Information AboutGlenn Gould |
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Glenn Herbert Gould ( September 25 , 1932 – October 4 , 1982 ) was a celebrated Canadian Pianist , noted especially for his Recording s of Johann Sebastian Bach 's Keyboard Music . He gave up Live Performance s in 1964 , dedicating himself to the Recording Studio for the rest of his career. LIFE Gould was born Glen Gold in Toronto , Ontario , Canada on September 25 1932 . His family was Protestant and changed their name soon after his birth, fearing that it would otherwise be mistaken as Jew ish during the growing Anti-Semitism of the time. Gould's first piano teacher was his mother, whose grandfather was a cousin of Edvard Grieg . 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. with his student Glenn Gould, 1945]] 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 Piano Concerto No. 4 . 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 America n to play there since the Second World War . 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 . Gould returned to the West keen to popularize the music of Russia n composer Dmitri Shostakovich . On April 10 , 1964 , Gould gave his last public performance in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Among the pieces he performed that night were Beethoven's ''Piano Sonata Opus 109'' and selections from Bach's last unfinished work, the ''Art of the Fugue'' (BWV 1080). For the rest of his life he focused on making recordings, writing, and broadcasting. He died in Toronto in 1982 after suffering a massive Stroke and is buried in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery . GOULD AS A MUSICIAN Gould was known for his vivid musical imagination, and listeners regarded his interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to, on occasion, outright eccentric. It was said of Gould that he never played a piece the same way twice. His playing had great clarity, particularly in Contrapuntal passages. Gould lived at a time when a heavy, grandeur-emphasizing approach to the performance of Bach, dating from the 19th century, was still very much on the musical scene. In comparison, many listeners found Gould's own approach to Bach to be refreshing, even revelatory. Gould's style arguably has strongly influenced later pianists who have played Bach, notably Andras Schiff and Angela Hewitt . Gould had a formidable technique that enabled him to choose very fast tempos while retaining the separateness and crisp clarity of each note. Part of the technique consisted of taking an extremely low position at the instrument which allowed him more control over the keyboard. Although Charles Rosen 's view is that a low position at the piano is unsuitable for playing technically demanding music of the 19th Century , this did not impede Gould's playing much, though, as he generally disliked Romantic period piano music. He held in disdain much of the concert pianist's generally accepted repertoire of his time and did not play the usual romantic period technical show pieces that audiences expected. Gould's one-of-a-kind technique yielded excellent results, however, in contrapuntal music and his choice of repertoire reveals an obvious inclination to polyphony; his few recorded excursions into the Romantic period piano literature are biased towards uncharacteristically contrapuntal works. The music of Bach formed much of his repertoire, and it is for his interpretations of Bach's works that he is most remembered. With regard to performing Bach on the piano, Gould said, "the piano is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such... 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." (From the liner notes to Sony CD SM2K-52597, "Bach Partitas, Preludes and Fugues", page 15) RECORDINGS Gould stated that he much preferred the control and intimacy with music that the recording studio provided him and 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 also to the technical aspects of recording and considered the manipulation of tape another outlet for creativity. Although his producer at CBS, Andrew Kazdin, has stated that he was the classical artist least in need of splices or dubs, Gould felt that he could produce effects in the studio not possible in live performance. 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. {Link without Title} Gould's first studio recording came in 1955, at Columbia Masterworks 30th Street Studios in New York City. For it he chose the '' Goldberg Variations '' by Johann Sebastian Bach . He had performed the piece a year earlier for a CBC broadcast, which was also made available on record. Gould became closely associated with the ''Goldbergs'', playing it in full or in part at many of his recitals. One of his last recordings, also of the ''Goldbergs'', was one of only a few pieces which Gould recorded twice in the studio. This 1981 recording was one of (now CBS) Masterworks first digital recordings, and also the last recording made in 30th Street Studios before they were closed. Both studio versions are critically acclaimed. 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 30 variations as one cohesive piece, a significant change from his earlier recording in which the variations are treated as a set of separate miniatures. The 1981 recording won two Grammy Awards in 1983, including best classical album of the year. Gould recorded many of Bach's other keyboard works, including the complete '' Well-Tempered Clavier '' and the keyboard concertos. For his only record at the Organ , he recorded about half of '' The Art Of Fugue ''. He also recorded all five Beethoven Piano Concertos as well as most of the Piano Sonatas. Gould also recorded pieces by many prominent piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of some of them, apparently not caring for , claiming his music to be simple and derivative. He was fond of some of the lesser known byways of the repertoire, such as the early keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons , whom he claimed was the greatest composer of all-time. He also made critically acclaimed recordings of little known piano music by Jean Sibelius , Richard Strauss , and Paul Hindemith . His recordings of the complete Arnold Schoenberg piano works are also highly regarded. One of Gould's performances of ''Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1'' from