Mental processing is the product of the huge number of synaptic interactions that occur in the brain. It is easier to understand how brain functions can deteriorate than how they might be boosted. Lying at the border between the humanities, cognitive science and neurophysiology, some mental diseases offer new angles on this problematic issue. Despite their social deficits, autistic subjects can display unexpected and extraordinary skills in numerous fields, including music, the arts, calculation and memory. The advanced skills found in a subgroup of people with autism may be explained by their special mental functioning, in particular by their weak central coherence, one of the pivotal characteristics of the disorder. As a result of the increasing interest in autistic talent, there has recently emerged a tendency to screen any eccentric artist or scientist for traits of the autistic spectrum. Following this trend, we analyze the eccentricity of the popular pianist Glenn Gould and briefly discuss the major functional hypotheses on autistic hyperfunctioning, advancing proposals for functional testing. In particular, the potential involvement of rhythm-entrained systems and cerebro-cerebellar loops opens up new perspectives for the investigation of autistic disorders and brain hyperfunctioning.

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Glenn Gould, Music and Mind by Geoffrey Payzant

Autism and genius: is there a link? The involvement of central brain loops and hypotheses for functional testing

Introduction: Liveness, Mediatization, and Glenn Gould's Recordings Live music does not exist without its recorded other. In other words, the concept of liveness in music was unknown until there was something not live--recordings--with which to compare it. Sarah Thornton describes the conventional ideology of liveness, which derived from a live/recorded binarism, as historically giving "positive valuation to ... performed music. [The word 'live'] soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human-versus-mechanical, creative-versus-imitative ... Liveness became the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture. Records, by contrast, were false prophets of pseudo-culture" (1995:42). Liveness, at least as historically constructed, signified the authenticity of human musical production and performance, always considered in contrast with the artifice of electronic reproductions. While this rather straightforward live/recorded binarism still informs some Western concepts of liveness today, many recording and performance situations are far more complex than such a binarism will allow. So-called live recordings provide a simple example: on the one hand, those who listen to such recordings are not immersed in the same atmosphere of sights, smells, tactile sensations, or even sounds (because, despite the best intentions of its producers, no recording can ever exactly reproduce the sounds it supposedly captures) that the attending audiences experienced at the time of performance/recording. On the other hand, the liveness of these recordings is thought to consist in their apparently faithful representations of performances that took place in the presence of these audiences. Television broadcasts, rock music performances, and various forms of electroacoustic music (among many other musical contexts) all similarly present mixtures of electronic mediation and some semblance of liveness. (1) In many instances, then, liveness persists even within what I will call mediatized music, or more specifically mediatized performance. I borrow the term mediatized from Philip Auslander, who in turn borrows it from Jean Baudrillard (1981) to indicate "that a particular cultural object is a product of the mass media or of media technology" (1999:5). Auslander, like Baudrillard, recognizes the mass media as the dominant form of cultural production, and thus as a "vehicle of the general code in a way that live performance is not (or is no longer)" (1999:5). Use of the term mediatized thus indicates not only the deployment of electronic technology in the production of culture, but also the ways in which this very deployment brings that cultural production into a much wider network of dominant social and economic practices. Mediatization recognizes the deeper implications of technology's ubiquity in a way that a more neutral term like mediation cannot. My own use of the term mediatization is slightly but significantly reconfigured from that of Auslander, in that while I still rely on the term's ability to denote the profound effects of electronic media on the musical process, I also believe there are many forms of mediatized music that in fact challenge the "dominance of a single code" (Auslander 1999:5) informing Baudrillard's thinking and to a lesser extent that of Auslander himself. This is mainly because much mediatized music exists largely outside the economies of mass circulation so prominently explored in their usage, even though much of it is produced using popular contemporary forms of media technology. So much of our performance tradition has become mediatized that we must, as music scholars and practitioners, re-examine old distinctions between "live" and "not live." In this sense, then, I propose that we understand liveness not so much as a designation of "non-mediatization," but rather as a designation of a trace of that which could be live, in the face of the threat of further or complete mediatization. …

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Hearing Glenn Gould's Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music

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John Williams: An Evaluation of his Impact Upon the Culture of the Classical Guitar

Hand roles and handedness in music: Comments on Sidnell.

Biographical accounts of musicians have enjoyed widespread popularity since the late-Victorian era. Literary theory has recently held biography to be a literary construct, rather than a factual enterprise. Biographies and music are both governed by narrative structures and help to create a sense of individual and collective/national identity. Biographical accounts of two Canadian musicians—Emma Albani and Glenn Gould—are examined. Both musicians are Canadian national icons, but there are several problematic issues in their life stories: Albani’s elitism, class consciousness, and ambiguous relationship to Canada, and Gould’s eccentricity and uncertain sexual identity. The article examines how these issues have been handled in various auto/biographical accounts of the two musicians.

Glenn Gould, Music and Mind by Geoffrey Payzant

Citations

Autism and genius: is there a link? The involvement of central brain loops and hypotheses for functional testing

Hearing Glenn Gould's Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music

John Williams: An Evaluation of his Impact Upon the Culture of the Classical Guitar

Hand roles and handedness in music: Comments on Sidnell.

Constructions of Identity in the Life Stories of Emma Albani and Glenn Gould

Related Papers (1)

Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations