Re: Alberto Guerrero

[kimmoor@mindspring.com (Kristen Immoor)]

>I also have an autographed copy of Gould's little book on Schoenberg, and
>an unautographed copy as well. I'm curious about how rare Gould
>autrographs are.

        Whaaat!? You have an autographed Gould item? You lucky man. I don't
know about re-sale value, because the cult of Gould is much smaller than
those that commonly drive the autograph prices up, like James Dean or Harry
Truman. Still, its cultural value has got to be way up there.
        The way I hear it, polite as he was, Gould was not *too* terribly
fond of signing stuff, for fear of giving away an "unlucky" signature. I
understand he even re-signed his personal correspondence a few times if he
couldn't nail it right away. Which brings me (tangentially, of course) to
the topic of his signature, "GlenGould." I know he claims he got carried
away by all the loops of the N's and decided to edit them out to streamline
things, but he never had a problem with the N's on any of his school papers
or on his passport, and I think the revised signature came later as he
became more superstitious. I suspect that as the lucky/unlucky signature
thing (which smacks of Obsessive-compulsive disorder, IMHO) developed,
Gould devised the "GlenGould" signature style as a sort of luck loophole. I
think that he must have thought he could avoid the luck issue entirely by
not signing his own name. It seems like something he would think of. Just a
thought, not really important.


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Elyse Mach: "But do you think that if Beethoven came back to life he'd go
along with these notions of motif and tempo?"
Glenn Gould: "I don't really know, nor do I very much care..."