This week’s theme is…Caffeinated Music! The satisfying and enormously popular beverage known as coffee migrated to Europe from the Middle East through Venetian trade routes late in the 1500s. Initially met with suspicion for its origins, coffee nonetheless wasted no time in winning over Western culture, boasting countless devotees within a century and inspiring plant after plant of coffee house establishments, which remain centers of philosophy and culture to this day. Numerous artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and other influential Europeans consumed coffee in awe-inspiring quantities, often prepared through elaborate and eccentric rituals. Every piece this week was written by or inspired by a great coffee drinker.
Caffeinated Music, Day 5 – Opus 1 by Glenn Gould
Much is made of the obsessive and often bizarre rituals of intensely productive creative artists. They can seem almost ascetic in their scheduled rigor and exclusion of so many of life’s frills. You tend to see a handful of themes repeated among the routines of writers and other such creative souls: extreme regularity of working hours, preference for a specific location, distaste for food or favoring a limited kind, and copious amounts of chemical stimulation, usually caffeine, but often something stronger.
I can relate to this actually, and I bet a lot of you can. When I have been “in the zone” with different projects from time to time, I can very much sympathize with those preferences. There’s something about continuous creative application that changes your priorities, obsessively focuses your psyche on the outcome, and becomes very detailed-oriented to the exclusion of the outside world. Indulging in varied experiences, like different foods, especially, can be distracting to the detriment of steady progress toward one’s goal. You need something consistent and predictable, a reaction you can rely on, to keep your nose down and focused on what’s ahead.
I remember experiencing a version of this in the winter of 2005. I was working on my master’s degree in composition at Bowling Green State University, and it was Christmas Break. I was staying in town and committed to finishing a piece I was working on, which ended up being Conturbo, Pace, Conturbo for saxophone quartet and marimba. I don’t remember how much of it I had done when vacation started, but at some point during the vacation I came to realize that I could finish it; I saw the vision of the end and just had to keep chipping away at the statue, so to speak. Also, I was writing it all by hand, which I don’t tend to do very often, but that particular score was completed entirely by hand before it was input into Sibelius, the computer notation program I was using at the time.
I think I worked on it for 8 hours each day (maybe a little less) for about a week (maybe a little more) in order to finish it. And I developed a routine to help keep me at it. I would wake up and take a walk. Then, around 9:00, I would sit down at my kitchen table with my mechanical pencil and landscape tabloid manuscript paper, and start writing. And during that process of writing that piece I ate the same lunch every day that week: a sandwich of lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard and cream cheese on a toasted bagel ( I don’t remember what kind of bagel it was ((sorry!)) but it was a good sandwich!). I recommend something like that if you need a quick and reliable lunch). I was meticulous in my hand-written detail, and there was something very fulfilling about that. I used a straight-edge to make all the stems, beams and barlines. It was a transcendentally satisfying experience, and I don’t think I could have finished it at that level of precision were it not for that routine. I completed it by the time school reconvened for the spring semester, and my composition teacher was impressed.
One thing I don’t remember is whether I was drinking coffee at the time. I hadn’t really developed a coffee habit yet. Today, I might make a pot of coffee to go along with that experience, but I wouldn’t have then. If I drank it then I bought a cup somewhere. More often than not the creative rituals I read about that are practiced by other artists involve coffee, often in stunning amounts. And I think I understand why. While food can be distracting, a little gulp of coffee is just the momentary vacation/oral fixation necessary between pen strokes to keep you in that zone. So maybe I was chewing on flavored toothpicks at the time; I used to like those – a much healthier alternative to smoking if you’re the type to succumb to oral fixations.
One of the most eccentric artists to have such rituals and tastes was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. He’s known in musical circles as a brilliant oddball, renowned especially for his incredibly precise and intricate interpretations of the keyboard music of J.S. Bach which bring out their characteristic polyphonic textures with utmost clarity. Just watch this:
That’s from a recording of the Goldberg Variations, one of Bach’s collections of solo keyboard music, and one that Gould is particularly known for interpreting. Along with that brilliance came a host of eccentric quirks and mannerisms. He sang along as he played, much to the consternation of conductors and recording engineers. He was basically nocturnal. He didn’t like to shake hands, and visitors had to be reminded of this constantly. He would not go outside without a coat and hat.
And he subsisted on a diet of mostly runny scrambled eggs, prescription drugs and coffee. That’s kind of a blunt and simplistic summary, but it’s based on facts about Gould. I’ve read that he did not have much variety in his diet, eating those runny scrambled eggs whenever he could. And toward the end of his life Gould, often described as a hypochondriac, was heavily medicated, ingesting a daily cocktail of prescribed drugs for various maladies.
On top of that, he drank gallons of coffee, often doing so without food. There are stories of him going to donut shops in the middle of the night and just ordering coffee.
Some people wonder if Glenn Gould was on the autism spectrum somewhere, perhaps Asperger’s syndrome. Other people aren’t convinced. But his story reminds me of an autism expert I once heard interviewed who said something to the effect of “If you get rid of autism, you have to ask yourself what else you are prepared to lose.” Basically he was saying that the characteristics that accompany mild autistic spectrum disorders, like obsessive interest in limited subjects, have helped to advance the state of so many sciences and arts that if you were able to get rid of autism and everything that goes with it, humanity would be thusly impoverished. I feel like you have to make a similar evaluation of Glenn Gould; as hard as it might be to live or work with someone who exhibited those quirks, we would not want to trade his musical interpretations, his witty and insightful lectures and writings, or his droll and artfully complex music.
Of everything he did, Glenn Gould is probably the least known for his original compositions, but they’re out there, and worth a listen. This movement from the string quartet, which he called his Opus 1 (for further reading on the opus system, see this post), is a most infectious synthesis of composers whom he championed, including Bach, Richard Strauss, and members of the Second Viennese School. From what I know about Gould, this fits him well, quirky, intense, complex, and fascinating:
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