73 Years ago from today, Glenn Herbert Gould was born to a family in Canada along the banks of Lake Ontario. A child prodigy nurtured by his pianist mother from young, he went on to receive instructions from Alberto Guerrero. There has been debate as to whether Gould’s detaché style of playing- meaning a technique from the days of harpsichord performance, whereby one’s finger is “snapped” up from each depressed key – combined with the practice of slapping one’s finger onto the designated piano keys with the free hand to create his legendary crisp percussive non-sustain pedal readings of Johann Sebastian Bach was, in fact, techniques cultivated by Guererro. One of the Gould’s least noted achievements is being the first American post WWII to perform in the Soviet Union in 1957, a year before Van Cliburn was to win the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition before returning to a wild ticker tape reception. Having received no such attention, Gould instead went down in history as being the one to reintroduce listeners to an interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations that was to redefine the 20th century approach to performing works of this baroque master. With Gould’s technique, crisp, defined, and distinct fugal passages are brought out, making audible previously unheard harmonic passages, thereby creating additional melody lines that were not notated but (I believe) intended by the genius of J.S. Bach.

Unlike Van Cliburn, who would live in the shadow of his single past accomplishment, Gould went on to an illustrious career of laying down recordings of the entire Beethoven piano catalog, lesser known Tudorian composers such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Orlando Gibbons, and William Byrd (claimed by Gould to be his all-time favorite recording of his piano playing), Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hindemith, Brahms, and Mozart. Gould also foretold the advent of Midi technology by over a decade, envisioning a time when listeners could tweak the dynamics and attack of individual notes of a composition to suit their ear. Technology became the forte and chosen medium of this pianist, who gave up public performance in 1964, questioning the schadenfreude aspect of audiences gathering to watch the tightrope act of a concert pianist as a moral issue. (Later, he would metaphorically address this stance, depicting his fictitious return to public performance as an event set on a sinking oil tanker while seals squawked on.) Using a highly criticized method of multitracking and assembling snippets and passages of his piano playing from many recorded takes, Gould created what, in his opinion, was an ideal version as a complete performance.

From his acquaintance with technology in the recording studio, Gould went on to produce many documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He also created instructive tv programs for children, taking on multiple personalities including a New York taxi driver, a German professor, and of course, the hermit pianist himself. The Solitude Trilogy, a set of three recordings that Gould assembled for CBC, took voices from residents in Northern Canada, superimposed with ambient sounds to create one of his most remarkable compositional achievement, that of transferring his understanding of Bach’s contrapuntal melodic lines into human voices to create a spoken fugue.

Eccentricity is the other characteristic long associated with Glenn Gould, a hypochondriac who consulted four physicians simultaneously- a contrapuntal fugue of doctors. Gould was also a hermit, preferring to be holed up in enclosed spaces recording, researching, writing and producing his radio shows, communicating with friends through telephone, typically calling at odd hours of the night and keeping them online for hours. Friends have claimed that Gould thought he could catch an illness over the telephone while talking to a sick person on the other end. Gould also went on long car drives, listening to rock music on the radio, and being an enthusiastic fan of both Petula Clark and Barbara Streisand. Gould’s wild gesticulations and humming during his piano performance and recordings preceded the nuisance that came to be associated with Keith Jarrett’s piano improvisations.

Gould traveled with his grand piano for a large part of his career, the Steinway cd318. He put reps at Steinway on wild goose chases, making demands on the makers of his piano to achieve a light harpsichord response that suited his fast technique and low playing position. When the technicians failed to meet his requests, Gould continued using his beloved piano, favoring tactile gratification over sonic perfection, thereby producing the notorious hiccuping pieces on Glenn Gould: Two-And-Three Part Inventions of Bach. In later years, Gould removed the end blocks of the piano, claiming that they cramped the 88 piano keys together by their mere presence. He also removed the soundboard to hear his piano better while playing on his worn-out trusty chair, made for him at an early age by his father. During a move, cd318 was irreparably damaged, and Gould had to make do with a used Yamaha grand he found at the back of some piano shop in NYC.

Gould passed away at the age of 50 due to a stroke, shortly after his late re-recording of the Goldberg Variations. Connoisseurs of this Canadian pianist ceaselessly debate the pros and cons of the breakthrough 1955 recording versus his 1981 version. Both contain key elements that should serve to bookmark the beginning and end of Gould’s illustrious recording career. His written works have a dry humorous tinge of a man who spends long hours alone and writes more often than not, for his own amusement. The Glenn Gould Reader is a compendium of such a nature. While many biographies and even a movie (32 short films about Glenn Gould) have been made about our subject, they pale in comparison when placed next to the eccentricities of the real person. Of these, I recommend

*The Glenn Gould Reader (Knopf book) edited by Tim Page. Hindemith described with the assistance of Linus’s security blanket? You betcha!

*Glenn Gould: Solitude Trilogy – (CBC CD) collection from radio shows documenting voices of Northern Canadians in contrapuntal weavings. I consider this one of Gould greatest achievements.

*Glenn Gould: plays Bach and Scarlatti. (Sony CD) Concerto In D Minor After Alessandro Marcello, BWV 974: II. Adagio is a tenderly romantic reading of a Bach piece, where his humming actually added harmonically to the piece.

*Glenn Gould: Consort of Musicke by William Byrd & Orlando Gibbons; Sweelinck: Fantasia in D (Sony CD) Claimed by the pianist as the all time favorite recording of his, this album includes a fantastic reading of William Byrd’s Sellinger’s Round, with trills that delight and contain an aleph of all things Elizabethan in one measure. The broken chords on Orlando Gibbons’s Allemande is the very picture of elation.

*Glenn Gould: The Art of the Fugue (Sony CD) a beautiful rendition of the title piece on piano: quiet, mystical, and a true insight into Bach’s fugal mind.

*Glenn Gould The Alchemist (EMI DVD): Bruno Monsaingeon remains patient, genuinely and infectiously interested in his subject. Also noteworthy, are long uncut passages that show that Gould can indeed play flawlessly and that the argument over his splicing as a compensation for his inability to play from beginning to end is unfounded.

*Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations 1955 / 1981 (Sony CD) recordings that need no introduction.