Sounds of silence: new biographies of Eno, Gould

Eno, seated before at least two instruments

There are artists whose contributions to art enthrall us even while seemingly urging art itself toward some sort of end. Brian Eno and the late Glenn Gould offer potent case studies, the former a self-described “non-musician” traversing the margins of pop and the avant-garde, the latter one of history’s great virtuosos, working largely within the Western classical canon. Both either avoided or completely swore off live appearances early in their careers in favour of the recording studio, where their innovations focused on music’s vertical or textural qualities over the documentation of performance or celebration of technique. Both sought to diminish the centrality of the artist in the making of art, the former remaining an advocate of self-generating systems, the latter having made bold pronouncements to the effect of art’s eventual irrelevance altogether. There is something apocalyptic to such a sensibility.

Gould, with large pants

Of course, both Eno and Gould have at one time or another been pegged as consummate bullshitters. In his absorbing and ambitious new biography, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Orion, $34.95), British writer and musician David Sheppard describes how being interviewed early in his life taught Eno “to construct a theoretical context for his work after the event. He would subsequently develop a nonpareil facility for articulating persuasively plausible retrospective concepts for what had simply been intuitive, or happenstance creativity.” In Glenn Gould (Penguin, $26), his provocative biographical essay, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell writes of Gould’s “after-the-fact rationalizations” and the “danger that his theorizing will undermine the joy given by his performances.” What emerges in both books are portraits of artists whose capacity to apply systems or polemic to their art, however compelling, must be considered secondary to the art itself, which can feel so multifaceted as to overwhelm those who endeavour to encapsulate it.

Eno chased a lot of girls in his youth,

only partly to borrow their outfits

Eno was born the same year as the LP, the hologram, and Velcro. As a child in mid-1950s Suffolk he collected fossils, saw a UFO, and was fascinated by the alien-like sounds of doo-wop emanating from nearby USAF airbases. Sheppard, who first met the composer/producer/video-artist/et al. at Michael Brook’s studio when Eno popped by to examine Brook’s fish cutlery, gives a vivid sense of his subject’s rather idyllic rural English upbringing and panoply of early fascinations. It’s a lot of fun to read Sheppard’s evocations of Eno’s formative art school experiences, his attraction to John Cage, androgynous clothing, audio equipment, the Velvet Underground, Mondrian, Little Richard, and girls. A wildly productive, vivacious dilettante, Eno’s appetite for diverse forms and subversive approaches were matched by a particular bravado regarding his ability to interact with whatever medium, regardless of ostensible facility. There is, Sheppard writes, “something of a late medieval polymath about Brian Eno, albeit cut with a very mid-20th-century strain of British ‘garden shed’ amateurism.”

Eno, Fripp, Bowie in Berlin

While methodically tracing the development of Eno’s iconoclastic musical approaches—including a careful re-examination of the oft-told and perhaps apocryphal tale of Eno’s “discovery” of ambient music while convalescing to a low-volume recording of 18th century harp music—Sheppard, perhaps unsurprisingly, pays closest attention to Eno’s name-making tenure with Roxy Music, his quartet of watershed experimental rock albums, and his 1970s collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie and Talking Heads. Sheppard’s study of these periods, as well as Eno’s rigorous employment of both systems and accidents, yield countless great stories: co-producer Tony Visconti’s four-year-old son spontaneously “composing” the opening of Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ on the piano during the Low sessions; Eno convincing David Byrne to jog on the spot to create his breathless delivery on Talking Heads’ ‘Drugs’; or the transformation of ashtrays, lampshades and wooden flooring into musical instruments. Along the way Sheppard offers an unexpected defense of Paul McCartney, and suggests that Eno may bear some responsibility for Phil Collins’ solo career. (Readers are advised to refer to Sheppard’s footnotes, which contain some of his funniest findings, such as Eno’s contractual clause that he never be obligated to set foot in Los Angeles, or the time he signed autographs as Quincy Jones for excitable Japanese Michael Jackson fans.) The only real flaw with On Some Faraway Beach—other than Sheppard’s over-use of certain adjectives, “sanguine” especially—is his compression of the last quarter-century of Eno’s life into what reads like an annotated CV. Apparently, at some point Eno’s near-superhuman productivity simply exhausted Sheppard. I can’t entirely blame him. Eno's only in his 60s now, and it's easy to see him re-inventing everything well into our new millennium.

