Glenn Gould


If you’d asked me thirty years ago what I thought of Glenn Gould, I would have recalled that he was a Canadian pianist who recorded an extended monolog about Petula Clark. I have three or four Gould recordings on LP, including his famous interpretation of the Bach Goldberg Variations. Since we moved, I’ve listened to these LPs again. While I’m certainly no expert on keyboard performance practice, I do appreciate the novelty of Gould’s approach. In some ways, his keyboard attack reminds me of another favorite keyboard performer, Keith Jarrett. Setting aside the fact that both emit random vocalizations during their performances, they both have a percussive style, albeit using very different biomechanics.
Today, I’ve been listening to some YouTubes about Gould—his biography and his critics. In some ways, he was the Bobby Fischer of the keyboard—eccentric, grandiose, narcissistic and consumed with his art. Despite his odd performance practice, using a low chair and flat finger technique, his re-interpretations of classical warhorses have defined their own genre.
Gould asked why any performer would bother re-recording masterworks that had already been codified, unless s/he brought a fundamentally new vision to those masterworks. Love him or hate him, his interpretations were transformative. So much so that Leonard Bernstein prefaced a Gould performance with a disclaimer that he disagreed with the performance he was about to conduct.
As a folk music consumer and sometimes performer, I like the idea that music can be re-interpreted in the hands of different performers. I'm sorry to think that classical music is off limits to that kind of experimentation.
I think some classicists believe Gould was having us on, that his oeuvre was a kind of musical joke or scam. Somehow, I doubt it. But in the end, I don’t like arguing taste in music, art or wine. You be you and I’ll be me. There’s a large universe of art out there and we are privileged to live in a time when access is only a click away.
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