The irrelevance of his performance was essential, just as it is essential to the victim of possession or religious ecstasy, whose bodily transformations are designed to give material evidence of the immateriality of the body succumbing to the power of spirit. For, if we have come to expect our performers to be geniuses, then we don't want them to be fully in charge of the process. We want them to be the vehicles of a higher, more impersonal power than their own. We would prefer them, when most themselves, in performance, to be beside themselves, and not quite in their right minds. There is a curious tangle here of traditional notions of male self-possession and female susceptibility.
Performers are there to prove that surrendered, spontaneously-combustible being is possible.
Glenn Gould belongs after all to the age of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. What we want from our performers is dependable abandon. But if they live long and watchfully enough, performers discover that unruliness has become an absolute injunction, an inflexible routine. Not surprisingly, performers burn to escape the demand to burst into flames before our eyes. The demonically possessed performer is a highly-desirable commodity.