GLENN GOULD

Somewhere outside our solar system, two American NASA space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, streak toward other worlds. These were launched in the late 1970s. Each carries a metal long-playing record constructed to last for thousands of millennia.

Each of the Voyager LPs is accompanied by a needle and a diagram. The diagram shows how to rotate and at what speed to play the disk.

On each disk is a sample of Earth's music, voices and sounds.

On each disk is a few minutes . . . of the acoustic works of a Canadian pianist.

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Voyagers 1 and 2 are each drifting toward separate planetary systems. By about 460,000 C.E. each will have entered its target area. They will have reached the vicinity of other worlds.

This will make it possible for the musical message of the Voyagers, if discovered, to communicate to other intelligent species.

This singular fact makes Glenn Herbert Gould (September 25, 1932-October 4, 1982) the Canadian artist whose work will probably longest survive.

The Voyager disks each contain some minutes of his interpretation of a Bach Brandenburg concerto.

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But in many other ways than this, Glenn Gould's life and career were extraordinary.

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Gould's musical interpretations of the great piano pieces of the past were controversial in his time. They nonetheless made him one of the 20th century's most famous, and perhaps one of its most respected classical musicians.

For in personal, intimate, unexpected ways, Gould's works moved hundreds of thousands of extraordinarily sophisticated listeners.

But Gould was more than a pianist. Gould was also a musical thinker. He pondered his time's deepest musical possibilities, the possibilities of what he called music -- by which he really meant the possibilities of sound.

Like a relatively large number of influential Canadian thinkers, like Harold Adams Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Northrop Frye, Gould considered the nature and meaning of technology. Unlike them, he warmly and unambiguously embraced it.

Gould was the most eccentric genius Canada has yet produced.

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Gould seems to have been a genetic fluke. The only child of ordinary parents, amateur musicians of average talent (his father an amateur violinist, his mother a pianist), Glenn grew up in a modest home at 32 Southwood Drive in the Beaches area of Toronto (about a mile from where I am sitting now). By the age of three he was discovered to be a musical prodigy. Among his other gifts, he had perfect pitch.

Gould's mother first trained him in piano. While he was learning, his next-door neighbour was his childhood friend Robert Fulford (1932-      ). Fulford would later help Glenn put on some of his youthful concerts. Fulford would grow up to be an interesting non-fiction author and Canada's most versatile artistic journalist -- as well as an insightful commentator on Gould.

Outgrowing his mother's instruction, Glenn next studied at the (then Toronto, now Royal) Conservatory of Music. Chilean pianist Alberto Guerrero then took Glenn in hand from the age of 11 to Guerrero's death in 1959.

At 12 he made his musical debut. Winning numerous competitions, Gould became the first pianist ever to be shown in concert on Canadian television. By 1955 he was a celebrity within Canada.

Gould later said that it was only when he left Guerrero's tutelage that he learned anything. By this Gould seems to have meant that only when he was on his own did he think out music from its fundamentals.

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From the beginning Gould was, as the French say, original. He played the piano from a particular low-cut wooden chair that accompanied him wherever he went. (It eventually became a shabby, shoddy relic.) He placed his pianos on blocks. He preferred a particular piano to all others, played it until it became useless. And he played in a peculiar scrunched-up position, as if were hard of hearing and had to listen intently to mice whispering beneath the keyboard.

Further, Gould often hummed or even sang uncontrollably and unmusically while playing. You can hear it on several of his recordings, rendering them bizarre. His head and long hair swayed with passion, his body almost swooned in odd transports as he played.

In 1955 Gould made his debut at New York's Town Hall, and was a charismatic sensation. When you saw him playing so weirdly it was impossible to believe the enormous precision, discipline, austerity, irony and dry delicacy of his unique interpretations. Columbia Records instantly offered him a recording contract.

Gould's first recording with Columbia was Bach's Goldberg Variations (1956), in a rendition of startling clarity that became his signature. His last recording, released on his 50th birthday in 1980, was also the Goldbergs -- in a new and controversially different manner.

