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Gould was shocked by this, and complained of aching, lack of coordination, and fatigue because of it. Gould is here In his liner notes and broadcasts, Gould created more than two dozen alter egos for satirical, humorous, and didactic purposes, permitting him to write hostile reviews or incomprehensible commentaries on his own performances. Gould was a teetotaller and did not smoke. He ate one meal a day, supplemented by arrowroot biscuits and coffee. A CBC profile noted, "sometime between two and three every morning, Gould would go to Fran's, a hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth, and order the same meal of scrambled eggs. Gould lived a private life. The documentary filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon said of him: "No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly. Bazzana writes that "it is tempting to assume that Gould was asexual, an image that certainly fits his aesthetic and the persona he sought to convey, and one can read the whole Gould literature and be convinced that he died a virgin"—but he also mentions that evidence points to "a number of relationships with women that may or may not have been platonic and ultimately became complicated and were ended".

One piece of evidence arrived in After several years, she and Gould became lovers. She purchased a house near Gould's apartment. In , Foss confirmed that she and Gould had had a love affair for several years. According to her, "There were a lot of misconceptions about Glenn, and it was partly because he was so very private. But I assure you, he was an extremely heterosexual man. Our relationship was, among other things, quite sexual. As early as two weeks after leaving her husband, Foss noticed disturbing signs in Gould, alluding to unusual behaviour that was more than "just neurotic". Though an admitted hypochondriac, [63] [fn 13] Gould had many pains and ailments, but his autopsy revealed few underlying problems in areas that often troubled him. Gould rarely shook people's hands, and habitually wore gloves. Bazzana has speculated that Gould's increasing use of a variety of prescription medications over his career may have had a deleterious effect on his health.

It had reached the stage, Bazzana writes, that "he was taking pills to counteract the side effects of other pills, creating a cycle of dependency". It's getting worse all the time. Ostwald noted Gould's increasing neurosis about food in the mids, something Gould had spoken to him about. Ostwald later discussed the possibility that Gould had developed a "psychogenic eating disorder" around this time. Whether Gould's behaviour fell within the autism spectrum has been debated. On September 27, , 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.

Glenn Gould - Wikipedia

By October 4, there was evidence of brain damage, and Gould's father decided that his son should be taken off life support. The service was attended by over 3, people and was broadcast on the CBC. He is buried next to his parents in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery section 38, lot In , a movement disorder neurologist suggested in a paper that Gould had dystonia , "a problem little understood in his time. Gould periodically told interviewers he would have been a writer if he had not been a pianist. 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. In his writing, Gould praised certain composers and rejected what he deemed banal in music composition and its consumption by the public, and also gave analyses of the music of Richard Strauss , Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Glenn Gould, Pianist: His Childhood and Student Life

Despite a certain affection for Dixieland jazz, Gould was mostly averse to popular music. He enjoyed a jazz concert with his friends as a youth, mentioned jazz in his writings, and once criticized the Beatles for "bad voice leading " [fn 18] —while praising Petula Clark and Barbra Streisand. Gould's perspective on art is often summed up by this 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 novel of the same name. Mark Kingwell summarizes the paradox, never resolved by Gould nor his biographers, this way:. He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the Zeitgeist and its most interesting expression.

He was, in effect, stranded on a beachhead of his own thinking between past and future. That he was not able, by himself, to fashion a bridge between them is neither surprising, nor, in the end, disappointing. We should see this failure, rather, as an aspect of his genius. He both was and was not a man of his time. 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 [83] —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, [85] 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?

What if the composer, as historian, is faulty? 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 , 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", [87] 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. Gould's first commercial recording of Berg's Piano sonata, Op.

He soon signed with Columbia Records' classical music division and, in , recorded Bach: The Goldberg Variations , his breakthrough work. Although there was some controversy at Columbia about the appropriateness of this "debut" piece, the record received extraordinary praise and was among the best-selling classical music albums of its era. A new recording of the Goldberg Variations , in , was among his last albums; the piece was one of a few he recorded twice in the studio. The release was one of CBS Masterworks' first digital recordings. The interpretation is highly energetic and often frenetic; the later is slower and more deliberate [90] [91] —Gould wanted to treat the aria and its 30 variations as a cohesive whole.

