s way.” Gould sided with Tureck. “[Hers] was playing of such uprightness, to put it in the moral sphere,” he recalled. “There was such a sense of repose that had nothing to do with languor, but rather with moral rectitude in the liturgical sense.”) Since the Goldberg Variations were intended for a harpsichord with a double keyboard, the fact that they were played on a modern piano at all was cause for debate. Today, American pianist Christopher Taylor plays them using a specially constructed Steinway piano with two keyboards, conceived by Hungarian composer Emanuel Moor.
Rosalyn Tureck, Bach specialist and early advocate of synthesizers (Illustration credit 15.2)
“The nut’s a genius,” remarked conductor George Szell after attending a Gould performance in Cleveland. His deportment was certainly strange: the low chair, the slouching posture, the way he conducted with his left hand when the right one was playing, the swooning, the humming. He had an explanation for the hunched position, which brought his upper back into a downward arch over the keyboard. “I discovered early on,” he explained, “that there are certain keys to the kingdom in terms of manipulating the instrument.” His ideal carriage, which brought him extremely close to the piano’s keys and strings, required an approach that favored finger power rather than arm weight. It also contorted his spine, giving rise to muscular problems that emerged slowly over the years. This technique was limited, he explained, applicable only to the music of Bach, or Mozart, or the pre-Bach era, where the span of the hands is narrow; it was not for Romantic icons like Scriabin, “for the simple reason that the leverage required to support a widening of the hands is such that you have to be further away from the keyboard, you couldn’t be that close.”
His list of reviled composers nevertheless included Mozart, about whom he declared that the problem was not that he had died too early, but rather that he had lived too long. According to Gould, who was a master of personal theatrics, Mozart’s late work was tainted by “a theatrical gift [that he applied] not only to his operas but to his instrumental works as well, and given the rather giddy hedonism of eighteenth-century theater, that sort of thing doesn’t interest me at all.” He proved his point by playing Mozart’s music horrendously, turning pearls into clams. And it wasn’t just Mozart who suffered under Gould’s fingers. As author Peter F. Ostwald wrote of Gould playing Chopin, “One is reminded of a frigid woman being forced to kiss a man she despises.”
GOULD’S BENCH
Glenn Gould’s chair, a relic from his childhood, became as indispensable to him as his instrument. It was a folding bridge chair, modified by his father in 1953 by sawing four inches off the adjustable legs, which placed the pianist just fourteen inches above the floor (six inches lower than a standard piano bench). He claimed it had “exactly the right contour” for performing, and he clearly didn’t mind the creaking noises it made as he swayed to the music (which merely added additional ambient sounds to his own incessant humming). “Official” replicas of the Gould piano chair, endorsed by his estate, have been offered for sale through “the Glenn Gould Chair Project,” a collaboration of Italian chair maker Cazzaro and the French designer René Bouchara.
Historically, piano seats have come in all shapes and sizes. They haven’t always been needed: the heights of some harpsichords required the player to stand—not a big problem, considering the lack of pedals. Paintings of early pianists often show them seated on a high-back chair, or a stool covered with an embroidered cushion. Geography has been one factor in the design of piano seats. A recent discovery of an early-eighteenth-century Iberian piano included a stool featuring cabriole legs and ball-and-claw feet (one leg was made of mahogany, the other three of walnut), a common design on the Iberian Peninsula.
The convention today is to use a solid wooden bench, an adjustable leather-covered one, or a swivel stool. Unless you are Glenn Gould, the important detail is to be placed high enough for optimum leverage when striking the keys.
Adventurousness and perversity were the twin poles of Gould’s art. His interpretations of the big Romantic concertos were especially grotesque. As a result of his distaste for showy display, he decided to suppress the passionate, expressive nature of the soloist’s role—essential to the very idea of a concerto—flattening the emotional peaks, and robbing the music of its dramatic narrative. Indeed, his infamous performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 1 under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, for which Bernstein offered a disclaimer to the audience beforehand, was not, as sometimes reported, too slow, but rather too pernicious in its refusal to bring on the musical fireworks. Like a musical vampire, he drew all the lifeblood out of Brahms’s throbbing masterpiece and left a pale, cold cadaver in its place. Gould tellingly admitted that his favorite colors were battleship grey and midnight blue: “My moods,” he said, “bear an inverse relationship to the degrees of sunlight on any given day.” Despite his standing in the piano world, the decision to become an “antivirtuoso” garnered no followers.
