Glenn Gould

Early life Glenn Gould was born at home at 32 Southwood Drive in The Beaches, Toronto, on September 25, 1932, the only child of Russell Herbert Gold and Florence Emma Gold (née Greig, a distant relative of the Norwegian composer and pianist Edvard Grieg), Presbyterians of Scottish, English, German, and Norwegian ancestry. The family's surname was informally changed to Gould around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing antisemitism of prewar Toronto. and it was observed that he had perfect pitch at age three. When presented with a piano, the young Gould was reported to strike single notes and listen to their long decay, a practice his father Bert noted was different from typical children. One year later he passed the written theory exams, qualifying for an Associate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (ATCM) diploma. In 1952, Fulford and Gould founded New Music Associates, which produced and promoted Gould's first three public performances, including Gould's debut performance of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Piano Gould was a child prodigy The piano, Gould said, "is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such ... [but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have to express my ideas." In the case of Bach, Gould noted, "[I] fixed the action in some of the instruments I play on—and the piano I use for all recordings is now so fixed—so that it is a shallower and more responsive action than the standard. It tends to have a mechanism which is rather like an automobile without power steering: you are in control and not it; it doesn't drive you, you drive it. This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things." As a teenager, Gould was significantly influenced by Artur Schnabel In 1945, at 13, he made his first appearance with an orchestra in a performance of the first movement of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with the Toronto Symphony. His first solo concert followed in 1947, and his first recital on radio was with the CBC in 1950. This was the beginning of Gould's long association with radio and recording. He founded the Festival Trio chamber group in 1953 and appeared at the inaugural Stratford Festival with cellist Isaac Mamott and violinist Albert Pratz. Gould made his American debut on 2 January 1955, in Washington, D.C. at The Phillips Collection. The music critic Paul Hume wrote in the Washington Post: "January 2 is early for predictions, but it is unlikely that the year 1955 will bring us a finer piano recital than that played yesterday afternoon in the Phillips Gallery. We shall be lucky if it brings us others of equal beauty and significance." A performance at The Town Hall in New York City followed on 11 January. Gould's reputation quickly grew. Also in 1955, Gould recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations. The recording built Gould's reputation both in North America and internationally and led to concert tours of Europe and the Soviet Union. In 1957, he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union, becoming the first North American to play there since World War II. His concerts featured Bach, Beethoven, and the serial music of Schoenberg and Berg, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism. Gould performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlin on 26 May, 1957. Gould debuted in Boston in 1958, playing for the Peabody Mason Concert Series. On 7 August 1960, Gould and cellist Leonard Rose performed Beethoven's Cello and Piano Sonata No. 3 Op. 69 at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. On the same program, Gould and Rose were joined by violinist Oscar Shumsky for a performance of Beethoven's Ghost Trio. On 8 November 1960, Gould performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Josef Krips. In March 1961, Gould performed and recorded Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. On 1 and 4 March 1966, at Manhattan Center, in New York, Gould recorded Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 with Leopold Stokowski conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. In 1962, Gould performed the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bernstein. Despite the controversy surrounding Bernstein's remarks before the performance, Gould regarded it as a major success. Although Gould's live performances were outstandingly successful, he came to believe that the institution of the public concert was an anachronism and a "force of evil", leading to his early retirement from concert performance. He argued that public performance devolved into a sort of competition, with a non-empathetic audience mostly attendant to the possibility of the performer erring or failing critical expectation, and that such performances produced unexceptional interpretations because of the limitations of live music. He set forth this doctrine, half in jest, in "GPAADAK", the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds. On 10 April 1964, he gave his last public performance, at Los Angeles's Wilshire Ebell Theater. Among the pieces he performed were Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30, selections from Bach's The Art of Fugue, and Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3. Gould was known for his peculiar, even theatrical, gesticulations while playing. Another oddity was his insistence on absolute control over every aspect of his environment. The