Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould

Glenn was in sort of an ecstatic transport.
I mean this is somebody who is just absolutely in a state of his own,
deeply, deeply emotionally involved. (Tim Page)

We took to each other immediately.
By the end of our first phone conversation,
which was a rather epic phone conversation,
we were already on the way to building a friendship.
He’d usually call around eleven o’clock at night.
And you had the sense that this was a rather lonely man
and somebody who really, really wanted to connect to the world. (Tim Page)

Gould was a huge influence on me
but maybe more in an abstract kind of way,
not that I’m trying to emulate how he plays.
What I was influenced by was the fact
that he had such a strong vision
and wasn’t frightened by anyone
and just followed what he thought was important in the music
and what his personal vision of this music was. (Simone Dinnerstein)

Glenn Gould’s the Goldberg Variations had an enormous affect on me.
I think that I listened to that music exclusively
for at least two months because I was astounded at the colors
and the dynamics and the phrasing that he had created and brought to that piece.
I had never, never heard that piece played that way.
And that aria at the beginning. (Sings.)
I was so moved by the melody. (Bobby McFerrin)

When I fell in love with Bach and heard this Gould recording,
music that just fires on all cylinders, that has the immediacy
and emotional intensity, that clarity of intent. (Chris Thile)

Glenn Gould, I listen to his Goldberg Variations very, very often.
Just absolutely floored by the way he approaches Bach
with the exactitude and yet the emotion that he gets,
quality of the playing, quality of the recording, all of that is perfection. (Ward Swingle)

When you heard Glenn play,
there was something that really just leaped out.
There was so much rhythmic propulsion in how he was playing.
The very sort of, for many people, I’m sure, strange choices.
He played in a very percussive way.
But the voice leading, you could hear how all the voices
were moving and incredible control of the counterpoint as a pianist.
When I heard that, it really floored me
and I became obsessed with those records.
And those recordings had a profound affect,
I think, on a lot of musicians. (Uri Caine)

There was no avoiding the fact when listening to Glenn Gould
that all of those neural circuits were firing constantly.
This was a brilliant man who had a profound understanding
not only of the music of Bach
but of many other composers. (Eugene Drucker)

Glenn and I started talking about the new recording
of the Goldberg Variations and I had listened to it
and I just flipped out. I thought it was wonderful.
From the very beginning I thought that it improved
upon the 1955 performance, that it was much deeper,
much more thoughtful. It was really a sense of a summing up
and I felt that actually listening to it before I knew
that Glenn Gould was going to die the week that it was released,
which made it very eerie, since he started his career
with the Goldberg Variations, then in the same way
that the Goldberg Variations comes back to the theme to complete,
Glenn went back and re-recorded the Goldberg Variations. (Tim Page)

I actually only met him in person about a month or so before he died.
Here he was, this man in this heavy coat in August, no laces in his shoes
and he looked as though he wore his clothes for a month at a time.
I remember walking through the halls of The Inn on the Park
and some little boy looked at him and started to walk over to him
and his horrified mother grabbed him and pulled him back.
I’m sure that child never knew, and certainly his mother never knew,
that they’d just had an encounter with one of the greatest musical geniuses
of the Twentieth Century. (Tim Page)

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Music Critic
Tim Page on his friend Glenn Gould