“All the critics are really responding to is a denial of a certain set of expectations that have been built into their hearing process,” he insisted, as if tradition were really unimportant. The reality was simply that the Romantic legacy with its overblown emotions was not for him. Bach, a composer whose greatness lives in the inventive unfurling of musical ideas, and for whom emotion was expressed not as personal testimony but rather as something to be projected on a celestial scale, was more in keeping with his inclinations.
Gould’s adoration of Bach led him to write a piece called So You Want to Write a Fugue for four singers and string quartet, a work that, in his words, plugged “one of the most durable creative devices in the history of formal thought.” It begins with a bass voice singing, “You’ve got the nerve to write a fugue … so go ahead.” But, the clever contralto warns, “never be clever for the sake of being clever, for a canon in inversion is a serious diversion and a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation.”
Gould’s preference for serene abstraction over messy sentimentality emerged early on. He rejected his piano teacher Alberto Guerrero because, he admitted, “our outlooks on music were diametrically opposed. He was a ‘heart’ man and I wanted to be a ‘head’ kid.” It’s no wonder that his aversion to what biographer Geoffrey Payzant described as sunny Mediterranean activities, like the Spanish bullfight and Italian opera—“He thinks these depend equally upon herd responses to violent spectacle, and upon flashy personal display”—found relief in the isolation of the control room. “As I grow older I find more and more that I can do without [people],” he wrote. “I separate myself from conflicting and contrasting notions. Monastic seclusion works for me.” “The idea of north”—of the lonely, frigid landscapes of northern Canada—became his paradigm. He even wrote a work with that title.
Gould’s lasting influence actually stemmed from that shift from the concert hall to the recording studio. His motivation was partly the belief that audiences hoped for a spectacular disaster on stage; it made him feel, he said, like a vaudevillian. But the warm confines of the recording studio represented more than simple comfort; from the vantage of that cocoon he could also exercise complete dominance over every aspect of musical sound.
To some degree, he had a point. “I wonder how often Vladimir Nabokov’s publisher has pondered a third and not-yet-final draft,” he wrote in an article for the magazine High Fidelity entitled “The Grass Is Always Greener in the Outtakes,” “and declared, ‘Volodya baby, I’ve told you already, let it all hang out. So you dropped a comma, so you split an infinitive, that’s truth, man.’ ” However, his quest for perfection evolved into something monstrous: today, studio recordings often involve hundreds or even thousands of edits, and the music has undeniably suffered.
Gould’s rejection of the accepted performing tradition presaged the remarkable changes soon to be ushered in by the digital generation. He even suggested that the listening public might eventually become co-creators in the musical process by reordering and reshaping the material by means of home equipment. (In a sense, he was re-envisioning the concert experience as one that his fellow Canadian, philosopher Marshall McLuhan [1911–1980], might describe as moving from a “hot” media form into a “cool” one. The pianist often visited McLuhan and was certainly influenced by him.) Today, that vision is real: digital “sampling,” iPods, and audio editing have become central to the process of making and sharing art.
EVEN BEFORE THE digital revolution, twentieth-century technology had changed the way people enjoyed the piano. The new media of film, radio, and television embraced the instrument and made it possible for wider audiences to appreciate its qualities. With the advent of “talking pictures,” which began with the revolutionary film The Jazz Singer in 1927, keyboardists from all the genres began to populate the Hollywood screen. Pianist Oscar Levant (1906–1972), George Gershwin’s highly neurotic friend and champion, became a film star, along with José Iturbi (1895–1980), the Spanish conductor and pianist who appeared as himself in numerous movies and played Chopin’s music on the soundtrack of that composer’s film biography A Song to Remember (1945). (Gary Graffman performed for Iturbi as a young student, and vividly remembered a set of swords mounted on the walls of his studio. “As soon as I finished playing,” he wrote, “Iturbi started to pace around the room nervously, exclaiming over and over, ‘Kill his teacher! Kill his teacher!’ That, plus the swords,” recalled Graffman, “made me quite uneasy.”) The piano itself became a main character in cinematic celebrations like director Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935, in which fifty-six showgirls at fifty-six white baby grands danced across the screen in waltz time.
From the film Gold Diggers of 1935 (Illustration credit 15.3)
Earl Wild (Illustration credit 15.4)
The first classical piano recital on television, in 1939, featured American virtuoso Earl Wild (1915–2010). Famed for his remarkable technical ease and stunningly beautiful tone, Wild’s Romantic reveries and rapturous accounts of music from Liszt to Gershwin took him on a roller-coaster career that also included five years as music director for television comedy star Sid Caesar, and a stint as staff pianist for the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini.