temperature of the recording studio had to be precisely regulated; he invariably insisted that it be extremely warm. According to another of Gould's biographers, Otto Friedrich, the air-conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the recording engineers. The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks if necessary. A rug would sometimes be required for his feet. He had to sit exactly above the floor, and would play concerts only with the chair his father had made. He continued to use the chair even when its seat was completely worn, and became so closely identified with it that it is displayed in a glass case at Library and Archives Canada. Conductors had mixed responses to Gould and his playing habits. George Szell, who led Gould in 1957 with the Cleveland Orchestra, remarked to his assistant, "That nut's a genius." Leonard Bernstein said, "There is nobody quite like him, and I just love playing with him." He did not cook; instead he often ate at restaurants and relied on room service. He ate one meal a day, supplemented by arrowroot biscuits and coffee. Personal life Gould lived a private life. The documentarian Bruno Monsaingeon said of him: "No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly." One piece of evidence arrived in 2007. When Gould was in Los Angeles in 1956, he met Cornelia Foss, an art instructor, and her husband Lukas, a conductor. After several years, she and Gould became lovers. Health and death Though an admitted hypochondriac, In his biography, psychiatrist Peter F. Ostwald noted Gould's increasing neurosis about food in the mid-1950s, something Gould had spoken to him about. Ostwald later discussed the possibility that Gould had developed a "psychogenic eating disorder" around this time. In 1956, Gould was also taking Thorazine, an anti-psychotic medication, and reserpine, another anti-psychotic, which can also be used to lower blood pressure. Cornelia Foss has said that Gould took many antidepressants, which she blamed for his deteriorating mental state. Whether Gould's behaviour fell within the autism spectrum has been debated. On 27 September 1982, two days after his 50th birthday, after experiencing a severe headache, Gould had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He was admitted to Toronto General Hospital and his condition rapidly deteriorated. By 4 October, there was evidence of brain damage, and Gould's father decided that his son should be taken off life support. Gould's public funeral was held in St. Paul's Anglican Church on 15 October with singing by Lois Marshall and Maureen Forrester. The service was attended by over 3,000 people and was broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He is buried next to his parents in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery (section 38, lot 1050). The first few bars of the Goldberg Variations are carved on his grave marker. An animal lover, Gould left half his estate to the Toronto Humane Society; the other half went to the Salvation Army. In 2000, a movement disorder neurologist suggested in a paper that Gould had dystonia, "a problem little understood in his time." == Perspectives ==

Writings Gould periodically told interviewers he would have been a writer if he had not been a pianist. He expounded his criticism and philosophy of music and art in lectures, convocation speeches, periodicals, and CBC radio and television documentaries. Gould participated in many interviews, and had a predilection for scripting them to the extent that they may be seen to be as written work as much as off-the-cuff discussions. Gould's writing style was highly articulate, but sometimes florid, indulgent, and rhetorical. This is especially evident in his (frequent) attempts at humour and irony. On art Gould's perspective on art is often summed up by this 1962 quotation: "The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." Gould repeatedly called himself "the last puritan", a reference to the philosopher George Santayana's 1935 novel of the same name. But he was progressive in many ways, promulgating the atonal composers of the early 20th century, and anticipating, through his deep involvement in the recording process, the vast changes technology had on the production and distribution of music. Mark Kingwell summarizes the paradox, never resolved by Gould nor his biographers, this way: Technology The issue of "authenticity" in relation to an approach like Gould's has been greatly debated (although less so by the end of the 20th century): is a recording less authentic or "direct" for having been highly refined by technical means in the studio? Gould likened his process to that of a film director—one knows that a two-hour film was not made in two hours—and implicitly asked why the recording of music should be different. He went so far as to conduct an experiment with musicians, sound engineers, and laypeople in which they were to listen to a recording and determine where the splices occurred. Each group chose different points, but none was wholly successful. While the test was hardly scientific, Gould remarked, "The tape does lie, and nearly always gets away with it". In the lecture and essay "Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process", one of his most significant texts, Gould makes explicit his views on authenticity and creativity. He asks why the epoch in which a work is received influences its reception as "art", postulating a sonata of his own composition