Two days later, Gould, who had suffered for years from high blood pressure and was in alarming physical decline -- had a cerebral hemorrhage. His friends insisted he go to the hospital. Gould resisted for several hours.

Then he permitted it.

His condition worsened irreversibly. A week later Glenn Gould was dead.

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In between the two sets of Goldbergs Gould had at first an active concert career. He performed around the world. He performed, among other places, in Israel and Australia, and was the first North American pianist to give a concert in the Soviet Union.

But Gould gave up performing in public altogether in 1964. 31 years old, he had decided that the future of music was in recordings. Live performances, Gould felt, were inferior to what could be produced in a studio with the new reel-to-reel multitrack sound recording systems. No live concert, he was sure, could match the quality of studio recordings; these could be assembled from the best bits of many imperfect takes. In addition, the maturing Gould disliked the rhetoric and insincerity to which, he felt, the requirements of live concert production necessarily led.

Gould therefore switched from being primarily a concert artist to being entirely a recording artist. (This was absolutely unprecedented.) In the 18 years of his life remaining he recorded more than 80 albums of piano music, and one of music for organ.

From 1970 to 1977 Gould insisted on recording only in Toronto's Eaton Auditorium, a once-popular and posh concert venue he insisted had perfect acoustics. It was located above Eaton's old College Street store, built in the late 1920s but left unfinished at the beginning of the Depression. Eaton's College Street closed in the early 1970s when the downtown Eaton Centre mall was opened. (The old College Street building was later refurbished as an elegant mall named College Park.) Gould recorded in Eaton Auditorium as long as he was allowed to use it. In 1977 he was forced out, and turned to recording in a hotel called The Inn on the Park in a Toronto suburb; sometimes he recorded in New York. (In 2002 there was talk of reopening Eaton Auditorium; in 2003 it reopened, refurbished, as something called the Carlu after its original architect.)

In Eaton Auditorium and The Inn on the Park Gould recorded nearly all of Bach's non-organ keyboard music. He recorded as well the complete piano works of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1880-1951, and known for his dodecaphonic compositions). In addition, Gould recorded many concerti and sonatas by Beethoven (in original interpretations), by Brahms and (especially at the end of his life) by Richard Strauss. He also recorded a piano transcription of Wagner's Siegfried's Rhine Journey and some of Liszt's piano transcriptions (Gould did not, generally, like Romantic music or composers like Liszt; for him, they were rhetorical piano showoffs).

Finally, Gould controversially recorded a good deal of Mozart. (The performances of Mozart were original, unique and startlingly different. For the most part, critics disliked them. Gould would not record Mozart's most famous sonatas; for him, they were too common.) Gould, as he so often did with other composers, was determined to try to play Mozart in a way that, even if a failure, was entirely his own.

In addition to musical recordings, Gould made many, many radio programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. These were usually about music. For these, he invented several buffoonish comic personas; he invented absurd voices and accents for their bizarre personalities. Beside these educational and satiric efforts, Gould also made a few radio documentaries about ideas: the best was his thought-provoking "The Idea of North" (1967), which some Canadians feel touches intimately on the mystery of this country.

As years passed, Gould added CBC English television to his documentary efforts. Now his buffoonish characters were not only voices, they put in costumed appearances.

It is unusual for the personality of a performer long to survive him. But Gould, a reticent recluse who hid out in his apartment at St. Clair Avenue West and Avenue Road and in his family's cottage at Uptergrove on Lake Simcoe, established a legend of himself that seems destined long to survive him -- indeed, to survive nearly everyone else in this country.

To remind you of only one reason: because a segment of Gould's original Brandenburgs was selected to be on the phongraph records sent out with the American NASA spacecraft Voyagers 1 and 2. These have now journeyed beyond the Solar System; in about 460,000 years each will enter another . . .

