By Kevin Bazzana
Rumours of Glenn Gould’s death have been greatly exaggerated: few classical performers have ever seemed so alive so long after their demise. This fall, the CBC’s radio festival Variations on Gould, a major exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, a day-long conference in Ottawa, the release of new books and recordings, and many other events in Canada and around the world remind us of his continuing presence in our culture. These events honour the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, which also happens to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death and (as the October 1 broadcast reminds us) the fiftieth anniversary of his high-profile tour of Russia at the height of the Cold War. But excuses like anniversaries are no longer really necessary, for posthumous celebration of Gould has become routine. His death on October 4, 1982, barely a week after his fiftieth birthday, stimulated interest in him that has never abated—indeed, has only grown stronger, and spread more widely, with time. His posthumous “life” has now lasted almost as long as his professional career did, and in some ways his story is more interesting today than ever.
Gould was, first and foremost, a great pianist, and his compelling, deeply personal, sometimes subversive interpretations continue to entertain and provoke and influence people. His recordings actually sell better today than they did while he was alive: he is the bestselling classical solo instrumentalist in history, though most of his sales have been posthumous. (“Dying,” a record executive joked, “was a great career move for him.”) Moreover, his multifarious work away from the keyboard—as broadcaster, writer, lecturer, composer, arranger, conductor—has also been widely disseminated; even pieces he composed as a teenager have been published, performed, and recorded. A vast literature has sprung up, collections of his own essays, scripts, interviews, letters, and other writings as well as dozens of books about him, ranging from the scholarly to the hagiographic—to say nothing of the countless newspaper and magazine articles and websites.
Moreover, the posthumous interest in Gould is an international phenomenon. The literature now includes original and translated volumes in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinese, and it is symptomatic that a Gould periodical launched in Toronto in 1995 should attract readers from some forty countries. Though he continues to enjoy national-hero status in Canada, much of the most passionate and serious interest in him is overseas.
Gould has been the subject of TV and radio broadcasts, college-level courses, and public events large and small—film festivals, lectures, exhibitions, whole conferences—in cities all over the world. There is a Glenn Gould Foundation, a Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communication, a Glenn Gould Professional School at the Royal Conservatory of Music, a scholarship in his name at the University of Toronto. His is among the most visited collections in the Library and Archives Canada, and his relics have sold for real money at auction. Fans make pilgrimages to Gould-related sites in the Toronto area and in the “Gould country” around Lake Simcoe and along the north shore of Lake Superior. Canada Post issued a stamp honouring him in 1999, and a commemorative envelope this fall. When Maclean’s named its 100 Most Important Canadians in History, Gould ranked No. 1 among artists, ahead of the Group of Seven, and No. 5 overall, just behind Champlain.
Gould has also inspired the sort of cult of personality rarely seen in classical music. He has even crept into the popular culture—witness a reference to him several seasons ago on The Simpsons. Certainly his eccentric personality and lifestyle have helped fuel his posthumous appeal: to many, he remains an intriguing, mysterious, even lovable figure. (His identifiably Canadian traits, from his Leacockian sense of humour to his fascination with the North—“there’s not one drop of Latin in me”, he once said—are of course especially prized in this country.) And his refreshing irreverence toward many classical-music conventions and visionary championship of the electronic media made a significant impact on the musical world. (The September 29 and October 3 broadcasts pay tribute to his experiments with radio and recording technologies.) Another important source of his appeal is the perception that he was something more than a piano player, and many people do take seriously the ideas—aesthetic, ethical, theological—they perceive embedded in his art. Gould, it appears, provokes not just admiration but real devotion.
As Variations on Gould reveals, he has posthumously inspired many artists to appropriate his life and personality, his work and ideas, for their own creative purposes. Over the years, he has prompted new works by painters and sculptors, by choreographers and multimedia artists, by novelists, playwrights, short-story writers, and poets, and by the director François Girard, who made the feature film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Musicians—composers and arrangers as well as performers—have always been prominent among these artists, and the September 25 broadcast, in which a dozen composers contribute new pieces based on a theme derived from Gould’s name, adds to the existing body of musical tributes in a way that might have appealed to the honoree: Gould himself, an inveterate game player and puzzle solver, enjoyed tackling just such musical challenges.
Several of the Variations on Gould broadcasts are multicultural in orientation, reflecting one of the more recent—and more surprising—developments in Gould’s posthumous “life.” To be sure, it is a little ironic that Gould should appeal to musicians of many non-Western cultures and traditions, for he himself was a performer with a strictly delimited aesthetic and a very selective repertoire of Western art music. He had little or no interest in popular music, folk music, non-Western classical music, or East-meets-West, North-meets-South, jazz-meets-classical, and other fusions. As a teenager, he pompously dismissed jazz as “a minor and transitory offshoot of the Romantic movement”—yet he numbered many jazz performers among his fans, and continues to communicate to laypeople and musicians whose own tastes and proclivities scarcely overlap with his own.