that sounds so like one of Haydn's that it is received as such. If, instead, the sonata had been attributed to an earlier or later composer, it becomes more or less interesting as a piece of music. Yet it is not the work that has changed but its relation within the accepted narrative of music history. Similarly, Gould notes the "pathetic duplicity" in the reception of high-quality forgeries by Han van Meegeren of new paintings attributed to the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, before and after the forgery was known. Gould preferred an ahistorical, or at least pre-Renaissance, view of art, minimizing the identity of the artist and the attendant historical context in evaluating the artwork: "What gives us the right to assume that in the work of art we must receive a direct communication with the historical attitudes of another period? ... moreover, what makes us assume that the situation of the man who wrote it accurately or faithfully reflects the situation of his time? ... What if the composer, as historian, is faulty?" ==Recordings==

{{external media|audio1=Gould performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1961 Studio In creating music, Gould much preferred the control and intimacy provided by the recording studio. He disliked the concert hall, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena. He gave his final public performance in 1964, and thereafter devoted his career to the studio, recording albums and several radio documentaries. He was attracted to the technical aspects of recording, and considered the manipulation of tape to be another part of the creative process. Although Gould's recording studio producers have testified that "he needed splicing less than most performers", Gould used the process to give himself total artistic control over the recording process. He recounted his recording of the A minor fugue from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier and how it was spliced together from two takes, with the fugue's expositions from one take and its episodes from another. He recorded most of Bach's other keyboard works, including both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the partitas, French Suites, English Suites, inventions and sinfonias, keyboard concertos, and a number of toccatas (which interested him least, being less polyphonic). For his only recording at the organ, he recorded some of The Art of Fugue, which was also released posthumously on piano. As for Beethoven, Gould preferred the composer's early and late periods. He recorded all five of the piano concertos, collaborating with Vladimir Golschmann and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (members of the New York Philharmonic) on No. 1, with Leonard Bernstein and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (members of the New York Philharmonic) on Nos. 2 and 3, with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on No. 4, and with Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra on No. 5. He also recorded 22 of the piano sonatas, and numerous bagatelles and variations. Gould was the first pianist to record any of Liszt's piano transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies (beginning with the Fifth Symphony, in 1967, with the Sixth released in 1969). Gould also recorded works by Brahms, Mozart, and many other prominent piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of the Romantic era as a whole. He was extremely critical of Chopin. When asked whether he found himself wanting to play Chopin, he replied: "No, I don't. I play it in a weak moment—maybe once a year or twice a year for myself. But it doesn't convince me." But in 1970, he played Chopin's B minor sonata for the CBC and said he liked some of the miniatures and "sort of liked the first movement of the B minor". Although he recorded all of Mozart's sonatas and admitted enjoying the "actual playing" of them, and with Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in 1966. Gould collaborated extensively with Vladimir Golschmann and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra for the Columbia Masterworks label in his recording of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1958 and several works by Bach in the 1960s, including the Keyboard Concerto No. 3 (BWV 1054), the Keyboard Concerto No. 5 (BWV 1056) and the Keyboard Concerto No. 7 (BWV 1058) in 1967 and the Keyboard Concerto No. 2 in E major (BWV 1053) and the Keyboard Concerto No. 4 in A major (BWV 1055) in 1969. Documentaries Gould made numerous television and radio programs for CBC Television and CBC Radio. Notable productions include his musique concrète Solitude Trilogy, consisting of The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its people; The Latecomers, about Newfoundland; and The Quiet in the Land, about Mennonites in Manitoba. All three use a radiophonic electronic-music technique that Gould called "contrapuntal radio", in which several people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue—manipulated through overdubbing and editing. His experience of driving across northern Ontario while listening to Top 40 radio in 1967 inspired one of his most unusual radio pieces, The Search for Petula Clark, a witty and eloquent dissertation on Clark's recordings. ==Transcriptions, compositions, and conducting==