Caesar had initially enlisted his help in pulling off a mock opera with a nonmusical cast of comedic characters. “I even created an overture,” remembered Wild, “and he had [radio announcer] Milton Cross sitting in a box, describing the proceedings. Afterward, he didn’t want to let me go, and the money offer kept climbing until it was so high I couldn’t afford to say no.” To the end, though, the pianist remained dedicated to classical performance, in interpretations that were always highly personal and Romantic in sweep, free of the boring restraints that were symptomatic of what he called “the good taste virus.”
American television audiences enjoyed another pianist who was never accused of succumbing to good taste. Liberace (1919–1987), whose real name was Wladziu Valentino Liberace, first appeared in “soundies”—short films that presaged the music video—and then became one of the highest-paid nightclub and television acts in the world. With a candelabrum on the piano, extravagant costumes, and a native flamboyance second to none, he blithely announced that he didn’t give concerts, but “put on a show.”
Peter Schickele as P. D. Q. Bach
PETER SCHAAF (Illustration credit 15.5)
Danish-American Victor Borge (1909–2000), a concert pianist suffering from paralyzing stage fright, realized one day during a mishap on stage that he could make an audience laugh, and found his niche, combining both talents to become a musical king of comedy. “I was one of the first to play the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto,” he remembered. “In the middle of the third movement, the conductor lost his place, and I stopped because it was clear to everyone that the performance just wasn’t working. So I jumped up, turned the pages for him, and said, ‘Let’s do it from here.’ On my way back to the piano I looked at the audience and smiled. In my entire career I have never met with warmer applause than I received that night when I took my bow at the end of the piece.” His comedic routines—playing a passage across the keyboard and landing on the floor; strapping himself to the bench after being startled by a loud soprano; or chasing a sidekick around the piano while both men played a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, executing alternate passages as they each rounded the keyboard side of the instrument—are based on a keen sense of observation; they merely exaggerated what he saw around him. But they offered the pianist a safety valve: as a serious virtuoso, “my hands would shake,” he said. Comedy made him free.
That satiric tradition continues in the hands of Peter Schickele (b. 1935), a gifted composer who invented the character P. D. Q. Bach—allegedly the last and least talented of J. S. Bach’s sons—and used him as the centerpiece for highly successful theatrical and musical parodies. This fictional composer’s works carry titles such as The Art of the Ground Round, The Seasonings, and the Serenude for Devious Instruments (S. 36–24–36).
AS GLENN GOULD PREDICTED, technology would reshape the instrument itself. In his classic book Men, Women and Pianos (1954), Arthur Loesser pondered “why the electronic piano has never caught on … Several small companies were experimenting with it during the 1930s, but nothing further seems to have happened.” Indeed, The Musical Times of February 1934 reported on the first “electrical orchestra” assembled in Berlin, but complained of the casualness of the tuning on the part of the performers, and offered concerns about the future unemployment of musicians who might be displaced by technology. Both were persistent reasons for resistance. Clara Rockmore, a virtuoso performer on the early electronic theremin (played by moving one’s body toward or away from the instrument’s antennae) performed under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, who, she reported, “wanted to organize an orchestra of twelve electronic instruments” with her as soloist. “But the project was killed by the union,” she stated. “They thought that with Stokowski’s name and fame, it would have had such a fantastic impact that electronics would replace the symphony orchestra.”
It only stalled the inevitable. As computers and audio electronics advanced, several composers updated the role of the acoustic piano by combining it with sonorities never before available. Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) was perhaps the first with Mantra in 1970 for two pianos, amplified and electronically altered during performance. Then Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934), formerly director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his highly successful Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and electronic tape. Many others followed. Composer Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) wrote Reflections for piano and synthesized tape in 1972; and the important Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924–1990) used piano and tape in 1976 in a work written for pianist Maurizio Pollini called … Sofferte onde serene … (… Suffered, Serene Waves …).
By the 1980s, electronic versions of the piano boasted sounds that had been “sampled” from acoustic models, making them seem more authentic than ever. Piano firms like Yamaha, Bösendorfer, and Steinway each had their own updated “player piano” models with mechanisms controlled by digital discs and computerized memory. Yamaha even launched an “e-Competition,” in which competitors played on a special digital instrument in one place while the jury, in a distant city, listened as a second piano reproduced each tone and interpretive nuance. American Tod Machover (b. 1953), who worked in Paris with Pierre Boulez at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a facility for the development of electro-acoustical art music, created what he calls a “hyperpiano,” a Yamaha Disklavier (high-tech player piano) whose sound is carefully manipulated by means of computer programming.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DIGITAL PIANOS by Alden Skinner
In 2004, the traditional piano world felt a collective shudder. For the first time, digital pianos had outsold the acoustic version. As of 2008, industry reports show that digital pianos represent 70 percent of all new piano purchases in the United States, and the trend shows no sign of reversal. The digital piano will never completely replace the acoustic piano, yet it has displaced it in many locations. What is it about the upstart digital piano that has allowed it to encroach on the 300-year reign of the traditional acoustic piano?