Book 2 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. ECCENTRICITIES Glenn Gould frequently hummed along while he played, and his Recording Engineer s varied in how successfully they could exclude his voice from his recordings. Gould claimed this singing was unconscious, and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realise the music as he intended. Gould also was known for his peculiar body movements while playing and for his insistence on sameness. He would only play concerts whilst sitting on a chair his father made. He continued to use this chair even when the seat was nearly worn through {Link without Title} . His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honour in a glass case in the National Library Of Canada . Gould was very afraid of being cold and wore very warm clothes, including gloves, at all times, even when he was in warm places. Gould also disliked social functions. He had an aversion to being touched and in later life he refused to talk to almost anyone in person, relying on the telephone and letters for communication. He conducted interviews with himself, wrote unusual personal advertisements about himself which he submitted to newspapers, and recorded other people's conversations in public places. When he was still performing publicly, he did a concert with the Cleveland Orchestra , after which conductor George Szell remarked: "No doubt about it - that nut's a genius". Gould was not without a sense of humor, as for example in his creation of numerous alter egos for satirical, humorous or didactic purposes. From the liner notes to Sony CD SM2K-52597, "Bach Partitas, Preludes and Fugues", page 14: :"David Johnson", of course, was none other than Gould himself, the first in a long line of more than two dozen fictional characters whom Gould was to impersonate during the coming years, and of whom the most famous are the German composer "Karlheinz Klopweisser", the English conductor "Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite", and the American pianist "Theodore Slutz". 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. (''Source: CBC ) 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 these 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 congenital high blood pressure (a blood pressure monitor is visible in photographs of Gould's apartment shortly after his death), and was always concerned about the safety of his hands. Dr. Timothy Maloney (PhD), the director of the Music Division of the National Library of Canada has written about and discussed the possibility that Gould had Asperger's Syndrome , a disorder related to Autism . This idea was first tentatively proposed by Gould's biographer, Dr. Peter Ostwald (MD), though Ostwald died before he could develop this theory; there was no diagnosis of Asperger's possible in Gould's lifetime because Gould died before it was first included in the DSM (the main reference book for mental disorders used for diagnosis in the United States). Glenn Gould's eccentricities such as the pre-performance ritual of soaking his hands and arms in hot water, his rocking and humming, his isolation and difficulty with social interaction, and the uncanny focus and technical ability he displayed in music making can, according to Maloney, be related to the symptoms displayed by persons with Asperger's. Others, such as Dr. Helen Mesaros (MD), a Toronto psychiatrist and author, dismiss this theory as post-mortem diagnosis based on circumstantial evidence by people without medical training. Mesaros wrote a rebuttal to Maloney's paper and suggests that there are ample psychological and emotional explanations for Gould's eccentricities without resorting to neurological ones. (see External Links ) RADIO DOCUMENTARIES Less well known, but also critically praised, is Gould's work in Radio documentary. These were, in part, the result of Gould's long association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for whom he produced numerous Television and radio programmes. Notable here is his ''Solitude Trilogy'', consisting of ''The Idea of North'', a meditation on the north 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. According to his co-producer Lorne Tulk , he first used this technique out of necessity, when he found he had fourteen minutes too much material for ''The Idea of North''. It is this technique, combined with the skillful editing of music and the use of recordings of ordinary people in conversation, which makes his documentary work stand apart from the crowd. ''Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy'' was a BBC Radio 3 drama broadcast in 1991. It features Gould as a character, and is structured by sequential selections from his 1981 performance of JS Bach's ''Goldberg Variations''. (see complete text ) FILM
Gould's recorded music has been featured in many other films, both during his life and after his death. '' Silence Of The Lambs '' ( 1991 ) contains the Aria from his 1981 recording, and indeed the original novel of the same name has Dr. Lector (apparently an afficianado) requesting a recording of the Goldberg Variations whilst he dines. ''The Wars'' ( 1983 ) which features Gould playing music of Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms . '' Triplets Of Belleville '' ( 2003 ) includes a segment in which an animated Glenn Gould with greatly exaggerated mannerisms plays the ''Prelude No. 2 in C minor'', from J. S. Bach's '' Well-Tempered Clavier Book One''. AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS Glenn Gould was the recipient of many honors both during and after his lifetime. In 1983 , he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall Of Fame . He won four Grammy Award s: Grammy Award For Best Album Notes - Classical :
Grammy Award For Best Classical Album :
Grammy Award For Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra) :
The Glenn Gould Foundation was established in Toronto in 1983 to honour Gould and preserve his memory. Among other activities, the foundation awards the Glenn Gould Prize every three years 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 $50,000 CAD and an original work by a Canadian artist. The Glenn Gould Studio at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto was named after him. MEDIA PUBLICATIONS
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