To commemorate Glenn Gould’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys this weekend, author and Glenn Gould scholar Tim Page has submitted this meditation on the might-have-been’s of the late pianist’s eighth decade:
Greetings from an only slightly overcast Los Angeles. It is indeed a pleasure to report for musicaltoronto.org on the splendid celebration of Glenn Gould at the Grammy Awards yesterday – and to offer some of my own speculations about what he might be doing today had he been permitted some more time on our planet.
Glenn received a Lifetime Achievement Award yesterday from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in the distinguished company of the late Ravi Shankar, the pioneering jazz bassist Charlie Haden, the Temptations and a number of other people who have made our musical world so rich and varied.
It was Stephen Posen, Glenn’s friend, lawyer and sole executor of his estate, who wrote the vast bulk of the acceptance speech and, in a perfect world, Steve would have delivered it himself. But weather intervened on Friday and, after Steve spent a frustrating day at Pearson attempting to fly south, I was pressed into service, as another friend of Glenn’s and the first editor of his collected work. It was an enormous honor to be able to pay homage to my great mentor and I will remember the day for the rest of my life.
This is what Steve wrote:
Those of you who know Glenn’s reputation know that if Glenn WERE here today, he would NOT be here today – unless possibly he would sneak into the back of the theatre in some form of disguise, to satisfy his curiosity and to indulge his amusement over such a fuss being made over him.
Glenn Gould bore the privilege and burden of genius. He was, among other things:
- a profound thinker, philosopher and writer;
- creator, writer, producer and director of and performer on numerous radio and television documentaries;
- composer of some intriguing musical compositions;
- movie music director;
- conductor, which was intended to be the next phase of his career; but which was regrettably short lived due to his untimely death;
- a perfectionist, spending intense effort and considerable time in order to achieve his own version of perfection in both his writing and his musical performances;
- above all, he was arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century; and he was unique, both in the clear and distinct articulation of his fingering and in his individual interpretation of his repertoire; he determined that there was no point in replicating a performance or recording in the same manner as other musicians;
- a famous example of Glenn’s unique interpretations was when he performed Brahms D Minor Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein introduced the work with a spoken disclaimer to the audience saying that this was Mr. Gould’s interpretation, not his, and that only once before had he succumbed to the will of the soloist and that was the last time he had conducted Mr. Gould;
Glenn had a reputation – completely unwarranted – of being a hypochondriac. The truth is that he was truly heroic in contending with a number of physical, psychological and emotional aliments to succeed brilliantly in his many chosen pursuits.
When Mr. Freimuth, the President of the Grammys, called to tell me of the Academy’s decision to give Glenn this Lifetime Achievement Award, I responded that he himself may not have understood all of the reasons why this Award for Glenn by the Grammys is so appropriate. The reasons, aside from Glenn’s being such a great artist, include:
- Glenn gave up his career as an outstandingly successful concert pianist to devote his piano career to the world of recording;
- he was a perfectionist and felt that the medium of recording was the best way to create the most perfect performance;
- he disliked live performance as he did not like the gladiatorial atmosphere in which the audience would be looking for mistakes;
- to paraphrase Glenn’s own words, taken from his 1964 article The Prospects of Recording,
“Recording permits the performer to focus on various aspects of the music which become blended and far less clear in the concert hall, and facilitates the remediation of inevitable musical mishaps.”
- Glenn was a great proponent of the use of technology – tape splicing – having advocated its use and having participated in teaching the recording industry how to use the available technology to assemble, from many takes, the performer’s most favoured interpretation and the most perfect recording;
- Glenn was made for the technological age; he would have thrived in the age of compact discs, the internet, e-mail and the like, none of which existed at the time of his passing. He and the recording industry were made for each other. He is the “poster boy” for the recording industry.
- Glenn foresaw the prospect that recording techniques would permit a listener not only to listen and be a passive “consumer” of the recorded product, but also to be an active participant in selecting various takes, dynamics and tempi. Decades later, technology has been developing to the point where such participation by a listener is becoming possible.
I also note the irony that this Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to Glenn in the same theatre where he performed his last live recital in 1964.
It has been my privilege to participate in the preservation and enhancement of Glenn’s posthumous musical career as part of a team of a number of dedicated people, not all of whom I have time to name but which include, among many others:
- Ray Roberts, Glenn’s assistant during his lifetime and my continuing advisor and conscience
- Faye Perkins, formerly of Sony Music, now serving as advisor to the Estate of Glenn Gould
- The ongoing efforts of Sony Classical under their continuing dynamic leadership
- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- The Glenn Gould Foundation
- Tim Page, who did Glenn’s last interview and edited the Glenn Gould Reader
- Peter Raymont who is in attendance today and who produced and directed the movie Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould;
- Glenn’s beneficiaries, the Salvation Army and the Toronto Humane Society; and
- All of the creative minds and energy which have helped to keep Glenn’s legacy, vision and philosophy alive in one way or another
I am not amused by this award, as Glenn might have been. I am privileged to walk in his shadow and to receive with thanks this special distinction, placing Glenn where he properly deserves to be, in the company of the greatest recording artists of all time.
