Channeling Glenn Gould

In James Toback’s 1978 film Fingers, described recently as the tail end of the comet that was American independent cinema of the 70s, Harvey Keitel’s Jimmy gives performances that are clear parodies of Glenn Gould: he hums along to the music, rocks his upper body, twitches his mouth, and shakes his head in ecstasy, and though able to play to his satisfaction when alone or recording himself at home, he is unable to perform in public (Figure 9.1). ¹ Keitel’s parody of Gould’s pianistic style for Toback’s portrayal of an “Oedipally impacted” piano player was not the first on the big screen; Gould is also recognizable in Bob Rafelson’s 1970 Five Easy Pieces, another film tackling questions of masculinity. Yet Gould’s frequent youthful appearances on North American television from 1958 through the 1960s and his more widely mediatized star persona are generally ignored in analyses of mass-media musical representation and of crossover from small to large screen, both at that time and in the decade thereafter. As far as music on television is concerned, the moment is usually associated with the rise of rock ’n’ roll, with the focus above all on Elvis Presley’s famous television appearances from 1956 (for instance on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, The Milton Berle Show, The Steve Allen Show, and most famously of all, The Ed Sullivan Show), the emergence in the 1960s of other television rock ’n’ roll stars, notably the Beatles, and the development of a myth of masculine rock versus feminine commercial “pop”—this last partly as a result of rock ’n’ roll’s mediation for family viewing on television. But it is not just accounts of music on television of that time that have ignored Gould. Analyses of onscreen classical music-making have overlooked Gould’s public persona and big-screen parodies, notwithstanding the recent acknowledgment of Hollywood’s tendency to draw on images of men playing classical piano within plots that are anti-Oedipal. ²