Gould

“I have decided to tell Gould’s story—really a linked set of ideas about perception, consciousness, time, and silence—not as a story but as a single contested piece considered from a variety of angles.” There have been some stern grievances with Kingwell’s approach to writing about Gould, one of Canada’s most beloved and enigmatic icons, but to be fair he makes his M.O. explicit from the start, and it’s not like there’s any lack of other conventional biographies of Gould available to those who crave a more well-behaved, chronologically-ordered series of facts and anecdotes. Having said that, Kingwell does court contention, having written a slim volume that isn’t quite biography and isn’t quite philosophy. Were he to concentrate his energies on fully realizing either of these things he would likely have had to compose something far bulkier and daunting.

Gould

The chapters, each pertaining to a single idea that connects, however tenuously, to Gould’s life and work, are short. Titles include ‘Memory,’ ‘Existence,’ ‘Quodlibet,’ and, of course, ‘Genius.’ The overall structure is prismatic. Kingwell’s observations on each topic form stimulating chains of epiphanies. He writes elegantly about the inherent constraints of several artistic forms and the challenges they pose. (Kingwell begins his ‘Architecture’ chapter with the oft-used claim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” subsequently explaining that when taken to its logical conclusion such a claim implies that “the only appropriate reaction to music is more music, an absurd position if taken literally.” I immediately wondered if Kingwell had read Geoff Dyer’s sublime But Beautiful, which in fact suggests that much of the history of jazz is exactly that: articulate musical responses to other music.) Whether or not these build toward a satisfying conclusion—conclusion in the argumentative, rather than the musical, sense—is open to debate.

The Oblique Strategies

In the end I got a lot out of both books, and found that so many of Kingwell’s preoccupations while examining Gould's life and work dovetailed nicely into themes raised by Eno’s life and work. It would be great if Kingwell could apply this same approach to an Eno book. Come to think of it, it would be great if Sheppard could apply his rigorous research and cultural and critical insight to a book about Gould. A trade-off—sounds like one of Eno’s Oblique Strategies. What about it, guys?

Secrets between silences: Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

The solitary figure wanders through the autumnal Ontario hinterland, in famous overcoat, gloves and cap, lingering here and there, swinging his arms as though conducting the rivers and woods to ripple and sway with greater zest. We hear the figure’s disembodied voice, expressing a sense of “distance from the world” as being an endemic virtue of music and art. Of course the figure only seems solitary, only seems distant, a triumphant escapee from the oppressive hubbub of the world—someone else, after all, is operating the camera.

Having exploded on the world stage in the mid-1950s, Glenn Gould was arguably the most thrilling, iconoclastic concert pianist alive before taking his final bow just a handful of years later at the age of 31. Only half-jokingly, he once referred to audiences as “a force of evil.” He continued to make records and developed a career in broadcasting and theory that would in some sense equal the dynamicism and brilliance of his virtuosic musical performances. Yet this retirement from the stage also indulged Gould’s considerable quirks. It was accompanied by a retirement from public spontaneity. His public persona became honed to the point where nothing could escape his meticulous design. So we should not mistake that lonesome kook in the wilderness as anything less than a calculated, and highly marketable image. Which is not the same thing as mistaking this as a false image. Just as Gould’s more considered, more meditative 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations should not be mistaken for some sort of false reworking of Gould’s youthful and more frenetic 1955 recording. Both possess their disparate authenticity. One Glenn Gould is not necessarily more real than the other. This elusiveness of singular truth in biography or in art is among the compelling subjects of Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s new documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.

While it isn’t able to delve very deeply into certain areas of his diverse achievements, especially as a theorist, Genius Within offers a coherent summation of Gould’s major artistic feats, not to mention his well-known eccentricities—the drugs and hypochondria, the humming and unusually intimate relationship the keyboard, the Petula Clark fixation—with tributes from the likes of Russian conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell. Where Genius Within boldly strays from the established Gouldology is in its focus on Gould’s personal relationships, such as his friendship with the recording engineer whom he asked to become his legal brother, and most especially his affair with painter and mother-of-two Cornelia Foss, who was still married to composer and conductor Lukas Foss for the duration of her five-year relationship with Gould. She provides some of the most candid and insightful comments about the hazy region that spans the gap between Gould the solitary, difficult artist, and Gould the sociable, romantic, child-friendly domestic.

Throughout Genius Within Hozer and Raymont emphasize the gray zone between the myth and the essentially unknowable man, all the while enriching our appreciation of the music. They also, as the title implies, subtly attempt to get at what it is that constitutes the genius of one such as Gould. Happily, some mysteries remain too durable to penetrate.