Over time Gould increasingly became a recluse. When he was a child his mother had warned Gould about the horror of germs, bundling him up in heavy clothing in summer; in later life Gould was notorious, like American industrialist and aviator Howard Hughes, for his isolation and aversion to shaking hands with anyone. (Gould once sued a New York piano company because an employee had shaken his hand too firmly.) Gould customarily wore gloves, heavy woolen tweeds and a cap in Toronto's sweltering summers. More and more Gould avoided everyone. He gave to many the impression of being homosexual (though, for all anyone knows, he wasn't). His life centered around his apartment in a large, low-rise apartment building near Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue and his recording studios. He was an habitué of a coffee shop called Fran's at Yonge and St. Clair. His life focused narrowly on his favorite piano and his radio and television performances. Most of his friends were recording people and technicians.

In the late 1970s Gould did venture out from his apartment to make a memorable performance in a Canadian television documentary series called Cities (1979). In Gould's segment he introduced the city of Toronto to the world, driving around it and pointing out its features and culture. (Gould was a terrible driver. He caused many accidents from inattention to his driving, and once steered his car into a lake.) In the "Toronto" film Gould was memorably attired in his English driving cap and tweedy, germ-excluding duds. He was wearing the gloves he insisted on, to avoid touching people.

Gould was secretive about his sex life, but apparently heterosexual. He seems to have had several affairs, one with a married woman with several children, the wife of a "prominent musician" mesmerized by Gould's playing. (So says Otto Friedrich in his biography of Gould.) Because of Gould's phobia about germs, I wonder how his affairs were possible. I am not surprised that he did not settle down with anyone.

Gould functioned best at night. He telephoned his friends after midnight (they were not allowed to telephone him), and chatted with them (it was mostly a monologue, the self-absorbed Gould talking at them) until the wee hours.

Among his telephone buddies was my old professor of the philosophy of music Geoffrey Payzant. He wrote the first book to be published on Gould. I remember him telling me of Gould's phone calls. Dr. Payzant was very proud of his book, but was a bit ashamed that it was his first; he was in his 50s when it was published.

Since Doctor Payzant's book on Gould, there have been a small number of others. Several films have also been made; among the most notable is the 1993 film Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. In this film, impersonated by the talented Colm Feore (interpreter of the equally profound mystery of Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in a memorable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation film in early 2002), some attempt is made to pluck out the heart of Gould's mystery.

With the coming of DVD, we can hope that all Gould's many works will eventually be released by CBC and Sony Records in this format, which seems perfectly suited to his genius.

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Books About Glenn Gould

Bazzara. Wondrous Strange: A Life of Glenn Gould. 2003.

By a Vancouver musicologist, this is the most recent life. Bazzara attempts to correct the medical perspective of Ostwald, and the many lacunae of Friedrich's book. He attempts to foreground the Canadian background of Gould.

Cott, Jonathan. Conversations with Glenn Gould. Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown &       Company, 1984.

Consists of a long interview with Gould about some of the methods of his music and recordings. Contains some interesting remarks, and a Gould discography.

Friedrich, Otto. Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations. New York: Random       House; and Toronto: Lester and Orpen Denys; both 1990.

Otto Friedrich died in the mid-1990s. An excellent writer of non-fiction, he was once managing editor of The Saturday Evening Post. He was also a long-time editor at Henry Luce's Time magazine, and wrote pieces for the New York Daily News. His is a thoughtful, entertaining life of Gould (but I wish he had told us who Gould slept with, since he obviously knew!).

McGreevy, John. Glenn Gould: By Himself and His Friends. 1983 (?).

Ostwald, Peter F. Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius. New York       and London: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Ostwald disagreed with parts of Friedrich's biography. So he wrote his own.

Payzant, Geoffrey. Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. Toronto: Van Nostrand       Reinhold, 1978.

While giving a chronology of Gould's life and performances, Payzant's book for the most part avoids Gould's inner life. It is predominately about his music and ideas and is the best work for revealing the depth of Gould's thoughts about music and technology. I recommend the revised edition (put out after Gould's death). It contains some thoughts about Gould as a person.

Books About NASA's Voyager Sounds Project

Sagan, Carl. The Cosmic Connection. 1974.

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Last slightly modified: 4:54 AM 29/12/2003