The One-Percent Dissolution
Glenn Gould, George W. Bush, and Me

Not the least among these was an improbable recording of a difficult piece of music at an unlikely time by an unlikely pianist.

When magic (or whatever) is afoot, there’s no stopping it. The monophonic, electro-acoustic long playing record that in 1955 flowed from the dense pages of Bach’s Goldberg Variations through Glenn Gould’s fingers onto his carefully chosen Steinway and eventually into unprepared ears everywhere had an instant and possibly unique impact.

Few recorded performances have had such a profound, widespread, lasting impact. Stories abound about people being transfixed, their lives changed, when they accidentally tuned into Gould’s Goldbergs on the radio.

Then 25 years later he did it again: same piece, same piano, same studio. Older, wiser, more of a magician (or whatever). Result: another stunning, revelatory performance. but different.

And then weeks later he died.

If the first version is fast-youth-joy-day, the second one is slow-age-serenity-night. (The first recording takes 38:40 minutes, the second 51:14.)

Gould fandom is now within millimeters of being a cult. What other pianist (or musician or, for that matter, person) has inspired such a weirdly worshipful movie as Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould?

How intense is his earthly afterlife? Intense enough for his Canadian home city to overcome centuries of modest northerly reticence and give him near-top billing in its tourist brochures (you can now take a "Glenn Gould tour" of Toronto).

To find an achievement similar to Gould’s two Goldberg recordings you have to reach for the heights: in graphic art, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel; in architectural engineering, Eiffel and his Parisian tower, in political speech-making, the Gettysburg Address.

Many pages—many books—have been written about what Gould did. Nobody of course can figure it out but everybody loves to write about whatever it was he managed to pull off.

The other day I needed to send a copy of his Goldbergs to a friend and while I was at the appropriate Amazon page, in spite of my knee-jerk fear of blogspeak, could not resist checking the listener reviews. "Blown away" hardly begins to describe the reactions, even from persons who admitted to no previous fondness for classical music.

Lately Amazon has been adding a handy little bar graph to its customer-reaction section which at a glance tells you the range of fondess, from 1 to 5 stars. The Gould Goldberg graph, the day I was there, looked like this:

Hmm, I thought.

Then I thought some more and, ever fond of grand generalizations, quickly decided that this little chart contained a hitherto-unrealized KEY TO ALL HUMAN HISTORY and the many problems associated therewith!

Here we have one of the great artistic achievements ever and 99% of human beings recognize it as such.

But.

Lagging far far to the rear we have a recalcitrant, curmudgeonly, grumpy (tone-deaf?) 1 percent who are having none of it.

Hmmm.

We all know how hard it is to get people to agree on anything (even the oh-so-sanguine Brits can get really upset about a questionable play in cricket). That’s old, old human news.

What the Gould bar-graph made me realize was that humans are never, ever in complete agreement about ANYTHING, even a stunningly great, moving musical performance that actually changes lives.

Such of course is the way of this hornet’s-nest-of-a-world.

Still, we make do and somehow or other manage to get on with things even while we’re convinced that we and all who think like us are right and everybody else is plumb crazy.

Still, this is all old hat, the truth about the world that every generation of late-night college-dorm talkers has to discover for itself.

There was one more mental step to take as I contemplated the Goldberg reviewers graph. I kept looking at it and thinking about that odd 1 percent (I even read their comments and they were about as inarticulate and off-base as you’d expect). In a sense, I knew, such complete diversity is not only what keeps the human carnival lively but also probably what keeps it going.

But (and this time it’s a much bigger But), I suddenly thought, what happens if by hook, crook, luck, and a whole lot of money, one day that 1 percent takes over… everything???

Voilą: George W. Bush et al.

Isn’t that what happened in 2001? The 1 percent of kooks, with a little help from the near-kooks on the Supreme Court managed to take over. Bigtime.

Don’t misunderstand me. We’re no longer talking about Glenn Gould. I seriously doubt George W. Bush (or many of his hangers-on) even knows who Gould was. No, now we’re into not just politics, but geopolitics. Not just The Big Picture, but The Really Big Picture, the one where a tiny 1 percent of humanity thinks it has figured EVERYTHING out including me, thee, God, human destiny, and the right of every person to drive a vehicle as big as all outdoors.

It happens, it has happened before, it will happen again. Sometimes in war, sometimes in religion, sometimes in politics. The crazed 1 percent somehow manages to take over (going backward timewise consider: Mao, Hitler, Napoleon, Caligula, etc.—it's a long list, isn't it) and mess things up but good for everybody else.

That’s where we are now, messed up but good, the tiny minority that either can’t hear Gould’s magic or can’t accept their own extreme fallibility having turned the old rough-and-tumble human playpen into a quagmire of greed, violence, intemperance, and intolerance, essentially saying to everybody else: "Our way—the way of the 1 percent—or the highway."

The damage is great (with probably still more to come before we get things sorted out).

But just as the anti-Gould 1 percent doesn’t destroy him with their dislike, neither does the dangerously uppity and self-centered 1 percent of myopic tyrants, no matter how much damage they do, ever ultimately destroy the critically important fundaments of human striving: freedom, hope, and tolerance.