Gould was also a prolific transcriber of orchestral repertoire for piano. He transcribed his own Wagner and Ravel recordings, as well as Strauss's operas and Schubert's and Bruckner's symphonies, and "So You Want to Write a Fugue?" (SATB with piano or string-quartet accompaniment). His String Quartet (Op. 1) received a mixed reaction: The Christian Science Monitor and Saturday Review were quite laudatory, the Montreal Star less so. There is little critical commentary on Gould's compositions because there are few of them; he never succeeded beyond Opus 1, and left a number of works unfinished. He attributed his failure as a composer to his lack of a "personal voice". Most of his work is published by Schott Music. The recording Glenn Gould: The Composer contains his original works. Towards the end of his life, Gould began conducting. He had earlier directed Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde from the harpsipiano (a piano with metal hammers to simulate a harpsichord's sound), and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 (the Urlicht section) in the 1960s. His first known public appearance conducting occurred in 1939 when he was six, while appearing as a pianist in a concert for the Business Men's Bible Class in Uxbridge. By 1957 he emerged as the conductor for the CBC Television program Chrysler Festival, in which he collaborated with Maureen Forrester. His last recording as a conductor was of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original chamber-music scoring. He intended to spend his later years conducting, writing about music, and composing while pursuing an idyllic "neoThoreauvian way of life" in the countryside. ==Legacy and honours==

Gould is one of the most acclaimed musicians of the 20th century. His unique pianistic method, insight into the architecture of compositions, and relatively free interpretation of scores created performances and recordings that were revelatory to many listeners and highly objectionable to others. Philosopher Mark Kingwell wrote, "his influence is made inescapable. No performer after him can avoid the example he sets ... Now, everyone must perform through him: he can be emulated or rejected, but he cannot be ignored." Among the pianists who acknowledged Gould's influence are András Schiff, Zoltán Kocsis, Ivo Pogorelić, and Peter Serkin. Artists influenced by Gould include painter George Condo. One of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. The record was placed on the spacecrafts Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. On 25 August 2012, Voyager 1 became the first to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium. Gould left an extensive body of work beyond the keyboard. After retiring from concertising, he was increasingly interested in other media, including audio and film documentary and writing, through which he mused on aesthetics, composition, music history, and the effect of the electronic age on media consumption. (Gould grew up in Toronto at the same time that Canadian theorists Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Harold Innis were making their mark on communications studies.) Anthologies of Gould's writing and letters have been published, and Library and Archives Canada holds a significant portion of his papers. In 1983, Gould was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto in 1998, and designated a National Historic Person in 2012. Both his childhood home and his longtime apartment on Saint Clair Avenue West bear Heritage Toronto plaques honouring his life, and a federal plaque was erected next to a sculpture of him in downtown Toronto. The Glenn Gould Studio at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto was named after him. To commemorate what would have been Gould's 75th birthday, the Canadian Museum of Civilization held an exhibition, Glenn Gould: The Sounds of Genius, in 2007. The multimedia exhibit was held in conjunction with Library and Archives Canada. Glenn Gould Foundation The Glenn Gould Foundation was established in Toronto in 1983 to honour Gould and keep alive his memory and life's work. The foundation's mission "is to extend awareness of the legacy of Glenn Gould as an extraordinary musician, communicator, and Canadian, and to advance his visionary and innovative ideas into the future", and its prime activity is the triennial awarding of the Glenn Gould Prize to "an individual who has earned international recognition as the result of a highly exceptional contribution to music and its communication, through the use of any communications technologies." The prize consists of and the responsibility of awarding the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize to a young musician of the winner's choice. Glenn Gould School The Royal Conservatory of Music Professional School in Toronto adopted the name The Glenn Gould School in 1997 after its most famous alumnus. ==Awards==

Gould received many honours both during his lifetime and posthumously. He was awarded the 1969 Molson Prize, then worth C$15,000. In 1970, the Canadian government offered him the Companion of the Order of Canada, but he declined, believing himself too young. Juno Awards The Juno Awards are presented annually by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Gould won three, accepting one in person. Grammy Awards The Grammys are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Gould won four and, as with the Junos, accepted one in person. In 1983 he was inducted posthumously into the Grammy Hall of Fame for his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. ==See also==