That is perhaps the most interesting and heartening aspect of Gould’s posthumous appeal; certainly, it speaks to the potency and elasticity of his ideas that they can still nourish such a wide range of people around the world. Variations on Gould, in its breadth and variety, offers a representative cross-section of the cottage industry that has posthumously grown up around this perennially fascinating artist.
Kevin Bazzana lives in Brentwood Bay, B.C. He holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of California at Berkeley, and works as a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work (1997) and Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (2003), which won the Toronto Book Award and an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and has been translated into seven languages; he has also edited a semi-annual journal for the Glenn Gould Foundation since 1995. His most recent book, Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick (2007), is a biography of the Hungarian-American pianist and composer Ervin Nyiregyházi.
By Karen Kieser
Naming the major radio performance studio in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre after Glenn Gould is a living testament into the future of this great Canadian's intense and creative relationship with the CBC. From the earliest years of his career, Glenn Gould was fascinated with the possibilities afforded by radio, tape and the recording studio. From his CBC Radio broadcast debut on Christmas Eve, 1950, through the intricate radio documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, the CBC studios were a playground for his powers of invention. Throughout almost a decade of international touring and public performances (1955-64), Gould regularly played studio recitals, appeared with the CBC's radio orchestras, and gave on-air interviews and talks on musical subjects.
Gould's exit from the concert stage in 1964 released his full energy into the electronic media. Alongside his highly productive commercial recording partnership with CBS Records of New York (now Sony Classical), he continued to appear on CBC Radio and Television, as well as collaborating with BBC, PBS and Radio France. The results included discussions of such subjects as the possibilities of the recording studio, the obsolescence of the concert hall, the nature of improvisation, contrapuntal analysis, and aleatoric or "chance" music, as Gould gradually emerged as a significant musical theorist and philosopher. And then there were all those glorious performances: Bach of course, but also Beethoven, Webern, Hindemith, Anhalt, Mozart, Morawetz, Richard Strauss, Scarlatti, Scriabin, Gibbons, Byrd, Schoenberg, Brahms, Hétu, Bizet, Pentland, Grieg and many more. Many of these productions were also enriched by Gouldian analysis and dialectic.
But it was the radio documentaries that most demonstrated Gould's extraordinary appetite for auditory challenge and formal experiment. Produced between 1962 and 1979, even today they stretch the listener's ears and mind with their multiple, simultaneous strands of information, woven together in contrapuntal textures. Their subject matter, too, reflects their creator's interests. In addition to portraits of such musical luminaries as Arnold Schoenberg, Pablo Casals, Leopold Stokowski and Richard Strauss, the famous Solitude Trilogy explores aspects of Canadian psychography: The Idea of North, The Latecomers (on Newfoundland) and The Quiet in the Land (on the Mennonites).
For Gould, the attraction of the radio documentary and the recording studio was the opportunity for complete control. Whether scripting both sides of an interview, painstakingly editing between multiple musical takes or rebalancing dynamics at the mixing console, he revelled in his precise personal determination of the finished product. Glenn's presence was a frequent (if unpredictable) delight in the Radio Music Department on the fourth floor of the old Radio Building at 354 Jarvis Street. Here was his chance to enjoy contact with people who, like him, loved both music and radio. His work day began as others' ended. This was the hour when he might appear at one's office door, invariably clad in cap, scarf and tweed overcoat, whatever the season. Whether the topic was the joys of Grieg or the dissolute nature of Debussy's music, the resulting conversation never failed to be stimulating and memorable.
Glenn Gould's premature death at the age of 50 on October 4, 1982 was a tremendous shock to Canadians and to music-lovers everywhere. It was felt especially keenly at CBC, where his art and his lifeforce were so immediate and vital. We are deeply proud to celebrate Gould's stature as an artist, and his close connection with the Corporation, by bestowing his name on a broadcast studio with the most advanced technological capacity. May the performances and broadcasts realized here live up to Glenn Gould's inexhaustible quest for high standards and new frontiers.
Karen Kieser spent ten years as deputy head and area head of CBC Radio Music, and was General Manager of Glenn Gould Studio between October, 1992 and March, 1994.
Find out what's on air during the Variations on Gould radio festival
The concert that gathered all the Song Quest artists together at Glenn Gould Studio to perform their brand new songs.