Paying tribute today to the late and great Glenn Gould, whom I admire for many reasons, not least of all his tremendous raw talent, perspicacious wit and unapologetic eccentricity, and of course - his hair.
"It is in a short music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution … It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency."
– Glenn Gould, on Bach's Goldberg Variations (1955)
Excerpts from "Advice to a Graduation," in which Gould articulates his fascinating vision of "a vast background of immense possibility, of negation … the source from which all creative ideas come." Delivered at the Royal Conservatory of Music, University of Toronto, November 1964.
When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system – then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system. I do not, for one moment, suggest that you minimize the importance of dogmatic theory. I do not suggest, either, that you extend your investigative powers to such purpose that you compromise your own comforting faith in the systems by which you have been taught and to which you remain responsive. But I do suggest that you take care to recall often that the systems by which we organize our thinking, and in which we attempt to pass on that thinking to the generations that follow, represent what you might think of as a foreground of activity – of positive, convinced, self-reliant action – and that this foreground can have validity only insofar as it attempts to impose credibility on that vast background acreage of human possibility that has not yet been organized.
This solitude that you can acquire and should cultivate, this opportunity for contemplation of which you should take advantage, will be useful to you only insofar as you can substitute for those questions posed by the student for the teacher, questions posed by yourself for yourself. You must try to discover how high your tolerance is for the questions you ask of yourself. You must try to recognize that point beyond which the creative exploration – questions that extend your vision of your world – extends beyond the point of tolerance and paralyses the imagination by confronting it with too much possibility, too much speculative opportunity. To keep the practical issues of systematized thought and the speculative opportunities of the creative instinct in balance will be the most difficult and most important undertaking of your lives in music.
...so long as you remain deeply involved with the processes of your own imagination – not as alternative to what seems to be the reality of outward observation, not even as supplement to positive action and acquisition, because that's not the way in which the imagination can serve you best. What it can do is to serve as a sort of no man's land between that foreground of system and dogma, of positive action, for which you have been trained, and that vast background of immense possibility, of negation, which you must constantly examine, and to which you must never forget to pay homage as the source from which all creative ideas come.
