"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"
~ Sir Francis Bacon
Gould was emotionally reticent even in infancy. He never cried; he hummed instead.
His private motto: "Behind every silver lining there's a cloud"
"My ability to work varies inversely with the niceness of the weather."
He identified himself as a Nordic man, and all things southern and Mediterranean were anathema to him: sunshine and blue skies, spicy food, physical exertion, easy sensuality, emotional openness, Italian opera. He hated bright colours, and equated red with violence; at the age of four or five he flew into a tantrum when someone gave him a red fire engine. His favourite colours were "battleship gray and midnight blue" and he loved black and white movies, including war movies, ....
When he was eight, is parents took him to wee Walt Disney's Fantasia, and he hated its "awful riot of colour" as he recalled years later. "I went home depressed, feeling faintly nauseous, and with the first headache I can remember".
His hands were naturally agile and flexible, and he instinctively guarded them. Even as an infant he would pull them away or turn his back if someone threw or rolled a ball at him. Once, when he was just weven or eight, Jessie Greig asked him to join in a game of marbles. He wanted to play, but when he put his hand down and found the ground cold, he withdrew it at once, and said "I'm afraid I can't".
Gould's first name is frequently misspelled as "Glen",..... and Gould himself used both spellings interchangeably throughout his life. In fact, it is difficult to find a specimen of his signature which a second "n" is clearly discernable. To his record producer Andrew Kazdin, Gould offered a lame explanation: he had discovered early on that if he started to write the second 'n' he would be unable to stop and would end up writing three 'n's.
The organ, Gould later said, gave him a taste for Bach and other early music, and had a profound influence on his piano style. It taught him to "think with his feet", which led to a fondness for bringing out basslines (he was also left-handed, incidentally); taught him to "think of music as being played by three hands - the feet acting as the third hand," which led to a passion for counterpoint unusual among pianists; and it taught him not to pound the keys but to develop a technique based on "the tips of the fingers," to make expressive nuances through slight shifts of tempo instead of dynamics, both of which encouraged his clean, "upright" clearly articulated piano playing.
Arthur Rubinstein was once asked on television what he would wish for if he were given a second chance at life; he replied, " to be born with Glenn Gould's hands."
And there is the testimony of colleagues like Jaime Laredo, who recalled that he was open-mouthed as he listened to Gould play transcriptions between takes in their recording sessions; he thought Gould's technique superior to that of any other pianist.
"He really did have a magnificent technique," Charles Rosen said. "He could have developed terrific octaves quite easily if he'd wanted to. he just didn't want to."
In an interoffice memo from 1981, a Steinway and Sons employee referred to Gould as the one pianist of his generation with "complete tonal command" - comparable to Horowitz - and more than one critic and fellow musician considered his technique to have been perfect, perhaps the greatest of the age.
Still, to acknowledge that Gould could have played Chopin's etudes or Liszt's B-minor sonata or the Rach3 does not mean that he was physically (never mind temperementally) suited to making a career of such music.
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"I don't want to think too much about my playing or I'll get like that centipede who was asked which foot he moved first and became paralysed, just thinking about it."
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Glenn's take on his father's relationships, which I believe is spot on in general.
not appropriate for a person to change their spots so radically for the sake of another person
all relationships are addictive - just as much as alcohol or tobacco
one develops what one thinks of as an intense need to be with a particular person, to translate all your activity, everything that you do in the course of a day, and while that may be a fascinating exercise, it's also exhausting and it has one other great disadvantage - that it distracts you from contemplation, from looking inward, to really meditate upon the shape of your life - one doesn't do that (in a relationship) because one thinks one is starting one's life. When a relationship is new, there's a much greater intensity.
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Gould and Yamaha
He was testing Steinways as late as May 1981, but never found one to replace his old friend (CD318) permanently, not even instruments which has served artists like Rachmaninov and Horowitz. As always he found the new Steinways, especially the American ones, ranged from "terrible to pathetic" in tone or action or both, and he was not the only Steinway artist to complain at this time: the 70s is generally considered to have been the low point in the company's history.
He tested other pianos - German Steinways, Bechsteins - and finally defected to Yamaha. He first tried a Yamaha ...... and was deepley impressed by the piano's action, which had the responsiveness and the minimal aftertouch he craved. He also liked he intimacy, clarity and brightness of Yamaha's tone, and though he did not consider the sound completely satisfactory - he found the bass unfocused - he knew he could work with it.
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"The Wars" soundtrack
.... the most important classical theme is that of Brahm's tender Intermezzo in E-flat major, Op.117 No.1, which Gould called "Rowena's Theme". When it first appears in the film, it is associated with Robert's beloved, disabled sister Rowena, who dies before he goes off to war - according to Nielsen and Philips, Gould developed one of his obsessive adolescent crushes on Rowena, and was for a time watching one of her scenes every day. Brahms, incidentally, noted that the piece was based on a Scottish folk song, "Sleep Softly, My Child". The theme is woven throughout the score. In its original key, it is assoc with images of farewell, longing, remembrance; Gould wrote, "If you want the musical-mystical-metaphorical significance, E flat major is a key which composers have frequently assoc with the idea of resurrection (he was probably thinking of Mahler's 2nd symph). The theme also appears in Eflat minor, usually in a hauting version for one or two choirboys when someone dies. The theme hovers over the score like the Angel of Death. The score is in fact unified harmonically, with E flat (major and minor) as principal key. The most important Hymn, "Abide With Me" appears in E flat, and when Gould needed a new theme for the sequence involving Harris's ashes he chose Brahm's dark Intermezzo in Eflat minor, Op 118 No6.
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Gould as conductor
..... wearing layers of shapeless dark jackets, flannel shirts and pants (plural) despite the summer's heat, and carrying a large, gree plastic garbage bag containing his musical score, notepads and paraphernalia.
Wholly dedicated to the music at hand, Gould was not interested, like so many conductors, in matters of power and personality, and so came across unpretentious.
"What struck me the most about my encounter with Glenn was his unfailing politeness and encouragement to the musicians. He was animated, resourceful, inspiring and sympathique throughout. He did his best to make us all feel like partners in the endeavour rather than sidemen to his maestro. We were all on a first name basis. In fact, he had taken time to commit everyone's name to memory before meeting us, and he made sure to shake everyone's hand at the end of the final session, something none of us expected." ~Timothy Maloney, clarinetist
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Gould on Pedalling
"We are not trying to sacrifice in the piano what the harpsichord did not have, but rather to create an impressionistic effect of what the harpsichord did have."
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"I'm not anti-social, but if an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, then self-discipline, in the form of cutting oneself off from society, is a necessary thing."
"These aren't personal eccentricities, they're simply the occupational hazard of a highly subjective business"
"I don't go to concerts, sometimes not even to my own!"
"The greatest of all teachers is the tape recorder"
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