Glenn Herbert Gould (September 25, 1932 – October 4, 1982) was a Canadian pianist, noted especially for his recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He gave up concert performances in 1964, dedicating himself to the recording studio for the rest of his career, and performances for television and radio.
Life
Glenn Gould was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 25, 1932, to Russell Herbert ("Bert") Gould and Florence ("Flora") Emma Greig Gould, Presbyterians of Scottish extraction. (Greig is the original Scottish spelling of this name, unlike the Norwegian variant Grieg.) His mother's grandfather was a cousin of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.
Gould's first piano teacher was his mother. From the age of ten he began attending the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where he studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, organ with Frederick C. Silvester and theory with Leo Smith.
In 1945, he gave his first public performance (on the organ), and the following year he made his first appearance with an orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, in a performance of Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. His first public recital followed in 1947, and his first recital on radio came with the CBC in 1950.
This was the beginning of his long association with radio and recording.
In 1957, Gould toured 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 Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, which previously had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism.
On April 10, 1964, Gould gave his last public performance in Los Angeles, California, at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Among the pieces he performed that night were Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30, selections from Bach's Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), and the piano Sonata No.3, Op.92 No.4 by Ernst Krenek. For the rest of his life he eschewed live performance, focusing instead on recording, writing, and broadcasting. Towards the end of his life he began conducting; he had earlier directed Bach's Brandenburg concerto no.5 and cantata BWV 54, Widerstehe doch der Sünde from the harpsipiano [a piano with metal hammers to simulate harpsichord sound] in the 1960s. His last recording was as a conductor, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original chamber music scoring. He had intended to give up the piano at the age of 50, spending later years conducting, writing on Music and perhaps composing. He died in Toronto in 1982 after suffering a stroke, and is buried in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
Gould as a pianist
Gould was known for his vivid musical imagination, and listeners regarded his interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to, on occasion, outright eccentric. His piano playing had great clarity, particularly in contrapuntal passages. Gould was not only a child prodigy, but also in adulthood was viewed by some as a musical phenomenon. He often swayed his torso, always in a clockwise motion, as he played.[1] In 1949 Gould injured his tailbone on a paved boatlaunch near his Ontario home. This incident appears to be associated with injury to Gould's back that affected his playing posture. But it is not clear whether this occasioned the need for the chair that Gould's father subsequently modified with screws to adjust its height, and which Gould sat in to play for the rest of his life.
Gould disliked and rebelled against what he believed to be a hedonistic approach to music which had become popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was rarely virtuosic for the sake of being virtuosic, but rather, often had a refreshingly thoughtful and withdrawn interpretation of the Music he played.
Perhaps because he was left-handed, Gould had a formidable technique that enabled him to choose very fast tempos while retaining the separateness and clarity of each note. He took an extremely low position at the instrument, which allowed him more control over the keyboard. Charles Rosen's view is that a low position at the piano is unsuitable for playing the technically demanding music of the 19th century. However, this did not seem to impede Gould, as he showed considerable technical skill in both his recordings of Bach, and in virtuosic and romantic works like his own arrangement of Ravel's La Valse and his playing of Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's 5th and 6th symphonies. Gould worked from a young age with his teacher Alberto Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping, a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm.
Gould practiced little on the piano, preferring to study music by reading it rather than playing it, a technique he had also learnt from Guerrero. His voluminous repertoire, however, would also seem to betray a natural mnemonic gift. He stated that he didn't understand the requirement of other pianists to continuously reinforce their relationship with the instrument by practicing many hours a day.[2] It seems that Gould was able to practice mentally without access to an instrument, and even took this so far as to prepare for a recording of Brahms piano works without ever playing them until a few weeks before the recording sessions. This is all the more staggering considering the absolute accuracy and phenomenal dexterity exhibited in his playing.
Regarding the performance of Bach on the piano, Gould said, "the Piano 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 admitted, "[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."[3]
Recordings
In creating music, Gould much preferred the control and intimacy provided by the recording studio, and he disliked the concert hall, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena. After his final public performance in 1964, he devoted his career solely 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 his producer at CBS, Andrew Kazdin, has stated that he was the classical artist least in need of splices or dubs, Gould used the process to give him total artistic control over a recording. 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.[4].
Gould's first major recording came in 1955, at Columbia Masterworks' 30th Street Studios in New York City. He performed the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach. Although there was initially some controversy at CBS as to whether this was the most appropriate piece to record, the finished product received phenomenal praise, and was among the best-selling classical music albums of its time. Gould became closely associated with the piece, playing it in full or in part at many of his recitals. Another version of the Goldberg Variations, recorded in 1981, would be among his last recordings, and one of only a few pieces he recorded twice in the studio. The 1981 recording was One of CBS Masterworks' first digital recordings. The two recordings are very different, the first highly energetic and often frenetic, the second slower and more introspective. In his second recording of the Goldberg Variations, Gould treats the Aria and its thirty variations as one cohesive piece.
Gould recorded most of Bach's other keyboard works, including the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, Partitas, French Suites, English Suites and keyboard concertos. For his only recording at the organ, he recorded about half of The Art of Fugue. He also recorded all five of Beethoven's piano concertos and 23 of the 32 piano sonatas.
