Glenn Gould A Life in Pictures

Foreword by Yo-Yo Ma One of Glenn Gould's greatest gifts was his ability to create breathtaking new sound worlds from his own deep understanding of the abstract. In his recordings, writings and documentaries, Gould effortlessly transformed and reduced concepts of vast complexity into forms of profound beauty and simplicity. Gould's mind was a brilliant and shimmering prism through which sounds, senses and ideas were magically transfigured. As a teenager hearing his 1955 CBS recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations for the first time, I experienced a musical epiphany that would fuel my musical thinking for years to come. His recordings were a touchstone during those early years, and I admit that a copy of the Goldberg LP was prominently displayed on the wall of my freshman dorm room. Gould was not a tactile or experiential thinker; rather, he dwelt deeply within the recesses of his own interior world. And in fact, he insulated himself from the realities of the physical world by creating his own self-sustaining universe. My wife, Jill, recalled how she encountered Gould for the first time in 1972, the same summer she and I met at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. On a sunny, hot and cloudless morning, there he stood in cap, heavy winter coat, galoshes and gloves asking to interview Pablo Casals -- it was a sight she would never forget! Gould constructed a series of elegant hypotheses to define the natural world around him. He approached life with the wonder and curiosity of a scientist, and in this respect, he reminded me of the great physicist Richard Feynman. While Feynman sought to study nature, which guarded its secrets, Gould's approach was one step removed. Gould used the natural world as a backdrop to drive his imagination, yet did not require any proof or evidence of its actual existence. One of my favourite stories about Gould occurred when he was on tour in Israel in the 1950s. Disheartened by the piano in the hall, he drove his car out to the sand dunes near Tel Aviv and imagined he was playing his boyhood piano in his cottage on Lake Simcoe. He fixed his gaze on the Mediterranean and practised for hours -- and that evening performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 to stunning and powerful effect. Indeed, Gould exemplified how the mind could transport one to the outer reaches of creative expression. In his groundbreaking radio documentary The Idea of North, he explored the romantic ideal of the North, as a geographic region and as a mindset. The program consisted of a series of interviews featuring Canadians living in the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada who were asked to define the ineffable ideal of what constituted "the North." The result was an elaborate, fugal tapestry consisting of interviews that were edited by Gould himself. Well-known for his fear of the cold, the reclusive artist ventured no farther north than Winnipeg and Churchill. "I have no real experience of the North. I have remained of necessity an outsider," he admitted. "The North has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and in the end avoid." Imagined experience is perhaps made richer by the mind's eye, and this divide between imagined experience and reality can be found in the lives of so many of the great artists. Like Ravel, who infused his works with the bell-like pentatonicism of the Javanese gamelan orchestra, which he heard for the first time at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, Gould shared a penchant for exploring new sound worlds. The fact that Ravel never travelled to the East and that Gould never travelled to the North is perhaps immaterial. It was "the idea of" these worlds that ignited their creative imaginations. Shortly after Gould completed The Idea of North, he wEstate of Glenn Gould Staff is the author of 'Glenn Gould A Life in Pictures' with ISBN 9780385659031 and ISBN 0385659032.