Cover
Baby Gould pondering his fingers.
Dedication
To Carol Ann
CONTENTS
Introduction
ONE: The Enigma’s Variations
TWO: Altered Egos
THREE: The “Con”
FOUR: The Biggest Chill
Finale: The Magus’s Mysterium
Coda: The Lesson
The Life and Times of Glenn Gould
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
He also spelled his name with three n’s.
Introduction
As a kid doing my daily piano practice in a suburban basement west of Toronto in the early fifties, it was inevitable that I would hear the name Glenn Gould. I was born into a musical family: a piano family. My father, Jack, knew enough carpentry to help build a downstairs music studio where he taught piano lessons well into his late eighties. A certain amount of pioneering was involved in growing up in the suburbs those days. I remember picking through the bluish clay heaped up out of the house foundation to find the occasional arrowhead, which, of course, I threw away. Other houses were also rising up around us out of what once was Mississauga First Nation land. Our family became social. Over the months and years to follow, chatter about Gould intensified with weekend visits to our “place in the country” from other piano teachers or from friends with extensive record collections.
I was certainly not au courant on anything about Gould. Some of the adults had heard him play; their reports were confusing, to say the least.
I, on the other hand, had only heard about his playing. Having little access to the latest recordings was not that odd — these were still the days before classical music was played on FM radio (before there even was FM radio, in fact) and before hi-fi sets were a fixture in every modern rec room opposite a stack of LPs lining a lacquered maple cabinet.
Gould’s name was often in the newspapers when I was a boy, yet, as I remember, the stories weren’t always about his piano playing. He was terrific at that, we all knew; but it seems he was also great at the art of becoming famous. Having such a celebrity in our midst in the early fifties was an exceptional thing. Canadians were uneasy about fame, particularly the homegrown type. Celebrity was something the Americans did better. The main exceptions were members of the royal family, hockey players, and the occasional politician or two (who were, of course, always compared to their American counterparts).
The Canadian rules didn’t apply to Glenn Gould, we were learning. News of his rapid-fire conquest of the musical world was downright exciting. There was a Gould triumph here, a stunning breakthrough there. It was like getting news of successful battles in a far-off war. Gould had Moscow at his feet; Leningrad, too. The Germans were overwhelmed. New York was blown away.
Later in the decade, when I’d begun to listen to him with more purpose and frequency, he already seemed a fixture in my life in much the way other things Canadian were, like Ted “Teeder” Kennedy, the stand-up captain of the hometown Toronto Maple Leafs, or the lovely hill on the golf course we tobogganed down in the dead dark after dinner.
Gould’s still there, along with my memories of that hill. He refuses to budge from his place in my Canadian landscape. In my thinking Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017 will be shared with what would have been Glenn Gould’s eighty-fifth birthday.
Canadian Centennial walk of fame, 1967 (left to right): Morley Callaghan, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Kate Reid, A.Y. Jackson, Glenn Gould, and Marshall McLuhan.
Polls over the years regularly place Gould high on the list of the most famous Canadians. One can easily imagine him positioned for a group shot alongside any of the early prime ministers, everyone all bundled up — all good, overdressed, solid Canadian ancients. Gould would be a bit more rumpled than the rest, but every bit as steadfast.
(An aside: To me, rumpled is a loaded word because it has quite a history when it comes to Glenn Gould. In fact, the metamorphosis of Gould’s “rumpled-ness” delineates his entire history. The accusation of being rumpled was from the start part of the accepted view of his eccentricities: Glenn Gould, the overconfident young guy from the sticks [Toronto], with his theatrically rumpled way of dressing: thick sweaters, gloves, scarves, hats, and, of course, a coat that looked less like something worn than something hovering around him like a thick fog. It was noted that “Gould arrived in coat, beret, muffler and gloves” at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York in June 1955 to record The Goldberg Variations, the hallmark of his amazingly uneven (read: rumpled) career. Gould’s mid-career dishevelment — from the mid-sixties to the later seventies — could also be described as “multi-layered,” and not just when it came to clothing.)
But back to my own piano playing for a moment. For the most part, I didn’t think about it too deeply, sort of like a fish not having an opinion about water. When I did think about it years later, though, I realized that so much playing early in my life had made me monumentally inhospitable to the prospect of piano playing in the future. Sure, I owned albums — the early ones in the 78 rpm format — that focused on the lives of the great composers like Mozart and Schumann. But otherwise, piano music was as ubiquitous as the air in my teen years. My family’s life when I was growing up was spent literally walking over the sounds of the piano, which floated up through the floorboards from the fingers of latest student pounding away at the old Heintzman in the basement.
By that time I’d heard Gould, but I hadn’t really listened. Then one day the heavens opened — how else can I explain it? — and I saw the light. It wasn’t about Gould, not at first. It was jazz that did it.
At least it started with jazz, when a high school friend about a year older loaned me a Benny Goodman LP that included the1938 live recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which has always been known as the record with the Jess Stacy solo. That solo, about twelve or thirteen minutes long, comes partway through Goodman’s now-famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. To begin, Stacy noodles around the keys for a moment, sampling the notes of the song’s foundational A-minor chord before making the split-second decision to “come in real quiet,” as he later described it. It is beautiful. The resulting solo’s superb sense of proportion is evident when listening to the recording, with its sly references to Debussy and to Yiddish folk, yielding to Gospel and then … to what? Stacy turned a solo into an entire world.
Gould, though, was ambivalent toward jazz, although he respected its greatest technicians and tried playing some tunes over the years just to surprise his listeners. He also developed a friendship with the quietly cerebral jazz pianist Bill Evans later in his career, with whom he talked about the qualities of different pianos. But while Gould was never entirely comfortable with what jazz was about, some of his listeners, including me, knew he was not entirely separated from it or from any of the new non-classical kinds of piano playing that were out there. By the early sixties, when listening to Gould’s Goldberg was a must-do, appreciating the piano also meant listening to Lennie Tristano and Oscar Peterson