Gould also recorded works by many other prominent piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of some of them, apparently not caring for Frédéric Chopin, for example. In a radio interview, when asked if he didn't find 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 Gould recorded all of Mozart's sonatas, he was a harsh critic of Mozart's music. He was fond of many lesser-known composers, such as the early keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons, who he claimed was his favourite composer.[5] He made recordings of little-known piano music by Jean Sibelius (the sonatines, Kyllikki), Georges Bizet (the Variations Chromatiques de Concert and the Premier nocturne), Richard Strauss (the piano sonata, the five pieces, Enoch Arden), and Paul Hindemith (the three sonatas, the Sonatas for brass and piano). He made recordings of the complete piano works and lieder of Arnold Schoenberg.
one of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C Major from Book Two of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. The disc was placed on the spacecraft Voyager 1, which is now approaching interstellar space and is the most distant human-made object from Earth.
radio documentaries
Less well-known is Gould's work in radio documentary. This work was, in part, the result of Gould's long association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for whom he produced numerous television and radio programs. Notable recordings include his 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, on Mennonites in Manitoba. All three use a technique which Gould called "contrapuntal radio," in which several people are heard speaking at once, much like the voices in a fugue.
Gould as a composer
As a teenager, Gould wrote chamber music and piano works in the style of the Second Viennese school of composition. His only significant work was the String Quartet, Op.1, which he finished when he was in his 20s, and perhaps the Beethoven cadenzas, which can be heard on his recording of the piece and have recently been recorded by pianist Lars Vogt. As well as composing, Gould was a prolific arranger of orchestral repertoire for piano; not only his Wagner and Ravel transcriptions which he recorded, but also the operas of Richard Strauss and the symphonies of Schubert and Bruckner, which he played privately for his own pleasure.[6]
early works:
Slightly later works:
The majority of his work is published by Schott Music. The recording Glenn Gould: The Composer contains his original works excepting the cadenzas.
Eccentricities
Glenn Gould usually hummed while he played, and his recording engineers varied in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was subconscious and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize the music as he intended.
Gould was known for his peculiar body movements while playing, (conducting, or grasping at the air as if to reach for notes as he did in the taping of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata) and for his insistence on sameness. He would only play concerts while sitting on the old chair his father had made. He continued to use this chair even when the seat was completely worn through.[7] His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honor in a glass case at the National Library of Canada. Conductors responded diversely 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."[8] Leonard Bernstein said, "There is nobody quite like him, and I just love playing with him."[9]
Gould was averse to cold and wore heavy clothing, including gloves, even in warm places. He also disliked social functions. He had an aversion to being touched, and in later life he limited personal contact, relying on the telephone and letters for communication. Upon one visit to historic Steinway Hall in New York City in 1959, the chief piano technician at the time, William Hupfer, greeted Gould by giving him a slap on the back. Gould was shocked by this, and complained of aching, lack of coordination, and fatigue due to the incident; he even went on to explore the possibility of litigation against Steinway & Sons if his apparent injuries were permanent.[10]
In his liner notes and broadcasts, Gould created more than two dozen alter egos for satirical, humorous, or didactic purposes, permitting him to write hostile reviews or incomprehensible commentaries on his own performances. Probably the best known are "Karlheinz Klopweisser", the English conductor "Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite", and the American pianist "Theodore Slutz".[11]
Fran's Restaurant was a constant haunt of Gould's. A CBC profile noted, "sometime between two and three every morning Gould would go to Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."[12]
Philosophical and aesthetic views
Gould stated that had he not been a musician, he would have been a writer. He wrote music criticism and espoused his philosophy of Music and art, in which he rejected what he deemed banal in music composition and its consumption by the public. In seeming contrast to his geniality, open-mindedness and modernism, Gould's remarks on jazz and other popular music were mostly disdainful, though rare. He believed that the keyboard is fulfilled as an instrument primarily through counterpoint. Much of the homophony that followed that period, he felt, belongs to a less serious and less spiritual period of art.
Gould was convinced that the institution of the public concert with audience en masse and the tradition of applause was a force of evil, and that these practices should be abandoned. This doctrine he set forth in "GPAADAK," the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.[13]
Gould enjoyed solitude, and expressed that theme in his radio documentaries, the Solitude Trilogy.
Health
early in his life Gould suffered a spine injury which prompted his physicians to prescribe him an assortment of painkillers and other drugs. His continued use of prescribed medications throughout his career is speculated to have had a deleterious effect on his health. He was highly concerned about his health throughout his life, such as his high blood pressure, and was always worried about the safety of his hands, never shaking hands and always wearing gloves.[14]
Gould's experience with psychoanalytic treatment and medication is documented. Dr. Timothy Maloney, the director of the music Division of the National Library of Canada, has written about and discussed the possibility that Gould also had Asperger syndrome, a form of autism. This idea was first tentatively proposed by Gould's biographer, Dr. Peter Ostwald, though Ostwald died before he could develop this theory. (The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome did not exist in Gould's lifetime.) Gould's eccentricities, such as rocking and humming, isolation and difficulty with social interaction, and the uncanny focus and technical ability he displayed in music-making, can be related to the symptoms displayed by persons with Asperger's, according to Maloney. Others, such as Dr. Helen Mesaros, a Toronto psychiatrist and author, dismiss this theory as post-mortem diagnosis based on circumstantial evidence. Mesaros wrote a rebuttal to Maloney's paper, suggesting that there are ample psychological and emotional explanations for Gould's eccentricities, and that it is not necessary to resort to neurological explanations.
Awards and recognitions
Glenn Gould received many honors during his lifetime and posthumously, although ironically, he despised competition in all its forms. In 1983, he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
He won four Grammy Awards:
Source: Wikipedia
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