The digital piano first emerged in 1983 when Yamaha introduced the YP-30 with a digitally synthesized piano and a weighted action to simulate the feel of a typical acoustic instrument. This was followed in 1984 by Ray Kurzweil’s K250 digital piano based on digital samples of an acoustic piano—and the race was on. Compare the sound of a mid-range digital piano to that of an entry-level acoustic piano today and the acoustic piano will likely “lose.”
For many, the digital piano has a number of advantages over its elder sibling. Digital pianos are maintenance-free; they require no tuning and no regulation. Want to practice late at night? Plug in the headphones. Want to capture the song you’ve been composing? Connect your piano to your computer and use notation software to print your handiwork. Want to hear what that Scarlatti sonata sounded like back in the day? Change the temperament to a historical tuning, dial the pitch down to A-415, switch to a harpsichord sample or load in an early period piano sample, and history comes alive.
But is it a real piano? If you define the instrument by how it works rather than what it does, then no. But if you define the instrument by its role—allowing a player to perform any music written for the piano, with a result that sounds like a piano—then a digital instrument is simply a different kind of piano. No more, and no less.
Indeed, everything was changing. In 1946, the Musical Times had carried an article on “The Future of the Piano,” posing questions such as “Why must we always make our case of wood?” The forward-thinking author declared, “I can envisage some beautiful designs in metal, cellulose-sprayed in lovely color schemes.” Further, “Why should we not have a range of qualities in a single instrument? Why should a facility possessed by the eighteenth-century harpsichord, with its different manuals, be denied to the twentieth-century piano?” Electronics would now make it all possible.
By late in the century, new visions of the instrument were taking root, offering pianists a range of instrumental colors and timbres previously unimaginable. Electronic pianos flourished in the pop, jazz, and rock fields. They even gave birth to a genre known as “prog rock”—progressive rock—developed by rock musicians who pushed song structures into longer forms and greater levels of sophistication; incorporated classical and jazz elements into their music; and created “concept albums” with epic storytelling elements. (Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, drew on works by Bartók, Bach, Janácˇek, Sibelius, and others for his material; Dave Stewart, of Egg, represented a group known as the “Canterbury school,” which brought an avant-garde sensibility and surrealist lyrics to the mix.) The genre had its beginnings in groups like Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and in the experimental work of The Beatles in the 1960s and reached the peak of its popularity in the mid-1970s. It became a trademark for such bands as Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Liquid Tension Experiment, and Jethro Tull.
In the jazz world, Miles Davis incorporated these new sounds in “fusion” recordings like the landmark Bitches Brew (1970), which merged the trumpeter’s love of a musical atmosphere rich with mystery with the texture of contemporary, electrified rock. The result was a powerful, multilayered, highly produced concept album using two or three electric pianos, two bassists, and multiple percussionists all playing at once, along with other solo instruments. Its Gould-like application of recording technology, including a huge number of edits and postproduction studio effects such as tape loops, echo, and delay, made it a turning point in the evolution of modern jazz. Traditionalists were outraged, but the recording was Davis’s first gold record, selling more than half a million copies.
Some of Davis’s piano sidemen, including Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, turned to electronic instruments as well. Corea even began to use a lightweight keyboard slung over his shoulders as a solo instrument, in imitation of rock guitarists. This was no mere trend, but a major cultural shift; few jazz pianists today restrict themselves to the acoustic piano alone.
And the technological innovations continue. In 2009, the internet company YouTube launched a global online audition for a new orchestra. After thousands of submissions, the YouTube Symphony was formed with more than ninety musicians from thirty countries, culminating in a sold-out performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall. There are plans for more auditions, multimedia collaborations, online master classes, and the creation of a digital meeting place for musicians. The project’s artistic advisor, conductor and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, explained its purpose this way: “We’re exploring how classical music’s 1,200-year-long tradition can enter the realm of high technology and what that will mean for its mission and legacy.” It goes to prove that the art so lovingly cultivated by Cristofori, Bach, and Mozart is still very much alive, despite dramatic technological changes. Even Glenn Gould might be surprised.