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Gould said Bach was "first and last an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived". 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 , 23 of the piano sonatas , [93] 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 , with the Sixth released in 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. Although he recorded all of Mozart's sonatas and admitted enjoying the "actual playing" of them, [95] Gould said he disliked Mozart's later works. He also made recordings of Schoenberg's complete piano works. The success of Gould's collaborations was to a degree dependent upon his collaborators' receptiveness to his sometimes unconventional readings of the music. Stegemann considered Gould's television collaboration with American violinist Yehudi Menuhin in , in which they played works by Bach, Beethoven and Schoenberg, a success because "Menuhin was ready to embrace the new perspectives opened up by an unorthodox view". The studio was incredibly overheated, which may be good for a pianist but not for a singer: a dry throat is the end as far as singing is concerned. But we persevered nonetheless. It wasn't easy for me. Gould began by improvising something Straussian—we thought he was simply warming up, but no, he continued to play like that throughout the actual recordings, as though Strauss's notes were just a pretext that allowed him to improvise freely.

He also recorded Bach's six sonatas for violin and harpsichord BWV — with Jaime Laredo , and the three sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard with Leonard Rose. Claude Rains narrated their recording of Strauss's Enoch Arden melodrama. 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 inspired one of his most unusual radio pieces, The Search for Petula Clark , a witty and eloquent dissertation on Clark's recordings. 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, [11] which he played privately for pleasure. Gould dabbled in composition, with few finished works.

As a teenager, he wrote chamber music and piano works in the style of the Second Viennese school. Significant works include a string quartet, which he finished in his 20s published , recorded , and his cadenzas to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. SATB with piano or string-quartet accompaniment. His String Quartet Op. 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. His first known public appearance conducting occurred in when he was six, while appearing as a pianist in a concert for the Business Men's Bible Class in Uxbridge. In , Gould wrote to Golschmann of his "temporary retirement" from conducting, apparently as a result of the unanticipated muscular strain it created. He intended to spend his later years conducting, writing about music, and composing while pursuing an idlyllic "neoThoreauvian way of life" in the countryside.

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. The record was placed on the spacecraft Voyager 1. On 25 August , the spacecraft became the first to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium.

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Gould is a popular subject of biography and critical analysis. Philosophers such as Kingwell and Giorgio Agamben have interpreted his life and ideas. Thomas Bernhard 's novel The Loser purports to be an extended first-person essay about Gould and his lifelong friendship with two fellow students from the Mozarteum school in Salzburg, both of whom have abandoned their careers as concert pianists due to the intimidating example of Gould's genius. 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. The multimedia exhibit was held in conjunction with Library and Archives Canada. The Glenn Gould Foundation was established in Toronto in 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. Gould received many honours both during his lifetime and posthumously. In , the Canadian government offered him the Companion of the Order of Canada , but he declined, believing himself too young. Gould won three, accepting one in person. Gould won four and, as with the Junos, accepted one in person. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote. Canadian pianist — For the actor, see Glen Gould.

Toronto , Ontario, Canada. Musical artist. Further information: List of compositions by Glenn Gould. Main article: Glenn Gould Foundation. Main article: The Glenn Gould School. The whole family adopted the new surname. Bazzana , p. Reprinted and quoted in Kingwell , p. See Album details at world catalogue. Friedrich , p. He offered me his hand in a very definite way, none of this tentative, 'don't-touch-me' stuff. There can be no excuse for it, and the one clear lesson of the recording is that it could exist only because of the stature of its creator. Gould in effect called in twenty-five years of chits from Columbia when he got them to release this embarrassing piece of twaddle. The transcription of Bruckner's 8th symphony Gould alludes to in an article Gould where he deprecates its "sheer ledger-line unplayability"; the Strauss opera playing can be seen in one of the Humphrey Burton conversations and is referred to by almost everyone who saw him play in private.

Classic FM. Retrieved 30 January Modern Dog. Retrieved 24 December The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Retrieved 7 September Project ' CBC Radio One. Retrieved 25 December Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. CBC Newsmagazine. CBC Television. Sony BMG Masterworks. Archived from the original on 10 February Retrieved 12 March He is now managed by Walter Homburger. Around this time, the Gould family acquires one of the earliest tape recorders, and Gould begins eagerly to explore the new technology and document his playing. The following day, he is offered an exclusive recording contract with Columbia. It is released to almost universal critical and popular acclaim, launching his international career as a recording and concert artist. On August 31, he gives his last public performance in Europe at the L. Clair Avenue West — his home for the rest of his life. He befriends the couple. By , his friendship with Cornelia has evolved into the most important romance of his life.