This award has been earned and is long overdue but is a wonderful tribute and on Glenn’s behalf I sincerely thank the Recording Academy for this honour. Thanks to recording technology and the recording industry, Glenn can continue his “career” – virtually in perpetuity – due not only to his perfectionism and his unique interpretations, but also to the recording industry which can, does and will make his art perpetually available to new generations and new territories.
Thank you.
You can watch me deliver this speech here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Glenn lately – not only as a friend who took me under his capacious wing when I was young and green, nor as the extraordinary musician whose recordings play in my office as I write these words. No, I’ve been thinking about Glenn the technological visionary and trying to imagine what he might be doing in 2013 with the advances we have seen in the 30 years since his death. Trying to guess the direction a genius – particularly such an individual genius as Glenn Gould — might have gone is risky, maybe even foolhardy. And yet, in the same sportive, “what if?” manner that Glenn enjoyed so much, let us imagine him at the age of 80, still vigorous and creative, as he sends his music out to his ever-attentive public.
He has never returned to playing live concerts, of course, and he has continued to maintain a mostly solitary existence. And yet he has embraced the computer wholeheartedly – not going so far as to use Twitter (much too self-promotional for our self-described “Last Puritan”) or even to maintain his own Facebook page, but still delighted with this Brave New World. He guards his own e-mail address as carefully as he did his phone numbers (even after all these years, I will only give out his service number as a courtesy to the Gould completist – 416-922-9573 – and save the private number as a personal mantra).
But our imaginary Glenn founded his own website as soon as he learned of the Internet, and now adds to it every week. At last he has been able to eliminate the “middle man” between himself and his audience and while he remains on good terms with Sony and the CBC (both of which place ads on his site) he is finally in complete artistic control. Nobody is going to tell him what he can or cannot record ever again. And so he puts up wildly varying interpretations of music that fascinates him, not just the single take needed to fill out an album or a CD.
Would you like to hear Glenn Gould play Beethoven’s Opus 111? All right – he has several versions; do you want to hear it fast or slow? Measured or propulsive?
Last week, he added his own transcription of the Recognition Scene from Elektra, playing (and singing) along with himself to give the Strauss orchestration its due. A visitor to the site can create his or her own personalized “Gouldberg Variations” – not only from the 1955 and 1981 studio recordings and the 1954 and 1958 “live” performances but from all Glenn’s later thoughts on his signature piece, a variation or two which he might record in the evening, edit through the night and send out to the world as the sun comes up and he readies himself for bed.
Glenn posts his writing on the site, and is still creating those brilliant radio plays and television films that have won him such acclaim. He doesn’t blog about his daily life – he’s much too private for that – but when he is fascinated by a film, a book, a movement, a performance, he will don the critic’s hat and share his reactions with the world. Many of the recordings he loves most – notably those featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski – are now in the public domain and they can be found on Glenn’s site, along with his own commentary on their merits. And being the gracious and generous person that he is, Gould will share the recordings of new and hungry artists whose work he admires.
He continues to live in Toronto, and is occasionally sighted as he wanders down the hallways of whatever hotel he has moved to since the decline and ultimate demolition of the Inn on the Park (110 St. Clair Ave. W. is still the address of record, but he is rarely there). He has never given up following the stock market and continues to do well with it in boom years and bust. He does most of his trading online, which is also where he reads newspapers from around the world. He continues to conduct most of his social life over the telephone – Skype seems both an affront and an intrusion and he has used it exactly once.
My own guess is that Glenn would not have continued conducting once he had gotten it out of his system and made those few recordings that he wanted – no, needed – to make: Strauss’s Metamorphosen, the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2 with Jon Klibonoff as his soloist, a rendition of the “Pastoral” Symphony that makes Otto Klemperer’s leisurely version seem rushed. But this was not Glenn’s métier. He quickly found that telling other musicians how to play was almost as exasperating as having somebody else tell him how to play and he did not like the personal politics that necessarily go along with leadership of an orchestra, however temporary.
And now I’m mourning him all over again! How I wish Glenn was here to correct this little fantasy of mine; how much I’ve missed him through the years. Finally, we have to be content with what we have – it really is an amazing legacy, after all – and take comfort in the knowledge that somehow, way back in the 20th century, Glenn Gould saw our world coming.
Tim Page is professor of music and journalism at the University of Southern California, the editor of The Glenn Gould Reader and the author of Parallel Play. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997 for his writings about music for The Washington Post.